“The board of directors of the Le Bois d’Aulne college in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine voted to change the name of the establishment to the Samuel Paty college,” announced Monday evening on the social network X the mayor of this city in the Paris region, Laurent Brosse (right), “A strong symbol almost four years after the assassination of Samuel Paty.”
Samuel Paty, a 47-year-old history and geography teacher, was stabbed and then beheaded by Abdoullakh A., a Russian refugee of Chechen origin, on October 16, 2020. The 18-year-old, a radicalized Muslim, accused him of showing caricatures of Muhammad in class. Before being killed by the police, he had claimed responsibility for his actions, congratulating himself on having “avenged the prophet.”
The establishment will not be able to be renamed, however, until this decision has been voted on by the city council of this city as well as by the departmental council of Yvelines (a community that is part of the Paris region). “It is essential to honor the memory of Samuel Paty, it was a wish of the family, and to fight against obscurantism,” said Corinne Grootaert, president of the FCPE (a parents’ association known in France) of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. “I would like us to be able to hear the children,” however qualified this mother of a student, affirming that they are the “great forgotten” since the assassination of their teacher.
In April 2022, ten members of Samuel Paty’s family filed a complaint against the administration, accusing it of failing to protect the professor. A judicial investigation was opened by the Paris prosecutor’s office for failure to assist a person in danger and failure to prevent a crime.
In this case, six former students of the establishment, aged 13 to 15 at the time of the assassination, have already been sentenced to terms ranging from 14 months in prison, suspended, to six months in prison – to be served under electronic monitoring – on 8 December 2023 for their involvement in the assassination.
The trial of eight adults is also scheduled in this case before the special assize court of Paris, from November 12 to December 20. The attack took place in a context of high terrorist threat in France. The emotion provoked at the time by this crime was rekindled in France by the assassination, on October 23, 2023, of another teacher, Dominique Bernard, killed in Arras, in the north of the country, by a young Islamist.
