The death of a 16-year-old high school student, stabbed to death at the end of a town dance, is a tragedy. Thomas, captain of the local junior rugby team and described as cheerful and endearing by those close to him, died while being transferred to hospital after being stabbed during a violent rampage that left eight people injured on the night of November 18 in Crépol, a town in southeastern France. The strong emotion aroused by this murder is legitimate.
What isn’t, however, is the deluge of hateful messages on far-right social media, followed by unbridled political exploitation that has led to scenes not seen since the 1970s: a gathering, on November 25 and 26, of dozens of hooded militants, some armed with baseball bats. They came from several regions to clash with young people from the working-class Monnaie neighborhood in the town of Romans-sur-Isère, where some of the suspects linked to the Crépol tragedy live.
These unacceptable militia-style acts did not come from nowhere. The day after the murder, as investigators struggled to piece together the sequence of events, understand the motives and identify the perpetrators, far-right politician Marine Le Pen denounced an “organized attack” and blamed “armed militias who carry out raids,” while Eric Zemmour, another far-right figure, spoke of a “war of civilization.” Social media and far-right media outlets orchestrated a campaign calling directly for revenge and hatred, hammering home messages linking Thomas’s death to immigration, and driving a wedge between a romanticized vision of French towns and an ostracizing portrayal of poor French suburbs.
Heal wounds
Never mind that the scenario of a premeditated punitive attack against “whites,” as described by certain witnesses, was contradicted by certain statements describing a futile altercation that degenerated into extreme violence. Never mind that the main suspect was born in Romans and is of French nationality. Never mind that he was not physically recognized by the witness who pointed him out in a photo. The indecent rush from right-wing and far-right media to publish the first names of the nine young people under investigation merely reflects Le Pen’s vitriolic insinuations, neglecting their status as French citizens and linking them to her obsession with immigration.
The investigation must not only identify those responsible for the tragedy but also take into account the context, which obviously does not exclude rivalry between young people who, although they know each other through their schooling and rub shoulders, live in worlds that rarely mix. At the same time, we cannot ignore the broader trend toward the normalization of violence, the ethnicization of social relations and the concentration of the poorest populations in the same neighborhoods, nor the existence of racial prejudice in all walks of life.
But it should be one of the main tasks of political leaders in France – a country still resilient despite several shocks such as terrorist attacks, civil unrest, and the pandemic – to heal wounds rather than pour salt on them, to devise remedies rather than designate scapegoats, to support justice rather than encourage vengeance and to call for respect and decency rather than stirring up fear and anger.
Source : Le Monde
