His students once included President Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister Gabriel Attal. Not only a good part of the future French political elite is still educated in its facilities, but also students from all over the world, attracted by its academic excellence and prestige. The Paris Institute of Political Studies (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 that reach the Government, after the resignation of its director, Matthias Vicherat, due to a sub judice case of domestic violence and accusations of anti-Semitism against a very radicalized student sector.
The first shock is a personal problem, but in a very sensitive issue like marital violence. He and his ex-wife accuse each other. The lawsuit will be settled in a trial.
Vicherat is from the same class as Macron at the even more elite National School of Administration (ENA). He was a senior executive at the multinational Danone and the state railway company (SNCF). Vicherat, who declares his innocence, justified his resignation “to preserve the institution,” although many students consider that it was a late step because he had been floating aimlessly at Sciences Po for too long. The resigned director embodied a flagrant contradiction because he had imposed very strict rules and declared the fight against sexist attitudes of harassment and violence in the school as an “absolute priority.”
Vicherat is the second director to leave with scandal. In 2021 he succeeded Frédéric Mion, forced to leave office for having protected the famous political scientist Olivier Duhamel, accused of incest in a best-selling book.
“Unfortunately, we are used to directors with problems,” Andrea, a master's student originally from the Ivory Coast, commented resignedly to this newspaper on Friday. “The issue of anti-Semitism seems more serious to me, although I think that the controversy is a little disproportionate because of the media,” added the student.
One day before Vicherat's resignation, the incident occurred that led to Macron reacting in the Council of Ministers. A group of pro-Palestinian students occupied Sciences Po's main assembly hall, the Boutmy Amphitheater (in honor of the school's founder), without permission, which they renamed the Gaza Amphitheater. When a Jewish student tried to enter, someone identified her and shouted: “Don't let her in, she is a Zionist!”
The phrase spread and a scandal broke out. The President of the Republic considered these words “unspeakable 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 maintained 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 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 had problems when, after the Hamas massacre, 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 teaching staff there is much 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 disastrous and very active minority. “Many teachers are horrified by this attack and this disregard for our universalist values.”
