"The Cretins of Amiens"

I learned about the unrest in Amiens from a Moscow colleague. He was very worried and asked if I was okay. “This is our main news,” he explained with some offense when I expressed bewilderment. In France, the same events were considered regional news, but even in nearby Lille, no one was particularly worried. True, at the city station the national police replaced the municipalities. The difference is immediately visible, even before you see the stripes. The municipals are short guys, good-natured, completely without bearing, their uniforms and weapons hang haphazardly on them. It's a completely different matter when the national police patrol shows up. These are hefty guys with a tense, unpleasant look, fit and handsome. In Lille they are mostly blondes of a completely Aryan type or, conversely, Senegalese.

Returning home and looking at the domestic press reports about the events in Amiens, I was completely dumbfounded. The impression was as if they were writing not about France, but about some completely different country or even planet.

Clashes between youth and police in the poor outskirts of French cities have long become something of a routine. This time it all started with the death of a motorcyclist. The police did not seem to be involved in any way in the incident, but during the funeral they began to search some of those present, apparently having noticed suspicious young people in the crowd or, conversely, young people they knew too well. This caused outrage. A fight ensued. The clashes continued for two nights, after which everything somehow unexpectedly calmed down. In total, about a hundred young people took part in the events, who were opposed by almost twice as many police officers.

The dead motorcyclist was of Arab origin, but the crowd at the funeral and during the riots was completely mixed. Local television several times showed the neighborhoods where the riots occurred and interviewed their residents. There was nothing even remotely similar to an “immigrant ghetto” here. In northern France there are generally not so many immigrants, who are also completely mixed with the “native population”, this can be observed in any campaign on the street or in a restaurant. For some reason, it never even occurred to anyone that the riots that occurred, in our language, in several outlying microdistricts of Amiens could have been of an ethnic or even religious nature. Even the authorities themselves admitted that in the area affected by the unrest, the social situation is catastrophic, unemployment is off the charts - especially among young people. If the national unemployment rate reached 10%, here it is 12%. And among people under 24 years old - 23.3%.

A few days after the unrest, authorities arrested two young men who took advantage of the commotion to set fire to a school. These guys - Christophe and Wilfried - immediately received, with the light hand of left-wing radical politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the nickname “Amiens cretins”. During the interrogation, it was discovered that they could hardly read the protocol, and explained their action by resentment towards the teachers.

The fact that it was Mélenchon who expressed his indignation louder than many other politicians is very significant. After all, French education remains one of the best, and perhaps even the best, in Europe. At the very time when the left is trying to protect educational institutions from commercialization and prevent cuts to their budgets during the crisis, the “Amiens cretins” are setting fire to school buildings in revenge for the strictness of teachers. However, due to their social status, the arsonists themselves are undoubtedly victims of the system. Young unemployed people from poor neighborhoods, they may have even voted for Mélenchon, if, of course, they bothered to go to the ballot box.

The trouble is that even the best education cannot solve the problems of society. Worse, the contrast between the discipline, rigor and efficiency of the school system and the increasing disorganization of social life becomes a source of psychological and cultural discomfort.

A generation ago everything was clear. A good school provided a “social lift” for young people from the lower classes. Immigrants and the poorest part of the “native French” knew that they had to study well, maintain discipline, memorize the poems of Racine or Corneille, cram mathematics and understand the history of the republic, in order to later get a good job and become one of the people. School was and remains tough, authoritarian, and difficult. It shouldn't be any other way. A school where learning is easy and fun is a bad school. The principle of any good education has long been known: “hard in learning, easy in battle.”

But previously all these efforts were justified. The effort was rewarded. Society accepted and valued educated people, opening up jobs and career opportunities for them. Everything has changed over the past 20 years. French education remained as strict, thorough and pedantic. School still requires real knowledge, which cannot be replaced by any memorization or copying from Wikipedia. But society no longer opens up the same opportunities for its graduates. With the onset of the crisis, the situation worsened even more. Unemployment among young people is growing rapidly, and the openings have little to do with the “social elevator.” Only graduates of elite universities, such as the École normale, can get a good job. But in order to study there, you must initially have a fairly good preparation.

The role of “social elevators” has traditionally been played by less famous, but still quite decent universities, whose graduates are now much more difficult to find work. At the same time, in France, until relatively recently, university education was far from the only path to success. An ordinary high school trained very good personnel, in demand in many sectors of the economy. However, the decline in production and the crisis sharply reduce the demand for labor.

But when you go out for a walk around the city center, you can find many rich slackers wasting their parents’ money in restaurants and driving around the streets in expensive cars. All this does not fit well with the republican values ​​still inculcated by the French school, in a country where “Glory to Labor!” is still written on municipal buildings in every second city. ("Honneur a travail").

If until recently a teacher, who strictly demands discipline from children and strictly tests their knowledge, was a real authority for both schoolchildren and their parents, today he is perceived by many as a sadist. You need to save yourself and hide from it, protecting yourself from psychological violence and at the same time from knowledge. The better and more clearly the school system works, the more acute the contradiction, which ultimately gives rise to the “Amiens cretins.”

The French government is promising to urgently rebuild the damaged school, ensuring it will be in perfect order by the start of the school year. The huge amount of damage published in the press suggests that the administration used the arson as an excuse to immediately solve all the material problems of the educational institution - undoubtedly the restored building will be better than the previous one, and it will be equipped with the latest technology.

The school will now work even better, and its teachers, having received the moral support of society, will redouble their efforts, introducing children to knowledge. Ultimately, it is still better to know the texts of Corneille and Racine than to know nothing at all. Only the problem of unemployment and social inequality will remain unresolved. Teachers are unable to cope with it. This means that the “Amiens cretins” may very soon have imitators. And not only in France.