The Head Booked Mock Exams, So the Flour Came Early

The headteacher of the Lycée François Magendie in Bordeaux needed, as he put it to the local paper, to see the first gram of flour.

The flour belonged to the Père Cent: the day, one hundred days before the baccalauréat, on which final-year pupils celebrate by throwing flour, eggs and tomato sauce at each other and at anything else nearby. It is said to come from the army, from soldiers counting down their last hundred days. The head had pointed out that his pupils were not at war. They did not find this persuasive.

In 2012 the school had tried the reasonable approach and funded an alternative celebration, with music and no projectiles. The eggs were thrown anyway.

So in 2013 the school tried cunning. The Père Cent traditionally fell on the Friday before the February holidays. That week, the school scheduled mock exams.

A very school-shaped solution. It lasted until Thursday.

On Thursday the final-year pupils noticed, met and agreed to bring the whole thing forward by a week. Word reached ten terminale classes within two hours. Each pupil put in five euros for supplies. One of them later told Sud Ouest there was no malice in it, and that it was a bit like Christmas.

The head had scheduled exams against a tradition, and the tradition had simply moved its own date.

The head heard the rumours on Thursday night but could not shut a school of eleven hundred pupils on hearsay. At about eight on Friday morning he got his gram of flour: around fifty final-year pupils at the gate in the white overalls issued for chemistry, repurposed for protection against each other. He sent a message to every parent. The lycée would not open.

The message reached parents in their offices. The younger pupils, of course, were already at the gate, in their good coats, which is how the final-year pupils found their targets delivered to them on the pavement.

I have taken a similar strategic approach to the youngest’s birthday, which falls the week of a school trip. I moved the party forward to avoid the trip. The youngest moved the trip, by persuading the teacher it should be on the original birthday, so that the party would be “at the zoo, with everyone”.

I do not know how she did it. The teacher will not say. I suspect a two-hour meeting and a five-euro budget.

Magendie, the paper noted, held its Père Cent a week before every other lycée in Bordeaux. The head, to his credit, kept everyone out of the chemistry labs.