The Abandonment of Samuel Paty

Beheaded by jihadist terrorists, Samuel Paty should be remembered as a martyr of French culture, instead of being a subject of controversy.

From The European Conservative

By Hélène De Lauzun, PhD

A film in memory of the beheaded teacher opens the Cannes Film Festival. In France, the battle to preserve his memory is still far from won.

An unexpected film is screened outside of competition at the Cannes Film Festival this Wednesday, May 13th. Called L’Abandon (The Abandonment), it recounts the days leading up to the death of Samuel Paty, the history teacher who was beheaded on October 16, 2020, for showing his pupils cartoons of Muhammad as part of a lesson on freedom of expression.

The announcement of the film’s release came as a surprise, as it was important for the film’s team not to interfere with the work of the courts while the four men who assisted the murderer of the 47-year-old teacher and made his brutal assassination possible were being tried on appeal.

L’Abandon is part of the out-of-competition selection at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, where it is planned to be screened on Wednesday, May 13th—the date also chosen for its theatrical release. The film was shot in the summer of 2025 in utmost secrecy in order to avoid any form of pressure or media attacks, whether in support of or against the director, on a highly sensitive subject that has already given rise to much controversy. Contrary to what one might think in the land of Charlie Hebdo, the memory of Samuel Paty is by no means a given today, as evidenced by the tensions that accompanied, for example, the proposal to name the school where he taught after him.

In itself, the film’s title says it all: L’Abandon. The screenplay focuses on the eleven days during which the chain of events leading to his beheading by a Chechen terrorist began to accelerate. The teacher’s sister, Mickaëlle, who is fighting to honour Samuel’s memory, has devoted her energy since his death to bringing to light the truth and the collective responsibilities that made the murder possible. “From the very start, I sensed a willingness to listen and a desire to tell a true story,” she told the press after turning down several projects in which she “did not recognise her brother’s story.”

Director Vincent Garenq, who took on the subject in collaboration with her, specialises in bringing to the screen major court cases that have shaped public opinion in France. He was keen to conduct his own investigation and gather as many testimonies as possible to craft his cinematic narrative. As he wrote the script, he turned to her “to check” every detail and “ensure the accuracy of the facts,” says Mickaëlle Paty.

The task of reconstructing the events was made more difficult by the fact that none of the key figures in the case wished to speak directly. All are still traumatised. Garenq therefore had to rely on the trial transcripts. For the purposes of the screenplay, minor adjustments to the facts had to be made, but always with care to maintain overall consistency and respect the professor’s memory. A crucial question naturally arose for the director: should the infamous cartoons that led to Paty’s death be shown on screen or not? Garenq answered this question in the affirmative: “Samuel Paty died because of his choice to show them. To have omitted them would have been a betrayal.”

For the lead actor, the most difficult aspect was portraying Samuel Paty’s innocence right to the very end: the teacher obviously had no idea what was about to happen to him, unlike Antoine Reinartz, the actor chosen to play him. Before filming began, he shared a meal with Mickaëlle, who said she was immediately convinced by his ability to portray her brother.

Now that the film is complete, it is important to Mickaëlle Paty that it is used wisely. Upon watching the finished film, she confided that she felt as though she were “plunging into an ocean of despair”—so true, in her view, and as she wrote in the book dedicated to the tragedy, Le Cours de Monsieur Paty (Mr. Paty’s lesson), her brother’s death could have been prevented had the threats against him been taken seriously by the hierarchy of the French ministry of education. The director states that he is in talks with the ministry to ensure the film is now used as educational material.

The film’s subject matter should be uncontroversial. Yet even today, nearly six years after the events, upholding the memory of Samuel Paty is still not a matter of course for everyone. This is evidenced, for example, by the review of the film published by France’s leading left-wing newspaper, Libération. The daily paper lambasts a rewriting that it claims downplays the support Paty received from his colleagues and the desire to see him “blindly elevated to the status of a martyr.” The journalist argues that the history teacher was “almost abandoned by his own institution and by the justice system.” It’s all in the “almost.” The Huff Post, known for its unapologetically progressive left-wing cultural stance, takes issue with the choice of title, L’Abandon—which strikes them as dubious, even though it is clear that little of substance was done to halt the infernal machinery that was to lead to Paty’s beheading. The online media outlet even managed to uncover obscure links between the director of the film’s production company and Marine Le Pen during the 2022 campaign, which is enough to cast a suspicion of “opportunism and sensationalism” over the film. On the Right, Le Figaro, by contrast, believes that “the best of cinema” has been put at the service of the teacher’s memory.

On the official France Télévisions channel showing the trailer, comments have been disabled: proof, if any were needed, that the wound has still not healed.