Every Monday morning, Yveline Prouvost, a high school history-geography teacher in Roubaix, northern France, starts the week with a review of current events with her specialization students. "Miss, will there be a war?" "Have you seen the AI-generated video of Donald Trump having a drink in Gaza?" Her students comment on recent events and expect clarification from their teacher, singularly since the start of Trump's second term on January 20. "The difficulty is to provide them with elements in a shifting and complex context, without adding to their anxiety," said Prouvost.

As with every geopolitical crisis, teachers face questions from their students. In the opinion of the teachers interviewed for this article, there are fewer of them than after the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, or the outbreak of war in Ukraine in 2022. But, in both secondary schools across France, the political upheavals underway are impacting the way the national curriculum can be taught, particularly in the years that include themes like "The world since 1945" and "Relations between powers and opposing political models, from the 1930s to the present day." Teachers are having to build bridges between past and present.

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