Nicolas Sarkozy has often dwelt on the need for the French to know their history. He has required teachers to read out a letter written by a 17-year-old Communist resistance fighter to his mother just before his execution. He has proposed that every final-year primary pupil remember a child killed in the Holocaust. He has studded his speeches with references to" crusades and cathedrals, human rights and the revolution", saying that"there cannot be a nation if there is not a common history."

It is strange, then, that his government should decide to scrap history as a compulsory subject in the final year of one of the top three baccalauréats. The 50% or so of pupils who take the Bac S, which specialises in science and mathematics, have a compulsory two-and-a-half hours of history a week in their final year. But under a new reform, history will become optional, letting budding scientists retreat behind their Bunsen burners untroubled by the cold war or anti-colonialism.