"Some people will believe me, others won't. Some will doubt my sincerity and talk about taqiya [a strategy of concealment sometimes ascribed to jihadists]. But I am ready to accept that, these are the consequences of my actions..." Othman Garrido was fully aware of how society viewed men like him. How could a jihadist accused of participating in several beheadings in Syria truly have been deradicalized?

He described this transformation at length on Friday, September 18, on the fifth day of his trial before the Paris special criminal court. During the six years he spent in French prisons, he said, he discovered "the humanities" – Charles Baudelaire, Victor Hugo and Alfred de Musset. "You discover emotions, sadness, love. Hugo is about reaching out to others, a new vision of life," he said of his reading. He also earned a bachelor's degree and a vocational certificate in sales: "Every time I get a diploma, I feel a very strange, new kind of satisfaction... Something entirely different."

Garrido is not like other jihadists. Born in southern Montpellier to a highly radicalized family, he was barely schooled, shuttled between France and Morocco by a converted, Islamist father who taught him only adoration for Allah and hatred for non-believers. "As a child, when I saw a bearded man, he was a friend; a clean-shaven man was an enemy. That's just how it was, that's what I learned. Even now, my instinct is the same: If I see a skinhead with a beard, he's a friend," he said with a quick smile.