Schools from all over France pay homage this Friday to Professor Samuel Paty, whose murder for a jihadist will be a year tomorrow.
The tribute will have different ways based on the decisions of the pedagogical teams and according to the age of the groups of students, from keeping a minute of silence until the projection of documentaries or group discussions.
“The centers are freedom to organize” the tribute, explained yesterday the Minister of Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, who warned that “any disturbance will be punished.”
There will also be a ceremony at the Bois D’Aulne Institute, in the town of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine (periphery of Paris) where Paty taught.
At Villeneuve-d’Ascq (North), 15-year-old students from Liceum Raymond-Queneau, exchanged impressions for an hour around freedom of expression, during a moral and civic education course.
“What is freedom of expression for you? Do you feel free to express yourself in everyday life without hurting others? Are we entitled to blasphemar?”, Asks Anne-Sophie Branque, Professor of History and Geography.
“Samuel Paty had given a class on how to talk about the prophet,” says Chaymae, a student of the class.
“No, he gave a class about freedom of expression taking as an example the cartoons of Charlie Hepdo,” the teacher responds.
“Beware of information, especially, we should not mix things, we have educational freedom in our courses. Samuel Paty gave classes without offending the other.”
It is “extremely difficult” to explain to children what happened on October 16, 2020, but “it is important to tell you the truth,” said French Minister of Education Frédérique Vidal, on Radio Franceinfo.
The teacher’s family will meet tomorrow, Saturday, anniversary of the murder, with President Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister Jean Castex.
Professor of Geography and History, Paty was decapitated after a campaign on social networks against him for having shown Muhammad cartoons in a class on secularism.
The author, Abdullakh Anzorov, an 18-year-old chechen refugee, was killed shortly after by the police.
The murder, occurred during the trial by the 2015 attack against Charlie Hebdo magazine (which had once again published the polemic cartoons of Muhammad) submerged again to France in the spectrum of terrorism and converted to the teacher in a martyr of
secularism.
Paty received a national tribute at the University of Sorbonne, headed by President Macron, who gave him a speech.
Fifteen people are detained or under judicial investigation, declared secret, for alleged collaboration in different degree in the murder, among which the father of a student and a well-known Islamist militant, considered responsible for the campaign by networks
