ONE YEAR ON, FRENCH PAY TRIBUTE TO TEACHER SLAIN IN ISLAMIST ATTACK
PARIS—Schoolchildren across France paid tribute to the late history teacher Samuel Paty on Friday to mark the passing of a year since he was beheaded by an Islamist radical in an attack that struck at the heart of the country’s secular values.
Paty’s attacker, a teenager of Chechen origin, had wanted to avenge the teacher’s use of cartoons of Islam’s Prophet Mohammad in a class on freedom of expression for 13-year-olds. Muslims see any depiction of the Prophet as blasphemous.
The 47-year-old teacher was stabbed and then decapitated after leaving the middle school where he taught history and geography in the tranquil Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine on the evening of Oct. 16, 2020.
Paty’s violent death stunned France’s educators, who saw it as an attack on the core values teachers have taught generations of schoolchildren, including the separation of church and state and the right to blaspheme.
“To pay tribute to Samuel Paty is to pay tribute to the Republic,” Prime Minister Jean Castex said at a ceremony flanked by Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer and in the presence of the victim’s family.
“Nothing could be worse than forgetting,” Castex said.
“Samuel Paty was a victim of Islamist terrorism and human cowardice.”
Castex unveiled a plaque at the entrance to the Ministry of Education that read: “Homage to Samuel Paty... Murdered by an Islamic terrorist for teaching and defending the values of the Republic, including freedom of expression.”
At a new school in Valenton, south of Paris, that has been named after Paty, children sang a song about freedom of speech in ceremony for the slain teacher on Friday.
“It is moving because Samuel Paty was killed in such a horrific way. And so singing for him makes you very emotional,” said 6th grade student Yona Sehi.
Dedication
Paty was decapitated by Abdullakh Anzorov with a large knife on a street in a middle-class Paris suburb in broad daylight. Police shot dead the 18-year-old soon afterwards.
In a school in Creteil, a suburb of Paris, superintendent Daniel Auverlot unveiled a plaque with Paty’s name on a hall named after him. “Samuel Paty hall, 19732020. Assassinated because he defended freedom of speech,” the plaque read.
“Some said it was the 9-11 of the French education system. But there is also great hope, because our teachers keep on working towards teaching students how to live together, in tolerance and mutual respect,” Auverlot said.
A year ago, President Emmanuel Macron described Paty as a “quiet hero” dedicated to instilling the democratic values of freedom, equality and solidarity in his pupils.
Celebration
“We will never forget Samuel Paty. To celebrate his memory is to celebrate freedom, the republic and school,” Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer said this week.
France is home to Europe’s largest Muslim minority and has suffered a wave of attacks perpetrated by Islamist militants or their sympathizers in past years.
Paty’s murder exposed the deepening tensions between France’s model of state secularism, or laicité, that demands the separation of religion and public life and a minority of French Muslims and adherents of other faiths who seek to express their religious identity.
In the wake of his killing, some teachers acknowledged they censored themselves to avoid confrontation with pupils and parents over religion and free speech.