Samuel Paty was killed on October 16th

IN CASE ANYONE found his lessons boring—though it was hard to think that even teenagers would be turned off by history, geography or moral and civic education—Samuel Paty liked to pep them up. Art was a good way to do it. For the centenary of the Armistice in November 2018 he took over the art room, spread a white sheet on the floor, and picked seven pupils from troisième, all 14 or 15, to make a splattering mess on it with paint, to represent the war. One of them lay sprawled on it as a dead soldier, while the others, in black, knelt round. Another played a mother reading a letter from her son at the front. A third was a soldier made mad by the fighting, repeating words over and over. At the end they held a minute’s silence. The performance was moving, and made the children think.

The next year he got his class to illustrate “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité”. They copied each other a bit. Those who drew “Equality” mostly showed it as a body or a face with two equal halves, boy and girl, or brown and white. (The school, the Collège du Bois d’Aulne in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, north-west of Paris, had a diverse intake of races and religions, though the suburb itself was largely white and middle-class: small detached houses, well-trimmed hedges, tree-lined streets.) Those who drew “Fraternity” based their pictures on a globe, with white and brown hands cradling it into the shape of a heart. “Liberty” proved hardest for them. Quite a few drew the Statue of Liberty combined with the tricolore, and one depicted an open book winged like an angel. The drawing that stood out, when he pegged them up and proudly photographed them for the school website, was a bald staring head with sticking-out ears and, instead of a mouth, a cage.

This sort of thing not only livened up the lessons but also made the pupils think him sympa, even exciting, the teacher they hoped they would get when they changed years. He didn’t look the sort: a shy slight figure with glasses, living in a second-floor flat in an even quieter place, Éragny, with his five-year-old son. (He had moved to the town and to Bois d’Aulne, after a succession of placements in Seine-et-Marne, five years before, when his partner had to transfer for work, but then the relationship had crumbled.) His out-of-school life was mostly tennis, not competitive, just social at the local club, several times a week. Otherwise he kept himself to himself, not seeing much of the neighbours except when he picked up his bread on his walk back from school.

In class, though, he taught with passionate energy, especially on Athenian democracy and the French revolution. He was strict with his pupils, but he cared about them, and had regularly phoned their homes during lockdown to check they were OK (as well as to see where their homework was). Since many were Muslim, he went for a day-course last November at the Institut du Monde Arabe to get a little more into their world. Afterwards he wanted to invite its staff to give a presentation at the school, comparing the music of the Maghreb with that of the medieval French trouvères. Teaching was about opening minds; his, too.

When it came to teaching free speech as part of the national curriculum, he liked to show his quatrième class two caricatures from the magazine Charlie Hebdo which, in January 2015, had been attacked by murdering Islamists. He had done so for several years; this year it had added edge, with the trial of the accomplices going on. The caricatures were, first, Muhammad holding a “Je Suis Charlie” sign, blasphemous to Muslims merely for giving him a face. Most pupils might be unimpressed with that, but the second caricature was clearly rude: Muhammad on all fours, naked, with a star emerging from his backside and the caption “A star is born!”.

Once his pupils had seen the drawings he would explain that French law protected them, as part of the liberty enshrined in the Republic. Then they would debate why and whether it should, not angrily—he insisted on that—but reasonably, carefully marshalling their arguments. Being aware, though, that the caricatures were strong stuff for many 13-year-olds, especially the Muslim children, he warned his pupils at the start that they could look away if they thought they might be offended. He had to be careful, as it was against the law to identify anyone by their religion; the warning had to be general. But he had done all this before, and the result had been a mutually respectful conversation.

This time the backlash was furious. A number of Muslim parents objected, and one filed a complaint to the police. He also posted a video on Facebook to mobilise others, identifying who the teacher was and calling him a voyou, a thug: “He should no longer teach our children. He should go and educate himself.” A known Islamist agitator, Abdelhakim Sefrioui, came to the school and made a video decrying “irresponsible and aggressive behaviour”. The mobiliser’s daughter, Zaina, said the prof wanted to attack Islam, and had done so that day by asking Muslims specifically to raise their hands and then, if they liked, to leave.

That was lies, as he told the police. Zaina had not even been in the class. But at the first claim that the teacher of histoire-géo was an Islamophobe the principal called him in, and her superiors requested a visit by an inspector from the local education authority. They, like the police, supported him, and said he had followed correct classroom procedure. He would not face disciplinary action. The moral and legal weight of the French state was on his side, and he felt confident enough, as well as angry enough, to file a defamation complaint against the parent who had abused him.

He also felt threatened, though. The level of hate in the attacks was quite new, and it had spread wide, far beyond Conflans. Now he kept his head down in the corridors, and was noticeably out of sorts. His walk home from school, a short stroll through a wood, no longer felt safe, so he took the more open, still quiet, still leafy streets. As he set off for home on the 16th he had just finished teaching a class of petits sixièmes about prehistory, a relatively calm subject. The All Saints’ break was about to start, a chance to let things cool down a bit. The tennis court beckoned. He wished his pupils, and they wished him, “Bonnes vacances.” ■