Samuel Paty taught a lesson on free expression using cartoons his own students had seen dozens of times online. A father's Facebook video, built on a story his daughter had invented, set in motion a killing that took four years of French courts to fully untangle.
Samuel Paty taught history, geography, and civic education at a middle school outside Paris, and on October 6, 2020, he gave a lesson on freedom of expression that he had reportedly given in some form before: he showed his class caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that had run in Charlie Hebdo, the same cartoons at the center of the massacre five years earlier, as an example of the kind of speech French law protects even when it gives deep offense. He was forty seven years old. Ten days later, on October 16, 2020, he was beheaded on a street in Éragny-sur-Oise, near the school where he taught in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, by an eighteen year old Chechen refugee named Abdoullakh Anzorov, who was shot dead by police minutes afterward.
What set the killing in motion was not the lesson itself but an account of it that turned out to be false. A thirteen year old student in Paty's class, who was not actually present that day, told her father, Brahim Chnina, that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave the room before showing the images and had shown pornography alongside them. Chnina posted videos on Facebook and YouTube naming the school and the teacher and demanding his suspension. He was joined in the campaign by Abdelhakim Sefrioui, a Franco-Moroccan activist who filmed further videos outside the school calling Paty "a thug" and describing the lesson as "irresponsible and aggressive." Chnina spoke with Anzorov nine times over four days after posting his videos, according to French investigators. The girl at the center of it later admitted, in March 2021, that she had never been in the classroom and had invented the story to placate her father.
France prosecuted the case in two separate proceedings, sorted by age. A closed juvenile trial in Paris concluded on December 8, 2023, convicting six teenagers. Five of them, aged fourteen and fifteen at the time of the killing, were found to have pointed Paty out to Anzorov for payment, reportedly a few hundred euros, and received suspended sentences of fourteen to eighteen months, except for one who received two years with six months served under electronic monitoring. The thirteen year old whose fabricated account had started the campaign was convicted separately of false denunciation and given an eighteen month suspended sentence with probation. Lawyers for the teenagers argued afterward that their clients had believed Paty might be publicly shamed or flagged on social media, not killed.
Paty was posthumously awarded France's Legion of Honor at a national memorial held at the Sorbonne five days after his death, with President Emmanuel Macron presiding. Sefrioui's organization, a pro-Hamas group he had founded in 2004, was dissolved by the French government within days of the killing. The case became, alongside the Charlie Hebdo massacre five years earlier, one of the two events French commentators return to most often when discussing the country's particular and often misunderstood relationship to secularism, blasphemy, and the classroom.
The story that got a teacher killed began with a student who was not in the room, describing a lesson that never happened the way she described it.
What distinguishes Paty's case from many of the others gathered in this series is the ordinariness of the provocation. He was not a satirist courting controversy, a blogger arguing for secularism, or a dissident publishing forbidden material. He was a civil servant teaching a state-mandated curriculum on free expression, using material that had already circulated publicly for years, to a class of young teenagers. The chain of consequence that followed, from a fabricated classroom account to a Facebook campaign to nine phone calls to a beheading on a suburban street, has since become a case study cited by French education officials on the particular vulnerability of teachers caught between curricular obligations and the online amplification of parental grievance.
The oldest defendants convicted in December 2024 have appealed. As of this writing, no date has been confirmed for that appeal to be heard, leaving the case, more than five years after Paty's death, still technically open in French courts.
Abdelhakim Sefrioui, the activist who joined Chnina's campaign against Paty, had founded his own organization, the Collectif Cheikh Yassine, in 2004, named for the assassinated founder of Hamas, and the group was formally dissolved by the French government within days of the killing, one of a wave of organizational shutdowns that followed. The killing forced a broader reckoning inside France's education ministry over how teachers delivering the country's mandated curriculum on secularism and free expression, a curriculum that predates the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack by years, should be protected against exactly the kind of online campaign that preceded Paty's death, in which a single parent's Facebook video could travel from a middle school WhatsApp group to a teenager willing to carry out a killing within roughly a week. Teachers' unions have since pushed, with mixed success, for clearer institutional backing when a lesson plan draws exactly the sort of backlash Paty's did.