PARIS, Oct. 22 — Guy M?quet seems to be an unlikely national icon for France’s right-of-center government. A Communist during World War II, Mr. M?quet called for a revolution to destroy the capitalist system.
But he was also a participant in the French Resistance — and only 17 years old — when he was executed by the Nazis 66 years ago on Monday. And his brief, handwritten letter to his family on the eve of his death so moved President Nicolas Sarkozy that his first official act as president in May was to decree that it be read in all high schools in France every October.
Monday was the letter-reading day, but Mr. Sarkozy’s decision has prompted an angry reaction from politicians on the left, the biggest high school teachers union and some historians and teachers. They are accusing the president of manipulating history for political ends, interfering in educational matters and reducing the complex history of the Resistance to caricature.
“There is a revision of history to serve political power that is scandalous,” said G?rard Noiriel, who heads the Committee of Vigilance in the Face of the Public Use of History, which has protested the initiative. “The government has concealed the historical truth about Guy M?quet, and the complexities of the Resistance have been reduced to a letter taken out of context.”
Particularly misleading, Mr. Noiriel said, is that the Ministry of National Education’s official document of instructions to schools omits the fact that Mr. M?quet was a Communist.
Mr. Sarkozy canceled plans to visit Mr. M?quet’s high school in Paris on Monday where the letter would be read. His office blamed a scheduling conflict, but some teachers had threatened a protest.
Government officials, veterans of World War II and of the Resistance, historians and teachers paid tribute to Mr. M?quet, reading the letter and introducing many students to a hero who was about their age when he died. But some teachers refused to read the letter, and some protesters accused Mr. Sarkozy of appropriating a hero of the Communists.
Marie-George Buffet, the leader of the Communist Party, read the M?quet letter at a high school in the working-class Paris suburb of Seine-St.-Denis, but she called the government’s action a “solemn but deceitful homage,” emphasizing that class struggle was far from over.
Guy M?quet’s childhood sweetheart, Odette Niles, now 83, was quoted Monday in the newspaper Le Parisien as saying, “Sarkozy, he is not my cup of tea,” adding, “A forced reading — that bothers me.”
Other intellectuals, however, said the M?quet initiative was a small but important gesture toward helping to make France’s history relevant to students and infusing them with a spirit of national pride.
“Our young people lack heroes,” said Bruno Racine, the director of the Biblioth?que Nationale who also leads a presidential commission on education. “If Guy M?quet provides an opportunity to discuss the meaning of civic responsibility and sacrifice, then even if the initiative is controversial, it’s positive.
“If Zidane can be a hero, why not Guy M?quet,” Mr. Racine added, referring to the French soccer star Zinedine Zidane.
Mr. M?quet, the son of a Communist, was only 16 when the Germans invaded France in 1940. He distributed Communist leaflets for the Resistance and was arrested in 1941, tried and acquitted. But because he identified himself as a Communist, he was held as a political detainee.
His execution was an act of Nazi revenge. After three Communists killed a German officer, the Nazis ordered the execution of 50 prisoners. The Vichy government provided the names; Mr. M?quet was the youngest person on the list.
On Oct. 21, 1941, the eve of his execution, he wrote a letter to “my darling little Mama, my adored very little brother, my darling little Papa,” asking them to be brave.
“I am about to die!” he wrote, adding, “Indeed, I would have wished to live, but what I wish with all my heart is that my death serve a purpose.”
He said that he had no regrets “other than leaving you behind,” adding that he kissed his family “with all of this child’s heart of mine.”
“Be brave!” he told them.
Mr. Sarkozy evoked Mr. M?quet’s name during the presidential campaign as a source of national pride and patriotic sacrifice. Then, on the day he took office in May, he stopped at a monument in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris for a ceremony honoring Resistance fighters killed there by the Gestapo in 1944.
The M?quet letter was read out, and television images of the event showed Mr. Sarkozy shedding a tear. He promised to ask his future education minister to require the annual reading.
“A 17-year-old young man who gives his life for France, it’s an example not of the past but of the future,” Mr. Sarkozy said at the commemoration. He added, “I have never been able to read the letter by Guy M?quet without being profoundly moved.”
On Monday, Prime Minister Fran?ois Fillon received a group of high school students at his Paris headquarters, where the letter was read, and branded the imbroglio a “fairly pathetic controversy.” He added: “The president of the republic wanted to create a collective moment around a letter by a young Communist. It’s a shame some people don’t understand that.”
The debate over the M?quet letter has also rekindled objections to the government’s plans to curb immigration and its creation of a ministry of immigration and national identity.
Justice Minister Rachida Dati was booed during a visit to a school in the Paris suburb of Villejuif by pro-immigration demonstrators who shouted, “Free Guy M?quet!” and “Resistance against racist laws!”
Henri Guaino, a Sarkozy speechwriter and adviser, in an interview last week with Lib?ration, called it “completely incomprehensible” that teachers should reject the reading of the letter. Referring to the 19th-century novelist Victor Hugo, he asked, “Are we going to refuse to study a text of Hugo written into the curriculum, saying, ‘I don’t like Hugo?’”
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