In the case of France, it is possible that Sacks is alluding to various incidents that occurred in the first decades of the 20th century, that all featured far-right groups of students (or "students" since not all of them were actual students) who came to disturb violently the lectures of teachers that they disagreed with, sometimes resulting in the cancellation of lectures or in the shutting down of the faculties.

The Thalamas affairs (1904 and 1908)

In 1904, Amédée Thalamas was a history teacher recently appointed at the Lycée Condorcet, a prestigious public high school in Paris. He had published a short book about Joan of Arc, where he had written that "the scientist must therefore acknowledge that Jeanne had olfactory, tactile, visual and especially auditory hallucinations."

He was otherwise admirative of Joan - who wasn't! - but he doubted that Saints had actually talked to her. Instead, she had "objectified through the Saints the voices of her own conscience."

When one of his students called Joan "a religious glory and not a pagan goddess of patriotism" in a homework assignment, Thalamas told him that "the historian's job was not to deal with the miracle or the will of God, but to describe the facts". One of the students was the son of a nationalist and monarchist Member of Parliament, Georges Berry, who launched a press campaign riddled with fake news: it was claimed that Thalamas have told his students that the Joan was sleeping with her captains and that she deserved her fate. A newspaper wrote that Thalamas had participated in the Paris Commune and deported (he was actually 4 at the time). The "Man who had insulted Joan" was booed in his classrom, and from the end of November to mid-December, there were daily protests in Paris with hundreds of anti-Thalamas and pro-Thalamas students clashing in the streets. At that time, France was still reeling from the Dreyfus affair, and the Republican government was preparing the law on separation of church and state. However, it was destabilized by the Affair of the Cards, a political scandal that threatened its ongoing battle with religious authorities. Chaumié, the Minister of Education, rather than defending Thalamas, blamed him for having been "tactless" and transferred him to another school, the Lycée Charlemagne, where he had to be protected by the police for several days. Left-wing politician Jean Jaurès and the right-wing writer Paul Déroulède fought a duel about the Thalamas affair.

Thalamas was forgotten until 1908. By then the nationalist movement had been morphing into a proto-fascist one. The nationalist, monarchist, catholic and antisemitic Action Française, created in 1899, was characterized (Winock, 2009) by

its disdain for liberal institutions and republican traditions, its exaltation of the “show of force” and authoritarian powers, and perhaps even more, its teaching of a certain style consisting of invectives, outrageous acts, slander, and ad hominem attacks.

The Action française was now building its own youth organization and armed wing (armed with sticks and canes rather than guns, but armed nonetheless), the Camelots du Roi. In July 1908, one thousand nationalist "students" protested violently at the Sorbonne about the "traitorous" visit to Germany of germanist professor Charles Anders and his students. But it was the return of Thalamas at the Sorbonne for a series of weekly lectures on the "pedagogy for teaching history" that saw the first action of the Camelots du Roi. On 2 December, despite a strong police presence, the Camelots assaulted Thalamas as he began his lecture, pelting him with eggs and vegetables, and finally slapping him. Thalamas had to be exfiltrated by the police. From then, every Wednesday for the next three months, far-right activists played cat-and-mouse with the police in the narrow streets of the Latin Quarter, always finding ways to enter the Sorbonne and disrupt the lectures of Thalamas and other teachers. Thalamas was even assaulted while riding the Metro by a merchant who had recognized him. The Latin Quarter was under siege every week, with platoons of the Garde Républicaine trying to maintain order and keep the "thalamists" and "antithalamists" from fighting each other. For Thalamas, Joan of Arc was only a pretext: what was under attack was the idea of a secular (laïque) higher education that was unacceptable for the enemies of "rationalist and liberal efforts" (Thalamas, 1909). The end of Thalamas' lectures early February 1909 put a stop to the mayhem. One of the last action of the Camelots, for the time being, was an attempt at storming the Ministry of Justice. By then the Camelots were firmly installed in the French political landscape, and the Camelot leaders who were arrested by the police used the courts as soapboxes during their trials (the name Camelots later became some sort of catch-all for far-right activists).

The Scelle and Langevin affairs (1925)

After WW1, the far-right had recruited students in the Faculty of Medicine, at the Ecole des Chartes, and, more importantly, at the Faculty of Law, which became a hotbed of far-wing activism. In 1924, the electoral victory of the left-wing coalition Cartel des Gauches rekindled far-right activities in French universities. Like in 1904 and 1908, they found a target: Georges Scelle, the new head of the International Law department at the Faculty of Law of Paris. Scelle had been chosen by the governement, rather by the Faculty, and right-wingers opposed an appointment that they claimed was political, as Scelle was close to the Cartel parties. On 9 March 1925, 300 "students" invaded the amphiteatre where Scelle was to give his first lesson, throwing firecracks and breaking chairs, windows and doors, even molesting a usher who was a WW1 veteran. A hundred policemen arrived to restore order. Incidents went on for three weeks, with groups of pro- and anti-Scelle activists fighting each other in the Faculty and around the Pantheon, with the police chasing and occasionally arresting them. This time, the governement did not let things go on for several months as they had done with Thalamas: the Faculty was shut down on 30 March 1925 and the Dean dismissed. Early April, with little support from his colleagues, Scelle resigned (or was forced to resign) "to pacify the situation". There were more serious incidents: a few days later, a battle between Communist activists and members the far-right youth group Jeunesses Patriotes, resulted in four dead among the far-righters, who had literally brought sticks to a gunfight.

The victory of the Action Française in the Scelle affair made them try the method again the following year with Paul Langevin, the famous left-wing physicist and professor at the College de France. In 1911, Langevin had already been the victim of a nasty press campaign for his alleged affair with Marie Curie (a married man with a Polish widow!), and he had defended his honour by pistol dueling. Early 1926, nationalists reproached him for having chaired a pacifist conference given by a German schoolteacher, and on the 15 January, a hundred Camelots barged in the amphitheatre at the College de France, threw vegetables and eggs, and broke a spectrographer. The next lectures of Langevin took place under heavy police protection (with the help of communist students), and there were no further incidents, as the College de France was smaller and easier to secure than the Sorbonne. In the following weeks, the Camelots launched expeditions against events promoted by left-wing student organisations, including one late February where Georges Scelle was speaking about Germany and the Société des Nations. Early March 1926, Camelots infiltrated and attacked a meeting of communist students. They were given rubber truncheons that were easier to hide than the canes they usually carried, and were ordered to "break everything that could be broken".

-> Part 2

Thank you for your brilliant response, Gerard. I’ve only just logged into Reddit and seen it. Truly appreciate you taking the time of day to respond. It’s really helped me out. Immensely interesting.