France Pays Respects To Teacher Killed In Islamist Attack

A French teacher stabbed to death last week by an Islamist former pupil was to be laid to rest on Thursday, after a funeral in the northern city of Arras attended by President Emmanuel Macron.

The service in Arras cathedral for 57-year-old Dominique Bernard was broadcast on a large screen in the city's Heroes' Square, where almost 600 people watched in the rain.

"Sensitive and discreet, (Bernard) didn't like the sound and fury of the world," his wife Isabelle, also a teacher, told the roughly 1,000 people in the church.

"He deeply loved his daughters, his mother and his sister. We loved one another. He didn't like crowds and honours, ceremonies, he detested them."

Bernard had earlier been posthumously awarded the Legion of Honour, France's highest civilian decoration, by Macron, who spoke to the family before the ceremony.

But the attention on Thursday was on the words of people who knew Bernard.

"I see your silhouette in the staff room, I see the shirt you always wear, the cup you hold, your mischievous smile because you have something funny to say," a colleague, Aurelie, told the service.

"You were there for (the pupils) and they knew it."

Maxime, a former pupil, said Bernard was "kind" and "passionate" about his job as a French teacher.

"He loved to help us discover literature. He always had little extra things to say about the authors he was presenting," he told AFP, waiting on the square for the funeral to start.

Well-wishers had laid bouquets on the cathedral steps, where around 30 teachers and staff from Bernard's school waited as the coffin arrived.

Central Arras was shut down for the service, and classes were cancelled at the Gambetta-Carnot school where Bernard taught, allowing staff and pupils to go to the ceremony.

He was killed almost three years to the day after teacher Samuel Paty was beheaded outside his school in a Paris suburb by a radicalised young man.

Bernard's murder was a fresh shock for the profession and the wider French public.

Both Bernard's attacker, 20-year-old Mohammed Moguchkov, and Paty's killer were originally from Russia's mainly Muslim North Caucasus region.

Institutions around France have been subject to bomb threats since Friday's killing, including a string of airports, the Louvre Museum and the historic Palace of Versailles outside Paris.

Bernard's own school was targeted by a threat on Monday, when staff and pupils were set to hold a minute of silence in his memory.

Nerves were already on edge in France, which has large Muslim and Jewish populations, following the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel and the Israeli retaliation in Gaza.

The school killing has stoked a fierce political debate in France around immigration and security.

The government is speeding up the parliamentary calendar for a new immigration law.