His students once included President Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister Gabriel Attal. Its facilities educate not only a large part of the future French political elite but also students from all over the world attracted by its academic excellence and prestige. The Institute of Political Studies of Paris (IEP), better known as Sciences Po, a grande école founded in 1872 after the humiliating French defeat in the war against Prussia, is experiencing a real earthquake, with repercussions reaching the Government, after the resignation of its director, Matthias Vicherat, for a sub iudice case of domestic violence, and for accusations of anti-Semitism against a very radicalized student sector.
The first subtraction is a personal problem, but in a very sensitive matter such as domestic violence. He and his ex-wife accuse each other. The lawsuit will be settled in a trial.
Vicherat is from the same promotion as Macron in the even more elitist National School of Administration (ENA). He was a senior executive of the multinational Danone and the state railway company (SNCF). Vicherat, who declares himself innocent, justified his resignation “to preserve the institution”, although many students consider it a late step because he had been floating aimlessly at Sciences Po for too long. The resigned director embodied a blatant contradiction because he had imposed very strict rules and declared the fight against sexist attitudes of harassment and violence at school as an “absolute priority”.
Vicherat is the second director to leave amid scandal. In 2021, it happened with Frédéric Mion, forced to leave office for having protected the famous political scientist Olivier Duhamel, accused of incest in a book that was a bestseller.
“Unfortunately, we are used to directors with problems”, Andrea, a master’s student originally from the Ivory Coast, commented to this newspaper on Friday, resignedly. “The issue of anti-Semitism seems more serious to me, although I think the controversy is a bit disproportionate because of the media,” added the student.
One day before the resignation of the Vice-Chancellor, the incident took place that led Macron to react in the Council of Ministers. A group of pro-Palestinian students occupied Sciences Po’s main auditorium, the Boutmy Amphitheater (honoring the school’s founder), which they renamed the Gaza Amphitheater. When a Jewish student tried to enter, someone identified her and shouted: “Don’t let her in, she’s a Zionist!”.
The phrase went viral and the scandal was fueled. The President of the Republic estimated that these words were “unqualifiable and perfectly intolerable”. The next day, Attal went to Sciences Po and indicated that the Government would file a complaint. The Minister of Higher Education, Sylvie Retailleau, severely condemned the events: “Our establishments are places of study and debate. (…) It is intolerable and shocking to suffer the slightest discrimination, the slightest incitement to hatred”.
Several students present at the pro-Palestinian assembly claimed that the dispute had been exaggerated. They accused the expelled colleague, who belongs to the Union of Jewish Students of France (UEJF), of having attended previous pro-Palestinian events in order to record them on video and later spread them on social networks.
In an interview with Le Parisien, the Jewish student – ??whose name has been changed to protect her – recalled that she had already been in trouble when, after the killing of Hamas, she tore down posters with the slogan “Glory to the Palestinian resistance”. According to her, she has been the victim of very offensive macabre jokes, such as when someone told her: “You will have a free ticket to Poland” (in reference to the convoys of deportees to the Auschwitz extermination camp during Nazism) .
Among the teachers there is a lot of concern about the risk of radicalization of positions in a school that has 15,000 students, half of them international. “Tuesday’s incident is a paroxysm of the growth of hatred – complained François Heilbronn, associate professor, to Le Figaro -. We are hostages of a nefarious and very active minority. Many teachers are horrified by this attack and this disregard for our universalist values”.
