Daily educational training for 13-18 year olds. The Zola-Museum Dreyfus house, located in Médan in the Yvelines, undertook this Thursday to offer citizenship courses to minors, perpetrators of racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic or sexist offences. These courses will consist of a visit to the museum and educational workshops. They will take place “either within the framework of alternative measures to prosecution, or within the framework of convictions”, explained to AFP Philippe Toccanier, assistant prosecutor at the judicial court of Versailles.
The institution has signed an agreement with the Versailles prosecutor’s office and the Interministerial Delegation for the Fight Against Racism, Anti-Semitism and Anti-LGBT Hate (Dilcrah) to host these one-day educational training sessions, which will begin after the summer.
Alternative measures encouraged
Of the 3,500 minors who can be prosecuted by the Versailles prosecutor’s office, 2,500 are subject to alternative measures and 1,000 appear before a juvenile judge, said Philippe Toccanier. “Whatever the procedural stage, we want the prosecution, the judges or the sentence enforcement judge to be able to pronounce this type of sanction”, detailed Philippe Toccanier.
The prosecution hopes that five to six sessions, including eight to ten young people, will take place each year at the Zola house, which houses the writer’s former secondary residence as well as a museum retracing the Dreyfus affair, named after the captain of the French army wrongly accused of treason at the end of the 19th century against a background of anti-Semitism and who was defended by the author of Germinal. “This device can be an educational support to support minors in the development of their critical spirit, their free will and their reflection in relation to their words or their actions in order to understand the consequences”, described Bathilde Groh, territorial director of the judicial protection of the youth of Yvelines.
Citizenship courses are offered in other places in France, including the Shoah Memorial in Paris and the Camp des Milles in Aix-en-Provence. For the historian Philippe Oriol, who directs the Zola-Dreyfus museum, these “educational routes” are an integral part of the mission of his institution. “We are a citizen museum, clearly committed, even Dreyfusard, which aims to explain a certain number of fundamentals that it is in our interest to understand today” in order to better fight against racist and anti-Semitic stereotypes and prejudices, he defended.