Samuel Paty, victim of our fears

Fear. These will be the foundations of fear. When, in November, the trial for the assassination of Samuel Paty begins, the judges will not only have to determine the responsibilities of each party, but also and perhaps above all explore the tangle of fears and cowardice which allowed the jihadist Abdoullakh Anzorov, 18, to execute a teacher as he left his establishment, on October 16, 2020. This is the thought that harpoons the mind as we close Mr. Paty’s Coursea story that his sister, Mickaëlle Paty, published on October 16, four years to the day after the attack in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine (Yvelines), of which “Le Monde des livres” published large extracts. This text, which retraces the eleven days between Samuel Paty’s course on freedom of expression and the moment he was beheaded by an Islamist terrorist, describes a society consumed by fear.

The fear that arises here is first and foremost that of Paty himself. In poignant passages, his sister notes that the history and geography professor, victim of a gigantic slander campaign, took the threat seriously. In the absence of a police escort, he relied on his colleagues to accompany him to the outskirts of his home, hooded with a sweatshirt. As a weapon, he kept in his backpack the paltry little hammer that his father had given him when he left home to study in Lyon.

A thick loneliness

But Samuel Paty was above all afraid of the fear of others. He was one of those beings who fear cowardice above all else. During these days which led him to death, he will have had more than one opportunity to see it around him, enveloping many consciousnesses, filling so many silences. Mr. Paty’s Course details these evasions which will have plunged the teacher into a solitude whose depth we are only beginning to measure.

From the start of the manhunt to which he fell prey, Mickaëlle Paty goes so far as to assert, the people and institutions who should have defended him were above all preoccupied by a desire to avoid scandal – in the administrative language, we prefer to evoke the “risk of media coverage which could complicate the situation”. Hence this aberration: very quickly, the pretext of the cabal revealed itself to be a pure lie (the student who said she had been forced to look at a caricature of Mohammed published in Charlie Hebdo had not attended the course); However, this essential fact has been too often overlooked. To read Mickaëlle Paty, everything would have happened as if the most important thing, in the eyes of the rectorate, but also of the “secularism referent”was not to “crunch” the accusers. To insist that the situation was calming down: “We are betting that, if no one talks about it anymore, things will eventually settle down”she summarizes.

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