The “impossible mourning” of Samuel Paty’s family

Île de la Cité, 1:47 p.m. A little boy in a down jacket enters the major trial room of the courthouse. With his mother, he sits in the first row, on the left. M^e Francis Szpiner approaches, smiles and shakes his hand. This child is Gabriel, nine and a half years old, the only son of Samuel Paty, a history and geography professor murdered by an Islamist terrorist as he left his college in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine (Yvelines) on October 16, 2020. Now a ward of the nation, Gabriel came to attend the afternoon devoted to the hearing of members of his family, which concludes the first week of the trial for the assassination of his father. « He is the one who wanted to be here, he has always been extremely demanding of explanations, since day one. It makes sense that he's here »explains his mother.

In front of him his grandmother, his mother, his two aunts, his two cousins ​​parade at the bar – his grandfather is absent due to a « bad…