Samuel Paty was murdered, and teaching in France has never been the same
It was a Friday afternoon in October 2020, and Coralie, a junior high school French teacher at Collège du Bois d’Aulne, had just gone for a walk in the nearby woods with her dog to clear her mind before the two-week school vacation.
It had been a stressful week. Her co-worker, Samuel Paty, had shown controversial images in his history class, and the whole school was on edge. That morning, she had tried to say hello to Mr. Paty but felt he was avoiding her gaze, scuttling off to class instead of making the usual jokes or initiating a game of table tennis in the teachers lounge.
She was back home when the messages in her teachers WhatsApp group started flooding in. Murder in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. Decapitation. Teacher, dead.
Coralie switched on the TV. And then everything crumbled.
“I knew right away it was Samuel,” she says.
It has been three years since a teacher who loved rock music and talking philosophy was beheaded by a Muslim man in a Paris suburb, where crisp hedges trimmed to perfection line up in front of white stucco houses. Three years since Mr. Paty’s own student spread the lie that would eventually get him killed.
The murder reverberated across France. Many Muslims said they felt targeted in response. The country’s vaunted secular culture received fresh scrutiny. Yet perhaps most of all, the killing shook the connection between teachers and their students. Held up as the advance guard of French culture and intellectualism, French teachers had a near-sacred relationship with students. Now, educators are no longer sure how to do their jobs.
Coralie is still reckoning with the series of events that led to Mr. Paty’s death. How did showing an image of the Prophet Muhammad in class end with a teacher dead? Did the students who pointed out Mr. Paty to his would-be assailant know the consequences of their actions? Weren’t they just kids?
“For weeks, I had nightmares. I stayed in my house with the blinds drawn,” says Coralie, looking out towards the Seine River at a local café. Like the other teachers in this story, she requested to use a pseudonym to protect her safety. “How could our students, who we trusted, turn around and do this? At first, I hated them.”
Since Mr. Paty’s death, France has continued to wrestle with its notions of secularism – laïcité – and the importance of freedom of expression.
Mr. Paty was the first teacher to die for what he taught in class, but
