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 he has not been the last. In October 2023, French teacher Dominique Bernard was stabbed in the northern town of Arras by a former radicalized student, supposedly for the French values he represented. And at the end of February, a school principal in Paris received death threats after asking a female Muslim student to remove her headscarf.

While the right to blaspheme is protected by French law, Mr. Paty’s murder has raised questions about where the line is between freedom and provocation.

Those questions are at the heart of what threatened to drive wedges between teachers, parents, and students at Bois d’Aulne, and between teachers themselves. Some agreed with what Mr. Paty had done, and some didn’t. Several left the school after his death, shaken by the event. Others left teaching entirely.

For Coralie and those who decided to stay, the hate is starting to fade away. Forgiveness is slow, but coming. Now, three years later, what she, her colleagues, and residents of all faiths in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine desperately want is to learn to trust again – in their students, each other, and themselves.

“Teaching is not always easy. ... We’re definitely more careful now,” says Joëlle Alazard, a high school history teacher and the president of the Paris-based Organization for History and Geography Teachers. “But we’re pushing ahead and teaching controversial subject matter.

“When students have their arms crossed and don’t dare ask questions, we have a problem. But when we know a class well and trust each other, we can have a debate and move things forward together.”

It was an average fall day in early October 2020 when Mr. Paty decided to show two caricatures from the French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo, featuring the Prophet Muhammad, to his oldest students during a class on freedom of the press and freedom of expression.

The choice was intentional. Even if showing images of the Prophet is considered blasphemous in Islam, France prides itself on being a secular country – especially within its education system. Was Charlie Hebdo being unnecessarily provocative, or was it within its rights? Where was the moral line? 

Mr. Paty told students ahead of time that they could leave the classroom if they wished or close their eyes. The lesson went forward without incident, but later, a female student told her father that Mr. Paty had shown students images of a naked man, calling him the Prophet Muhammad, and forced her out of class because she was Muslim. On Oct. 8, Brahim Chnina posted a video on Facebook, calling his daughter’s teacher a pervert and lodging a complaint of pornography with the police. 

Soon Mr. Chnina’s video was circulating on the social media pages of a Paris-area mosque and on WhatsApp groups in France and abroad. In one week, the video accumulated 13,000 views.

“I had friends in Algeria who were telling me about this video,” says Soraya, whose son was a student in Mr. Paty’s class on the day he showed the images. To protect her family, she asked to be identified only by a pseudonym. “I called the father and tried to reason with him, but he was incensed with rage. There was no getting through to him.”

Soraya sent a message to Mr. Paty in support, on behalf of the Muslim community. Then it came out that Mr. Chnina’s daughter wasn’t even in school on the day Mr. Paty showed the images – she had been given two days of suspension for bad behavior and presumably wanted to lash out.

But the damage had been done. Rumors began swirling around the schoolyard. What had Mr. Paty really shown in class? Should he have done it? Was he truly anti-Muslim?

Four days before his murder, the principal of Bois d’Aulne held an emergency meeting with teachers. The local administrative office had been notified, and police lined the front door. Unbeknownst to anyone, Mr. Chnina’s video had reached Mr. Paty’s would-be assailant, a Chechen Muslim refugee named Abdoullakh Anzorov.

“Samuel told us not to worry, but at this point, we really realized it was serious,” says Coralie. “At that meeting we asked, ‘Are there risks?’ You could feel this oppressive atmosphere at school.”

Then, on Oct. 16, Mr. Anzorov waited by the school gates, pulling a 14-year-old student to the side and offering him €300 (about $325) to identify Mr. Paty. The teenager, along with four others, accepted. 

As Mr. Paty left the school at around 5 p.m., Mr. Anzorov beheaded him with a 12-inch-long knife on a street in nearby Éragny. Minutes later, Mr. Anzorov was shot and killed by police. But Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, and France, would never be the same.

Mr. Paty’s murder caused shock waves. While France is no stranger to terrorism, the attack of a teacher had shattered something sacred. Mr. Paty was given a state funeral, broadcast nationwide from Sorbonne University, at which French President Emmanuel Macron said that Mr. Paty had been the victim of hatred and misunderstanding, and that his death would not be in vain.

“We will continue to defend the freedom that you taught as well as laïcité,” Mr. Macron said. “We will not stop showing caricatures even when others back away.”

But despite Mr. Macron’s unwavering confidence, France was still trying to reconcile its vision of secularism with an increasingly diverse nation. It was also still reeling from the events of 2015, which had set the stage for Mr. Paty’s murder and become a defining moment in how France viewed terrorism then and now.

In January of that year, Islamist extremists stormed the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo and killed 11 journalists for their publication of satirical content related to the Prophet Muhammad. Later that November, Islamist terrorists again launched a violent spree across Paris, killing over 130 people at the Bataclan concert venue and restaurants around the city.

In the months that followed, France faced a wave of further attacks in cities such as Nice, Villejuif, and Rambouillet. In response, the government pushed through a series of anti-terror laws that would grant police and intelligence agencies extended powers. It also began employing the term laïcité more often in reference to French values. Following the January attacks, then-Prime Minister Manuel Valls said laïcité needed to be “proudly displayed ... since we’re being attacked because of it.”

Soon, laïcité was under threat everywhere. Muslim women were stopped on French beaches for sporting burkinis, or for wearing a hijab on city buses, in public institutions, or while driving. Religious symbols had already been prohibited in French schools since 2004, and now there were questions over whether veiled mothers could accompany students on class outings.

By the time Mr. Paty decided to show the Charlie Hebdo caricatures to his class in 2020, the French education system had become a battleground for laïcité.

“One of France’s biggest accomplishments when it broke with the Catholic Church [starting in the French Revolution] was its national education system,” says Philippe Gaudin, the director of the Institute for Religious Studies and Laïcité. “Until [1886], the church held full control. After that, French schools became the sanctuary of laïcité as a political project and not just a rule about respecting religious freedom to maintain public order.”

When France signed the 1905 law on the separation of church and state, religion was seen as an “enemy of the state,” says Mr. Gaudin, and laïcité was a reaction against this authoritarian regime. France’s education system was to be a place of free thought and speech, where all students, regardless of religion, had the right to learn.

But with those protections of laïcité has come debate about its reach. Though the nation came together in mourning after the 2015 attacks – defending its secular values in the face of radical Islam – France also saw a more than threefold jump in Islamophobic acts. Nearly half of French Muslims say they face discrimination based on their faith.

“We’re suffering greatly over the conflation between Islam and terrorism; the idea that our religion could produce violence,” said the French Council for the Muslim Faith in a press release following Mr. Paty’s death. “[At the same time], we must remain dignified, serene, and lucid in the face of hostility and anti-Muslim acts.”

And while the initial concept of laïcité was used by French leaders to ensure that religion – Catholic or otherwise – never controlled the country’s public services or education system again, it has often felt anti-Muslim by members of that community. Mohand-Kamel Chabane, a history teacher in Paris who wrote a book in 2022 about teaching in diverse, working-class neighborhoods, says that “many people, Muslims in particular, think that laïcité is used to prevent them from being free.”

In the past decade, the French government has regularly introduced legislation involving pieces of Muslim dress in education, sports, and public life. This past September, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal announced that the long, loose-fitting abaya would be banned in French public schools.

“The idea of laïcité has gone from being something related to freedom towards a way to control the visibility of religion in the public space,” says Valentine Zuber, a French historian and expert in religious freedom. “Now, it’s laïcité as a notion of identity, and people bristle at the thought of a piece of fabric [covering a woman’s head] year after year.”

For Bertrand Bujaud, there is a clear before and after: before Mr. Paty was murdered, when Mr. Bujaud enjoyed a certain trust in himself as a teacher and a father, and after, when he realized that he could be killed for doing his job.

“It was the worst day of my life,” says Mr. Bujaud, a history and geography teacher at a neighboring school in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. When the news broke about Mr. Paty, he says, his phone rang off the hook for an entire day.

“At first, there were few details about what had happened. We heard it was a 40-something male. A history teacher. In Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. Everyone thought it was me.”

Then there was the dilemma of how to break the news to his sixth grade daughter, who was a student in one of Mr. Paty’s classes but did not see the cartoons. He decided to tell her that her teacher was a hero, like Jean Moulin during the French Resistance.

But internally, Mr. Bujaud was trying to reconcile his thoughts about how to teach sensitive content going forward. History teachers were the only ones within the French national education program mandated to teach moral and civic education. They had a responsibility to impart concepts like freedom of speech and laïcité to their students. But what was the threshold between developing critical thinking and pushing a debate too far?

“Of course we need to defend freedom of expression, but teachers are supposed to remain neutral and show restraint,” says Denis Ramond, a political scientist who has written extensively about satire and freedom of expression. He was also working as a junior high school French teacher at the time of Mr. Paty’s murder.

“Teaching freedom of expression works if you explore it in a historical context, but it gets tricky once you move into contemporary debate.”

In the week between when Mr. Paty showed the cartoons and when he was murdered, controversy had started brewing. Even if Mr. Chnina had failed to rally a significant number of Muslim parents, many were conflicted on whether Mr. Paty should have shown the cartoons or invited students to leave class. Soraya says her son told her the night before that Mr. Paty was planning to show the cartoons the following day.

“I told him, ‘We live in France. You go to school in France. Take this opportunity to learn everything you can.’ I was OK with it.”

But other Muslim parents resisted. In an emergency meeting between parents and the school principal, one mother said that the class was supposed to be on freedom of expression. If not all students were allowed to participate in the lesson, didn’t that defeat its purpose?

The cracks were equally beginning to show in the teachers lounge. Two wrote emails to the rest of the staff saying they didn’t agree with what Mr. Paty had done.

“[Our colleague] committed an act of discrimination,” wrote one teacher in an email published in the graphic novel “Crayon Noir” (“Black Pencil”) about the week before and the week after Mr. Paty’s death. “We should never send our students out of class, no matter how, just because they practice a certain religion or come from a certain background.”

The chaos sent teachers spiraling. It was a moment that could have broken their bond for good. And while around a third of teachers during Mr. Paty’s era have now left, in the aftermath of his death, they came together in their grief.

“After [he was murdered], the teachers who had been against Samuel immediately apologized; they obviously felt terrible,” says Coralie. “His murder created an instant solidarity between us. We all felt we had to continue to fight his fight.”

But the sense of trust between teachers and students was different. After all, it was a student who had spread the initial lie about what Mr. Paty had shown in class, and students who had pointed out Mr. Paty to his attacker.

The peer pressure at school meant that a majority of students – regardless of their faith – believed the rumors that Mr. Paty was Islamophobic and had acted out of malice. Those who felt otherwise were too scared to speak out. Most had seen the photo of Mr. Paty beheaded on social media, and one student had even encouraged others to “like” it. For teachers at Bois d’Aulne, these are the wounds that are taking the longest to heal.

“I have asked myself so many questions about this relationship of trust. Up until last year, some students still believed that the rumors about Paty were true,” says Mattias, an English teacher at Collège du Bois d’Aulne, joining Coralie at a café in Conflans. “For €300, would they single us out [to an attacker]? Could it be any of us? Where is this heading?”

Chantal Anglade wants to help teachers at Bois d’Aulne put these questions to rest. Ms. Anglade runs the French Organization for Terrorism Victims, and inside her Paris-area office, photos from her group sessions line the wall in a colorful collage. In one image, a dozen teachers and students from Bois d’Aulne sit in a semicircle, shoulders hunched, covered by masks leftover from the COVID-19 pandemic.

One month after Mr. Paty was attacked, Ms. Anglade reached out to staff at Bois d’Aulne, and for the past three years, she has been leading regular workshops with teachers and students who lived through Mr. Paty’s murder. The goal has been to encourage both sides to speak their minds, dissect their emotions, and eventually heal.

“It’s giving them permission to verbalize the facts and especially the rumor,” says Ms. Anglade. “Even recently, some students were still rejoicing in what happened to Mr. Paty and saying, ‘He deserved it.’ This was something that absolutely needed to be addressed, but not head-on.”

Ms. Anglade brings victims of other terrorist acts to each session to share their stories, in an attempt to help students and teachers learn from those who have been through similar trauma. She also calls teachers by their first names in front of students to remind them they’re human, too. In one exercise, each side wrote letters, detailing what they couldn’t yet say.

“You could see the tenderness and affection students had for their teachers, some of whom they’d seen break down in tears in class,” says Ms. Anglade. “They just wanted them to be OK. And that repairs something. It’s beautiful.”

In another activity, Ms. Anglade worked with students to explain why blasphemy was prohibited in Islam but allowed in France, and what that meant for teaching freedom of expression. Though Ms. Anglade insists that Muslim students did not express feelings of discrimination to her, she says the exercise went a long way toward building understanding among students of all faiths, as well as between students and teachers.

“French society’s view of Muslims is always negative. We’re radicalized, violent – a problem,” says Mounira Chatti, a professor at Université Bordeaux Montaigne who studies integration. “So it’s easy for Muslims to feel targeted when terrorist acts happen, and to get defensive.

“Young people absolutely need more education about different religions. That automatically builds tolerance. Ultimately, both sides need to take steps towards one another.” 

In the year following Mr. Paty’s murder, French filmmaker Christine Tournadre spent eight months at Bois d’Aulne filming the documentary “Le Collège de Monsieur Paty” (“Mr. Paty’s Junior High”) about the rebuilding process. That experience also helped teachers and students address their mutual mistrust. Often, Ms. Tournadre would ask them to speak their mind to the camera. Other times, they would chat together with the camera off. Now, when Coralie is in front of her students, she feels like she’s in a protective bubble.

“This whole experience has allowed us to ask questions, understand each other, and tell our side of the story,” says Coralie. She and Mattias say it was eye-opening to realize how much students were affected by having their friends implicated in Mr. Paty’s murder. “We realized, OK, we’re all human.”

“Now we have something to leave for the next generation of teachers who come here,” says Mattias. “We want to make sure the burden is as light as possible.”

But there was still the problem of the group of students who had pointed out Mr. Paty to his attacker. Right after he was murdered, none of the teachers knew much of anything, but as the days went by, they noticed that some students were consistently absent from class. Six in all.

“A colleague told me, ‘You know, one of your students was involved.’ It was like the whole world collapsed,” says Coralie. “It was like a second stabbing, one that was almost more painful than the first [of finding out about Samuel]. We give everything to our students, never thinking they’ll betray us. I couldn’t digest it.”

Coralie says she has only been able to truly process what happened and make peace with her students – who were between 13 and 15 years old at the time – when their trial concluded this past December.

There, the female student who told the initial lie was given an 18-month suspended prison sentence, while the student who initially took the bribe from Mr. Paty’s attacker received the harshest sentence of two years in prison.

Around a dozen teachers joined Mr. Paty’s family as plaintiffs in order to be able to attend the trial and see for themselves the motives of their former students – to know that when they took the money, the students didn’t intend for Mr. Paty to die.

It was also a way to come to terms with the fact that, while their pain was different from that of his family, ex-partner, and son, the teachers were victims, too.

“At first, they didn’t necessarily think they were victims. They thought, ‘Paty was the victim or the family is the victim,’” says Antoine Casubolo Ferro, the lawyer representing the teachers at the December trial. “But they needed to be recognized for what they’d suffered, too. What they went through was not negligible. Just because you don’t have physical wounds doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.

“It allowed them to trust in themselves again. It’s definitely been a huge part in their personal reconstruction.”

Teachers across France continue to fight for their right to teach freely and without fear. In early December, two months after the murder of the Arras teacher, a junior high school teacher in the Paris suburbs was accused of making racist comments and excluding Muslim students, after she showed the 17th-century painting “Diane and Actaeon,” which features women with their breasts exposed.

In March, a French senator put forth 38 recommendations to address the rise in pressure, threats, and attacks against teachers across the country.

For Bois d’Aulne, the support of other teachers and the broader community has been crucial. The year after Mr. Paty’s death, the Organization for History and Geography Teachers created the Samuel Paty Award. Now it’s in its third year, and junior high school students can compete for the prize by putting forth a project within the moral and civic education program that exemplifies the values Mr. Paty stood for.

“We’re trying to create more freedom at school and teach students how to live alongside one another better,” says Ms. Alazard, the organization’s president. “We didn’t want to be stuck in regret and grief. We were afraid Samuel Paty’s name would be forgotten.”

In Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, it’s almost impossible to forget what happened here three years ago. At a recent book signing for the graphic novel “Crayon Noir,” a local library was standing room only. Tears flowed among teachers, city council members, former students, parents, and residents.

“Samuel Paty was killed so he could be silenced,” says Maria Escribano, a city council member in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, after the book signing. “So we have to speak for him.”

Every year, City Hall organizes a memorial service in the town center in Mr. Paty’s honor, as a reminder to residents of the importance of keeping Mr. Paty’s memory alive. Laurent Brosse, the mayor of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, says his diverse community stuck together after Mr. Paty’s murder. When Muslim residents showed up for the one-year anniversary, they say they were met with gratitude for their presence.

“Some Muslims in our community didn’t go because they were scared [of a backlash], but we went because it was a way to show our mutual suffering,” says Soulaimane Chemlal, a local psychologist who lived on the same street where Mr. Paty was murdered. “We wanted to show our kids that what happened was extremely serious and went against any religious framework. We needed to show our solidarity.”

Each October, teachers and students at Bois d’Aulne lead their own commemoration on school grounds. While there has been discussion about changing the school’s name to Samuel Paty, teachers and students remain at odds.

But otherwise, there is strong unity. François, an English teacher who joined the school the year after Mr. Paty’s death, says that he was intimidated at first but has been impressed by the staff’s sense of togetherness. Now, he says, he sees Bois d’Aulne as a school “like any other.”

Today, a floor-to-ceiling image of Mr. Paty, bursting with color and light, hangs in the hallway outside his former classroom. After his death, teachers also planted a ginkgo tree next to the lunchroom in Mr. Paty’s name, to represent strength, hope, and resilience. Like the teachers’ relationship with their students, the tree only continues to grow and breathe new life into the school.

“Former students often write us messages to see how we’re doing, or we’ll see each other on the street and say hello,” says Coralie. “We don’t try to run away from what happened. It has united us forever.”