Friday, Dominique Bernard lost his life, stabbed to death by Mohammed M. in front of the Gambetta high school in Arras. This Monday, France pays tribute to this 57-year-old French teacher. Schools will observe a minute of silence at 2 p.m. In the columns of Release, one of the colleagues of this associate professor of Modern Literature also pays him a last tribute.
The French teacher wrote a letter to Dominique Bernard, evoking his “silhouette” which she “will never forget”. “It was difficult not to come closer, not to listen to you. Not to let yourself be delighted by a reading tip, an anecdote,” relates Aurélie, paying tribute to Dominique Bernard’s “mischievous smile” when he had “something funny to say.”
“What a tragic irony”
She also salutes his “power with the students” whom he brought “to calm”. “You were there for them, they understood it and fed off your contagious passion for literature, your faith in man, the hopes you placed in them,” writes the professor. “You said to the smokers gathered in front of the entrance “so, shall we smoke a little coffin nail?” “, she remembers.
“What a tragic irony that it was on this very stoop where you wore out so many soles that your life was taken from you. You didn’t look for this nail. It planted itself in you randomly with a blind and primitive hatred. » “How ironic too that such a dark, obscure gesture struck the one that Victor Hugo could have called “a torchbearer”,” she wrote, adding “what a loss for the world”.