"For you, Samuel, and for all the teachers," says a sign at the entrance to the Conflans-Sainte-Honorine high schoolBERTRAND GUAY / AFP
The last class of third year of high school was dedicated to talking about inequalities and World War II, some students recall.
Samuel Paty, a professor at the Collège du Bois-D'Aulne in Conflants-Sainte-Honorine, a municipality of 35,000 inhabitants northwest of Paris, was like that.
It connected different themes.
He made history and geography interesting, the subjects he taught, as well as moral and civic education.
“He was someone smiling and cheerful, close to the students and proud of them.
He always encouraged us to do better, ”said 14-year-old Elinor Do Nascimento yesterday.
In France, classes stop for two weeks in mid-autumn, the All Saints holidays.
Friday October 16 was a farewell day, see you next time.
"He wished us a good holiday and told us that we would see each other when we returned from classes," explains Do Nascimento.
They never saw him again.
A few hours later, the news began to circulate on social networks and the adolescents suffered a
shock
, and a tragic lesson from the world that awaits them, which they will never forget.
Monsieur
Paty, the professor of
histoire-géo
, had died.
A man armed with a 12-inch knife appeared at the school in the middle of the afternoon.
First, he asked the students about the teacher.
Then he followed him home.
He attacked him with the knife.
He beheaded him.
He photographed the beheaded corpse and uploaded the image to the social network Twitter with a message "in the name of Allah, the all merciful" and addressed to "Macron, the leader of the infidels."
"I have executed one of your hellhounds who have dared to lower Muhammad," it said.
The police followed him.
He stood up to them.
They shot him and he died.
Since the attack on a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012, it has suffered 54 acts of Islamist terrorism, with a balance of 290 deaths, according to a study by the Fondapol institute.
The beheading on Friday is not the first murder with this method, but it is the first to hit the heart of the Republic, which is the school.
For the first time, the victim is a teacher who did - and with excellence, according to the testimonies collected at Conflans-Sainte-Honorine - his job: educating future adult citizens.
Samuel Paty was what the early 20th century writer Charles Péguy called the “black hussars”, the soldiers with chalk and blackboard in charge of bringing to all corners of the nation the values of
liberté, égalité, fraternité
, inscribed on the façade of this and of all the schools of the Republic.
Paty —47 years old and father of a son— was one of these guys, educators in a space, the school, that many in France see more and more as the first front against sectarian intoxication.
Being a professor of history and geography is no small thing in this country.
He is the one who exposes to students from the most diverse origins, from different religions (or without religion) and from different social media what has done and undone to this country, what unites and divides it, its glories and its traumas.
One of the recent traumas was the terrorist attacks of January 2015, which have been on trial in Paris since September.
The attack on the satirical weekly
Charlie Hebdo
- which had published cartoons of Muhammad and did not hold back from the ridicule of any religion - was an electroshock for French society: in France, in the 21st century, you could die for publishing drawings.
All of this is what Paty was trying to explain to fourth-year 13-year-olds in a class that had a disastrous epilogue at the beginning of October.
Confusing and contradictory versions circulated.
The teacher was said to have asked the Muslim students to raise their hands, and then he would have invited them to leave.
In fact, he said that whoever did not want to look at the cartoons of the prophet of Islam that he was going to show could close his eyes, look away or leave the classroom.
A father protested, and activated a furious campaign on social media.
He wrote messages in which he insulted her and accused her of spreading pornography.
He went in person to the school to complain.
He asked for his expulsion from the center.
He recorded a video that went viral in radical Islamist circles.
He filed a complaint with the police station.
The police detained him for questioning, along with eight other people, including four relatives of the terrorist, a Chechen born in Moscow in 2002 who lived legally in Évreux, 80 kilometers from Conflans-Sainte-Honorine as a refugee.
He was not a student at the school.
In front of the Collège du Bois-D'Aulne - a school surrounded by sports fields in a middle-class residential neighborhood - dozens of parents, students and neighbors came throughout the day to pay tribute to the teacher. Among the assistants, many teachers. “It happened in Conflans, but it could have happened anywhere in France,” said Jeanine Vinouze, a retired director of another school in the city and a neighbor of the neighborhood. As he spoke, his voice, his hands, his legs shook. Some fear self-censorship among educators, a debate similar to the one that affected the press after the 2015 attacks. Claire Guyomarch, a primary school teacher at another school, pointed out another concern: the lack of control of parents - not young people - in the social networks. “You cannot say anything. We have habitual problems of defamation, parents who propose to hit the teacher when what they do not like. Nothing ever happens afterwards. Now we have a dead man, ”says Guyomarch. Today in France - five years after the "
Je suis Charlie
" in solidarity with
Charlie Hebdo
- another motto has been born: "
Je suis prof
". "I am a teacher."