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A teacher in France has sparked outrage after she showed a 17th century Renaissance painting depicting nude women to pupils in art class, prompting complaints from Muslim parents.
According to Mail Online, staff members at Jacques Cartier in Issou, west of Paris, refused to work on Monday, December 11, in solidarity with the teacher who showed the masterpiece ‘Diana and Actaeon’ by the Italian painter Giuseppe Cesari in class last Thursday.
The work portrays a Greek mythology story in which the hunter Actaeon stormed a site where the goddess Diana and her nymphs were bathing. It shows a naked Diana and four nude female companions.
After the class, false posts surfaced online accusing the teacher of making racist comments, sparking controversy.
France’s Education Minister Gabriel Attal visited the school in person on Monday and later said pupils who made the false claims would be disciplined.
The crisis comes after a French court on Friday convicted six teenagers for their role in the 2020 beheading of Samuel Paty outside his secondary school near Paris, after they helped to identify him to a radicalised Islamist.
Paty, a 47-year-old history and geography teacher, was stabbed and beheaded in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine in October 2020, just 12 miles from Issou.
Teachers there are now worried they too could be attacked, The Times reports.
On Thursday, ‘during a French class, a colleague showed a 17th-century painting that showed naked women’, said Sophie Venetitay, secretary general of the Snes-FSU secondary school teachers’ union.
The name of the female teacher and false claims that she had made racist remarks to Muslim students were subsequently circulated on social media, reports said, raising fears that she could be targeted.
According to Le Figaro, the students allegedly accused their teacher of racism – claiming that she showed the painting as provocation and as a means to target her Muslim students by showing them naked women.
In reference to the furore, Venetitay told broadcaster BFMTV.: ‘We know well that methods like that can lead to a tragedy… We saw it in the murder of Samuel Paty.
‘Our colleagues feel threatened and in danger.’
The painting was reportedly shown during an art class for students aged 12 and 13.
‘Some students averted their gaze, felt offended, said they were shocked,’ Venetitay said, adding that ‘some also alleged the teacher made racist comments’ during a class discussion.
A pupil’s parent sent an email to the school director saying that his son was prevented from speaking during that discussion and that he would file a complaint, she said.
Venetitay said it was the ‘final straw’ for teachers at the school, who had complained of a ‘very degraded climate’ as well as a ‘lack of support’ from management despite ‘several alerts’.
In an email sent to parents on Friday, teachers said they were exercising their right to stay away from classrooms over the ‘particularly difficult situation’ at the high school.
They described ‘palpable discomfort’ and ‘an increase in cases of violence’ as their daily reality.
Teachers said the students had admitted to making things up in posts online, that that it was too late to quell the anger. ‘We’re dealing with vindictive parents who prefer to believe their children than us,’ they said in a statement.
Teachers at the school said behaviour had been deteriorating even before the row, with students fighting and threatening rape.
‘We feel we are clearly in danger. We are supported by our direct superiors but not from higher up,’ one teacher told The Times. ‘This is a real call for help’.
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