"On October 16, 2020 at 4:54 pm, in the person of Samuel Paty, Islamist terrorism reached the school, the beating heart of the Republic. Samuel Paty was not a symbol, he was not a martyr for any cause. He had not chosen to die in defense of any principle whatsoever. But, through him, much of what we are as a society was lost. This Republic of teachers and professors, of which all citizens are heirs and of which Samuel Paty was the embodiment, begins with freedom of expression, which is nothing without education offered to all..."

It was with these rallying words that, on Monday, December 16, the two representatives of the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor's Office (PNAT), Marine Valentin and Nicolas Braconnay, opened with their indictment, against the eight defendants on trial for the murder of history-geography teacher Paty, decapitated a few meters from his college in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, a northwestern Paris suburb, by an 18-year-old Chechen jihadist, Abdoullakh Anzorov.

While this attack "fractured our society," the two prosecutors know that the expectations of public opinion, and even more so those of the plaintiffs, sometimes clash with the legal reality of a case. "It's possible that what we're going to say won't completely match their expectations," they warned. Indeed, in light of the six weeks of debate that have elapsed since the opening of the trial, prosecutors requested that the charges against half of the accused be downgraded.

You have 83.16% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.