Four years after history-geography high school teacher Samuel Paty was assassinated by a radicalized 18-year-old Chechen assailant, on October 16, 2020, the time for the major trial has come. The defendants are eight adults, who were, to varying degrees, involved in the deadly chain of events that led to the teacher being beheaded as he left his school in the town of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, in the Paris region. Starting on Monday, November 4, they are standing trial before the Paris special criminal court.

The courts have already ruled, albeit only partially, on certain responsibilities involved in the chain of events that led to this terrorist attack. At the end of a trial held behind closed doors, as required by the law concerning minors, six former middle school students, who were aged between 13 and 15 at the time of the events, were sentenced by the juvenile court on December 8, 2023, to penalties ranging from a suspended sentence of 14 months to a six-month prison sentence. Five of them were found guilty of "criminal conspiracy to prepare aggravated violence," for having helped the terrorist identify the teacher outside his school, in exchange for a few banknotes.

The sixth defendant, the youngest, who was 13 at the time of the attack, was the middle schooler who initiated the tragedy, the first cog in the machine that led to the attack. She had lied to her parents to justify a two-day suspension for disciplinary reasons, unrelated to Paty, and thereby laid the trap that took the teacher's life. On October 7, 2020, the teenager told her father that she had been kicked out of class for having stood up to her teacher the day before, because, she had said, he had asked Muslim students to leave the room before projecting images depicting the prophet Muhammad naked in class. There were two lies.

The October 6 class had been entitled "Dilemma situation: To be or not to be Charlie. A definition of freedom," referring to Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine struck by a terrorist attack in 2015. Paty had conducted this exercise in class every year, without it ever provoking the slightest incident, and hadn't asked anyone to leave the room. He had simply suggested that any pupils who wished to look away while the caricatures of the prophet were projected could do so. What's more, the girl had not even been present that day: She had called in sick. At the trial, she was sentenced to 18 months' probation for "slanderous denunciation."

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