Samuel Paty was a 47-year-old French history, geography, and civics teacher who was murdered and beheaded on October 16, 2020, outside his school in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, a suburb northwest of Paris.... But on October 16, 2020, an eighteen-year-old Islamist waited outside a middle school near Paris and offered students money to identify their history teacher. When Samuel Paty emerged, they pointed him out. Minutes later, Paty was beheaded in the street because he had taught a lesson about freedom of expression. . . . . Samuel Paty was forty-seven years old. He taught history, geography, and civics at the Collège du Bois d’Aulne in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. During a lesson on free speech, Paty discussed the 2015 terrorist attack against the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Islamist gunmen had murdered twelve people after the magazine published caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. Paty showed his students some of those cartoons. He understood that Muslim students might consider the images offensive. He warned the class beforehand and allowed anyone who did not wish to see them to look away or briefly step outside. He was not demanding that his students approve of the drawings. He was teaching them why a free society permits expression that citizens may consider offensive, blasphemous, or cruel. One student was absent that day. Later, when her father asked why she had been suspended from school, the thirteen-year-old invented a story. She claimed Paty had ordered Muslim students from the classroom before displaying a degrading image of Prophet Muhammad. She said that she had objected and been punished for it. None of that was true. But her father, Brahim Chnina, believed her. He published videos accusing Paty of discriminating against Muslims. He identified the teacher and named his school. He demanded that Paty be fired. Abdelhakim Sefrioui, an Islamist activist, joined the campaign. The accusations spread across social media. Paty became the subject of denunciations, threats, and manufactured outrage. A classroom disagreement that had never happened was transformed into proof that Islam was under attack. The lie eventually reached Abdoullakh Anzorov, an 18-year-old Chechen refugee who lived many miles away. He had no child at the school. He possessed no firsthand knowledge of what had occurred. He did not need any. The accusation was enough. On October 16, Anzorov traveled to Conflans-Sainte-Honorine armed with a knife. Unable to recognize Paty, he recruited students outside the school to identify him. Then he followed the teacher and murdered him. The killer posted a photograph of his crime online along with a message boasting that he had avenged Prophet Muhammad. Police confronted and killed him minutes later. #archaeohistories