"Where books are burned, men are eventually burned."
Heinrich Heine
Ignorance, stupidity, or ideology? How can we know what could have been going through the mind of the mayor of the small town of Mont-Saint-Aignan, in the suburbs of Rouen, when, to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the University of Rouen, located in his town, he decided to commission the Compagnons du Devoir (a French guild of craftsmen) to make a wooden facsimile of a large book… and then publicly burn it on June 13th, in a “celebratory and joyful bonfire” for the Feast of Saint John.[1]...making a mistake in the date along the way... History does not say whether the university was associated with this charade.
The joy of burning a book! How could such a blunder have been committed? It is even more serious than turning the portrait of the President of the Republic against the wall, which is simply arrogant stupidity… A president is temporary and volatile, a book is a much more powerful symbol than a portrait: it is the symbol of knowledge, the symbol of the transmission of knowledge, the symbol of the very mission of the University.
Amadou Hampâté Bâ is known, among other things, for his famous phrase: "In Africa, when an old man dies, a library burns"; the municipality of Mont-Saint-Aignan does not hesitate to commit, in effigy, the most scandalous of murders: that of a book! If Mont-Saint-Aignan had been in Africa, would old people have been condemned to the stake?
So, was it ignorance, stupidity, or ideology? What led to this book burning? Perhaps a mixture of all three?
Ignorance: Doesn't the mayor of the town know who burned the books, and under what circumstances? Let's all contribute to provide him with a detailed account of the book destruction.[2] From 7th-century Alexandria to the 20th-century Nazi bibliocaust – and it's not over yet, alas… all the way to comic books in the 21st century[3] !
Nonsense: after all, said the mayor, " It wasn't a book that was burned, but simply a lectern. "Falsehood: it was a lectern on which rested a book. And according to France 3-Normandie, it was indeed a book that was commissioned from the Compagnons du Devoir…"
Ideology: the contempt for science and culture has reached such proportions that one can ask the question… The Gutenberg Galaxy[4] It seems to be receding from us at the speed of light, chased by the Marconi galaxy, McLuhan said sixty years ago; I would say rather by the TikTok galaxy. If there are no more books, you will no longer think, and the world will be so much better off!
