On one hand this seems like a pretty minor incident at a school outside Paris. On the other hand, this is part of a larger trend which has led to violence several times already. The incident started with a group of young Muslim students who objected to looking at a painting which included nudes during an art class.

The row began when a teacher showed Diana and Actaeon, a Renaissance-era painting portraying a mythical scene from Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Several first-year high school students, aged 11 and 12, said they were offended by the work by 17th-Century Italian painter Giuseppe Cesari, Sophie Venetitay from the Snes-FSU teachers union told AFP.

“Some students averted their gaze, felt offended, said they were shocked,” Ms Venetitay said, adding that “some also alleged the teacher made racist comments” during a class discussion.

Here’s a photo of the painting in question:

Renaissance nudes spark crisis at French school. Some Muslim students averted their gaze, felt offended, said they were shocked to watch the painting "Diana and Actaeon" by Giuseppe Cesari, in which the goddess Diana and her nymphs are bathinghttps://t.co/dh7Y26iB6E pic.twitter.com/YBtFXNmTzJ

— Alfons López Tena 🦇 (@alfonslopeztena) December 12, 2023

Teachers at the school refused to come to work on Monday saying they felt endangered after deadly attacks on French teachers over the past few years. They cited the murder of Samuel Paty by an Islamic extremist in 2020.

“We know well that methods like that can lead to a tragedy,” Ms Vénétitay told BFMTV news. “We saw it in the murder of Samuel Paty. Our colleagues feel threatened and in danger.”

Teachers at the Issou school said that pupils admitted lying about events in their art class but that the damage had been done.

“We’re dealing with vindictive parents who prefer to believe their children than us,” they said.

Notice that in addition to averting their gaze, some students falsely claimed the teacher had made racist comments. That’s very reminiscent of the sequence of events that led to Samuel Paty’s murder. Paty showed his class examples of Charlie Hebdo cartoons. A 13-year-old girl then claimed Paty had asked Muslim students to leave the classroom and these claims were repeated by her father online. Only those claims weren’t true. In fact, she hadn’t been in the classroom that day at all.

A 13-year-old schoolgirl confessed that she lied about a French teacher who was beheaded after showing his class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, according to the girl’s lawyer…

The unidentified girl told police that she lied about being in the class and falsely accused Paty of asking Muslim children to leave the class while he showed the pictures.

Nevertheless, those lies led a group of other students to track Paty’s movements, information which they then gave to the man who eventually murdered him. Those students were convicted in a trial which ended just last week.

The court found five of the defendants, who were 14 and 15 at the time of the attack, guilty of staking out the teacher and identifying him for the attacker. Another defendant, 13 at the time, was found guilty of lying about the classroom debate in a comment that aggravated online anger against the teacher.

The teenagers —all students at Paty’s school— testified that they didn’t know the teacher would be killed. All were handed brief or suspended prison terms, and required to stay in school or jobs during the duration of their suspended terms with regular checkups.

Unfortunately this was not the only time a teacher has been targeted by extremists. Just two months ago another French teacher was stabbed to death by a former student who’d become radicalized.

A teacher was stabbed to death at a school in northern France by a radicalised former pupil in what Emmanuel Macron, the French President, called a case of barbaric “Islamist terrorism”…

Dominique Bernard, a French literature teacher, was killed trying to “protect” pupils at City School Gambetta-Carnot in Arras and in doing so “saved many lives”, said Mr Macron…

A security guard and sports teacher were also seriously injured in the attack, in which the assailant reportedly shouted “Allahu Akbar” – God is great in Arabic. No pupils were hurt.

Gabriel Attal, France’s minister of education, visited the school Monday and said the students would be disciplined.

Mr Attal visited the school and said that disciplinary proceedings had been opened against three students “who caused this situation”.

“The role of the French school is to train republicans”, he told French politicians. “I will never accept that at the Republic school we refuse to look at a painting.”

Hopefully the swift condemnation will prevent anything worse from happening but teachers in the school have complained that discipline is lacking and “fights and death threats and threats of rape” have become common among students at this school.