A furious row has erupted in France and left a teacher in fear for her life after she showed a 17th century Renaissance painting depicting nude women to pupils in art class, prompting complaints from Muslim parents.
Staff members at Jacques Cartier in Issou, west of Paris, refused to work on Monday in solidarity with the teacher who showed the masterpiece – ‘Diana and Actaeon’ by the Italian painter Giuseppe Cesari – in class on Thursday.
The work portrays a Greek mythology story in which the hunter Actaeon bursts in at a site where the goddess Diana and her nymphs are bathing. It shows a naked Diana and four nude female companions, and is held at the Louvre museum in Paris.
Following the class, false posts circulated on social media accusing the teacher of making racist comments, fuelling the anger further.
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.’