After calling for resistance to the Islamist threat in November 2020, Didier Lemaire, professor of philosophy at Trappes, is placed under police protection. Didier Lemaire has been professor of philosophy at Trappes for nearly 20 years. Two decades during which he taught with passion despite the difficulty of this terrain classified as a priority area. Two decades during which he saw this city of the Parisian suburbs lock itself a little more into religious communitarianism.

In 2018, he wrote a letter with Jean-Pierre Obin (author of the book Comment we let Islamism penetrate the school) to the President of the Republic to urge the government to act to protect the youth from the influence of fundamentalists, and in November 2020 he published an open letter after the beheading of Samuel Paty to denounce the state’s lack of strategy in the face of political Islam.

Today, after twenty years of unfailing commitment, Didier Lemaire is throwing in the towel. Forced to go to work under armed police escort, the teacher expects nothing more than his exfiltration from this establishment and from this city where he is no longer safe.

“ I have been under escort since November ,” says Didier Lemaire. Every time I get in the car, I check that my doors are properly closed, that I am not being followed. I don’t want to live in fear. I’m just waiting for one thing: my exfiltration. “ More than by the feeling of fear, Didier Lemaire is overcome by anger. He refuses to be silent and denounces the attempts to intimidate certain inhabitants of the city, but also the intervention of the mayor himself, Ali Rabeh , whose election has just been annulled by justice and who has been condemned to one year of ineligibility.

“The mayor is peddling false and hateful accusations in the city which designate me as a potential target ,” protests the professor. He called me an Islamophobe and a racist. He has the right to think so. But this thought is a weapon of ideological warfare and it is calumny. It is above all a disgusting process, after what happened to Samuel Paty. He throws me into the pasture and puts me in danger. It is absolutely irresponsible on the part of an elected representative of the Republic. I ask the parties, Communist, Génération.s, La République en Marche and Europe Écologie-Les Verts, to disown his remarks. ” Contacted, the mayor has so far not responded to our requests.

For Didier Lemaire, this long-term fight ends in Trappes, in 2021, after years of a struggle that began in the first days of his appointment to this post. “Twenty years ago, it all started for me with the burning of the synagogue in October 2000. After that, there were no more Jews in Trappes. And finally, no more anti-Semitic inscriptions on the city walls. Now atheists and moderate Muslims are leaving. Fundamentalists are in the process of successfully completing their purification process. It’s frightening ! Everything is accelerating, in two years, I have seen more transformation in young people and in the public space than in the last eighteen years. Today, attacks on secularism are collective and very well organized. ”

Didier Lemaire does not want to leave his classroom in Trappes without once again sounding the alarm. If he says the city has fallen into the hands of the Islamists and recognizes the defeat of his Republican fight, he refuses to lower his arms . “I remain a philosophy teacher , he asserts (…) But I consider that Trappes is a city definitely lost. » Tireless defender of secularism and freedom confronted with the harsh reality of the territories of the Republic which are said to be lost. Didier Lemaire defends the idea of ​​a strong but above all urgent political response.

“We don’t have much time before it gets out of hand ,” he is alarmed. Many of these children are raised in hatred of France. We are not far from an Algerian scenario and we are no longer in a state of peace.