Murder of Samuel Paty

Samuel Paty was a French history and geography teacher, who was beheaded near his school in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, a suburb northwest of Paris. Some days earlier, during a lesson on freedom of expression, he had shown caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad from the magazine Charlie Hebdo, offering Muslim students the chance to leave the room. A false account of the lesson spread online, and a campaign against him was taken up by a parent and an activist. The attacker, an eighteen-year-old of Chechen origin, was shot dead by police. The murder prompted a national outpouring of grief and a national tribute, and accomplices were later tried and convicted. It renewed debate about secularism, extremism and teaching.

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