Instead Florence was on her own for the next two weeks – it was the school holidays and she was unable to discuss Paty’s murder with her colleagues: “I didn’t know quite what to think the school’s leadership team were sending contradictory messages. “I would've liked to be a Parisian then it would've done me good to be there with all those people.” Back in Paris, people I’d worked with there told me they were going to go to a vigil of teachers in Place de la République ,” Florence continued. “I literally thought I was going to break down. “As soon as I found out what happened, I decided not to read the papers because it just hit too close to home,” she said. When Samuel Paty was murdered one year ago, Florence was sitting outside a café in Paris, where she had gone to attend a conference during the school holidays. Florence, secondary school history and geography teacher: ‘ Many of us teachers broke down ’. One year on, FRANCE 24 spoke to teachers and students who were shaken by Paty's murder. The gruesome killing sparked shock and outrage across France, reopening wounds inflicted by past Islamist attacks – starting with the January 2015 massacre of staff at Charlie Hebdo, the satirical weekly that published the cartoons shown by Paty in class. She told her father, untruthfully, that the school had disciplined her for having protested against a request by Paty that Muslim students identify themselves – a request the teacher never made. She had been suspended from school for truancy since the day before Paty had shown the cartoons, so was not present in the class. The pupil in question had lied to her father before he posted the video on YouTube and Facebook. He emphasised that they could choose not to look at the cartoons if they were offended. Paty was teaching the children about freedom of expression. He travelled from his home in Normandy to kill the teacher after watching a video posted by a pupil’s father who was angry that Paty had shown students images of the prophet of Islam in a civics class. The perpetrator was 18-year-old Abdoullakh Anzorov, a Russian refugee from Chechnya who was killed by police soon after the murder.Īnzorov had no connection with Paty or the school. On October 16, 2020, Samuel Paty, a history and geography teacher, was stabbed and beheaded near his school in the town of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, near Paris.
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