Several historian colleagues, myself included, have received death threats over the years. Usually these threats are folkloristic. Occasionally they sound genuine enough that the police dispatches bodyguards.

Could a historian be killed for their ideas? I have wondered about this while writing some of my texts, but deep down I have always known the answer: of course, they can. History has to do with memory, and memory has to do with identity. Identity has become a demand for dignity and it fuels a politics of resentment. History does nothing else but reflect the violence of the contemporary world.

Paris and Nice

Samuel Paty was a history teacher at a French high school in the Paris suburbs. At the beginning of October 2020, he endeavored to make sense of the world by discussing current events in their historical context. The current event the class debated about was the trial of the terrorists who attacked Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical magazine that specializes among other things in ridiculing religion (originally Catholicism, now rather Islam.)

In this attack, that took place in 2015, two French terrorists who identified with a branch of Al-Qaeda after growing up in a gravely dysfunctional family of Algerian descent, gunned down twelve members of the redaction committee. The weekly was in terminal decline and barely sold 15,000 copies per issue before the attack. It sold one million the week after.

What so incensed the murderers was that Charlie published caricatures of the prophet Muhammad naked. Samuel Paty was aware of the explosive nature of such a provocation, and he gave his Muslim students a chance to step out before showing the caricatures to the class for pedagogical purposes.

Despite these precautions, the father of a student started a harassing campaign against him that circulated on social media. The father filed a police complaint against the teacher for “promoting pornography” and demanded his resignation. Samuel Paty had to defend himself in front of the school director and must have been relieved when class was over on Friday afternoon, 16 October 2020, and the fall vacation began.

But the French son of Chechnyan refugees, who had arrived in France at the age of six in 2008 and had heard of the controversy on social media, had decided to “avenge the prophet.” He beheaded Samuel Paty outside the school and proclaimed his allegiance to ISIS before being shot dead by the police.

Ever since the attack, the French left has been soul-searching, and has understandably been under attack by conservatives and extreme right alike. Was it wrong to be anti-racist and to accept immigrants and refugees? Had it been blinded by an idealism too generous for this world?

This painful questioning was not helped when another terrorist attack happened barely two weeks later, on 29 October 2020. A young Tunisian crossed the Mediterranean Sea, passed himself off as a refugee, and arrived in Nice on the evening of 28 October, only to slash the throat of three people in the basilica of Notre-Dame the next morning.

Anyone who has experienced it can testify that there is something especially painful about a terror attack that happens in one’s country, and even more when it is in one’s hometown. Samuel Paty was teaching history, my profession, in my country. Nice is my hometown. One of the three victims died in my favorite café after staggering out of the church.