March 21, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A French primary school teacher has received a reprimand for having read a violent rape scene to a class of 4 and 5th graders (9 to 11 year-olds) in a state primary school in Morsang-sur-Orge, a small suburban town of some 20,000 inhabitants 12 miles south of Paris. The reprimand will appear in the teacher’s file for two years. Pascal Noury, 54, will continue to teach at the “école Cachin” and no sanctions have been taken against him.
When the story went public after the February vacation, the French national media spoke widely about the scandal and Nicolas Sarkozy, who is campaigning for a second presidential mandate in the upcoming elections, approved the parents’ campaign against the teacher: “If this is true, the parents are right,” he said on a nationwide television program.
At the same time, French Education minister Luc Chatel published an official communiqué asking the “Academic inspection” – the administrative body which controls the army of state-funded teachers – to take “all necessary disciplinary measures.” He “totally shared the sense of shock and indignation of several families,” he added.
But no one in the mainstream media – apart from one French newspaper, Le Parisien, which focuses on the news of Paris and its region – underlined the fact that the teacher in question is the mayor of Morangis, only a few miles away from Morsang. Pascal Noury, 54, was until recently a member of the powerful French socialist party, from which he was excluded over disagreement on the choice of the local socialist candidate for the elections to the French senate last year.
Pascal Noury taught in state schools and directed several of them for 25 years before going on to jobs in several ministerial cabinets; after a brief time in the private sector, he accepted a post as technical counselor for urbanization and the environment in 2006 at the Essonne regional council. He recently took up teaching again as a part-time activity – a handful of hours a week – apparently in order to preserve his pension and other rights as a civil servant in public education.
Contacted by telephone, the director of Pascal Noury’s cabinet refused to comment on the affair, but refused – upon insistent questioning – to deny that the mayor of Morangis was the teacher involved.
It was at the end of January that many parents of the Cachin school at Morsang were shocked to find their children traumatized by the story read to them by Pascal Noury. Some refused to return to school, others had nightmares or started bedwetting. When their parents read the book chosen by Pascal Noury they were appalled. After several meetings with school authorities they took the affair to the press at the beginning of March. The “reprimand” issued on Tuesday has apparently put a full stop to the scandal.
Betty Coton, by Corinne Albaut, published in 2005 (it has since been republished in an expurgated version), tells the story of a Black African girl who is sold into slavery by her brother and taken to America in harrowing and inhuman conditions. On the cotton plant she is noticed by the young, pervert owner who forces her into sexual contact, then rapes her and mutilates her with a paperknife. She goes on to become his sexual slave.
The scene read by Pascal Noury is extremely graphic and sexually explicit which LifeSiteNews considers too explicit to be transcribed here.
He justified his choice as a desire to make schoolchildren aware of the horrors of slavery and the exploitation of the Black people. Noury later apologized.
The author of Betty Coton, Corinne Albaut, has been interviewed over the affair: in her opinion, she says the book is not appropriate for children under 13 or 14, although the book’s cover recommends the story for ages 12 and up.
French Education ministry:
Ministère de l’Éducation nationale, de la Jeunesse et de la Vie associative
110 rue de Grenelle
75357 Paris SP 07
France