Samuel Paty, the middle school history teacher who was beheaded for having shown his students caricatures of the prophet Muhammad during a lesson on free expression, was posthumously granted France’s highest award, the Légion d’Honneur, and commemorated in a national ceremony at the Sorbonne University in Paris on Wednesday, reports The Washington Post.
His gruesome killing in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine has revived the nation’s horror at the 2015 attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo. And just as France stood by the satirical newspaper then, it is rallying around its teachers.
At the ceremony in Paris, President Emmanuel Macron called Paty “the face of the Republic,” eulogizing a man whose “apartment was a library” and whose “greatest gifts were books".
“We all have, in our hearts, in our memories a teacher who changed the course of our existence. You know, this teacher who taught us to read, to count, to have confidence in ourselves. This teacher who not only passed on knowledge to us, but opened a path for us.”
“Samuel Paty was one of those,” Macron said, “one of those teachers who will not be forgotten, of these enthusiasts capable of spending nights learning history, a teacher who questioned himself a thousand times, as he did for a course on freedom of expression and freedom of conscience that he had been preparing since July.”
Whereas Charlie Hebdo relishes causing offense in its pursuit of free speech, Paty — according to the accounts of those who knew him — did not.
He attended training courses at Paris’s Arab Institute to better understand his students. He organized an Arab music concert to honor their culture.
“He had read the Quran and respected his students, regardless of their beliefs,” Macron said. “He was interested in Muslim civilization.”
And when he introduced the topic of the controversial cartoons in class, he acknowledged that it might be hurtful to Muslim students and offered them a chance to look away.
On Wednesday, Jean-François Ricard, France’s anti-terror prosecutor, provided a clearer picture of how Paty was targeted and killed.