A teacher’s murder: terror in the Republic
In the past few years, hundreds of people have been killed in terrorist attacks in France – from the scores massacred at the Bataclan theatre in 2015, to the 85-year-old priest whose throat was slit as he said Mass in his church in 2016. Now the French must add to that list Samuel Paty, the teacher beheaded in a town near Paris last week, after showing his pupils – during a discussion about freedom of expression – cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that had led to the Charlie Hebdo massacre in 2015. (Muslim pupils were offered the chance to step out for that section.) A parent at the school got wind of the incident and, backed by his imam, started an online campaign to have Paty sacked. The killer, who was later shot dead by police, was identified as an 18-year-old Chechen who had come to France as a refugee aged six. He didn’t know Paty: he lived about 60 miles away.
This latest atrocity has touched a “raw and angry nerve” in France, said John Lichfield on UnHerd – and not just because of the “appalling manner of Paty’s death”. In France, secularism is the “state religion”. The state guarantees the freedom to believe, and the right to blaspheme, but is neutral on religious affairs. Teachers, though often criticised, are viewed as “secular priests” – tasked with passing down the
Republic’s values of tolerance, freedom of expression and secularism. Paty was killed for teaching these principles, and on Sunday, tens of thousands of people took to the streets to commemorate him. Yet he was not the attacker’s only target: the killer had also sent a message to President Macron, in which he referred to Paty as “one of your dogs of hell”.
Macron had recently unveiled a new bill to combat what he terms “Islamist Separatism” – the sense that a minority of France’s six million Muslims believe that their allegiance is to the Koran, not to French law, said The Economist. As well as initiatives to combat social exclusion, the bill includes a ban on homeschooling and on foreign-funded mosques. Last week’s atrocity is sure to bolster calls on the farright for more extreme clampdowns – which will in turn reinforce the claim that French Muslims are being vilified. Macron insists he isn’t trying “to demonise young Muslims, but to bring them in from the cold”, said Matthew Campbell in The Sunday Times. It is overdue. France is a divided country: the young residents of the neglected banlieues aren’t just cut off from the rest of France. Weaned “on festering grievances, and tales of the horrors inflicted by the French on their ancestors in North Africa”, some of them hate France. The malaise runs very deep.