Macron appears helpless to stop France’s descent into political violence

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There are countless conflicting versions of what happened on a late November night in the village of Crépol, nestled between Lyon and Marseille in southwest France’s Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, where a 16-year-old white teenager named Thomas was stabbed to death at a local dance.

The truth may never be known about what exactly led to the violent incident, which has left all of France in shock and has since monopolized the attention of the French political class. But the truth has become collateral damage amid the polarized debate that has erupted.

Amid an ongoing police investigation, talking heads on cable news have warned of “civil war” breaking out over the stabbing death of young Thomas, a local rugby captain. Far-right politicians have blamed the attack on “anti-white racism” by immigrant youth from a neighbouring town. They have insinuated that if such horror can happen in Crépol, a tiny community of 500 far from the violent Paris suburbs, it can happen anywhere in France.

Stirring up such fears is par for the course for the French far-right. But the clouds surrounding the Crépol incident have made it particular fodder for conspiracy theorists and their apologists on France’s increasingly influential right-wing cable outlets, including CNews and BFM-TV.

They have accused members of President Emmanuel Macron’s government of trying to cover up the truth to avoid being accused by their left-wing opponents of seeking to stigmatize Black and Arab youth. The right-wing author of La France Orange Mécanique (Clockwork Orange France), a 2013 book predicting France’s inevitable descent into violence, is suddenly a sought-after TV guest.

Thomas’s death has also sparked calls for vigilante justice by neo-Nazi gangs. The members of one such group, baseball bats in hand, held a march through the streets of a multiethnic neighbourhood in Romans-sur-Isère, where the nine youths arrested in connection with the stabbing of Thomas are believed to live. Authorities intervened to ban further marches.

On Wednesday, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin issued a decree to dissolve the Martel Division, the group that organized the Romans-sur-Isère march, stating it “privileges and assumes in a recurrent manner a discourse … that engages its members to lead, through violence, a combat against antifas and immigrants or presumed Muslims, and promotes violence to favour the advent of nationalist and xenophobic supremacy.” The group, the decree noted, takes its name from Charles Martel, the 8th-century leader who repelled a Muslim invasion of Gaul.

It remains unclear what good Mr. Darmanin’s move will do. Mr. Macron’s government has banned more than 30 such extremist groups since 2017, only to see many of their members create new ones to take their place. The whack-a-mole method has proved its limits.

Authorities believe that neo-Nazi groups in France count no more than a few thousand members overall. But they have become increasingly vocal in the aftermath of Thomas’s death – egged on, at least tacitly, by extreme-right politicians.

Former presidential candidate Éric Zemmour accused Mr. Darmanin, whose ministry oversees French public security, of “hiding the names” of the youths arrested in relation to the Crépol incident – even though, under the standard judicial procedure in France, names are not released until those arrested appear before a judge on specific charges. Mr. Zemmour added that “everyone knows why” Mr. Darmanin, who is of Algerian descent, had refused to disclose their names.

“I know why he says that: My second name is Moussa,” Mr. Darmanin said of Mr. Zemmour’s allegation. “I am the grandson of French combatants from Algeria.”

Since riots engulfed dozens of French cities after the June police killing of a 17-year-old son of Maghrebi immigrants in a Paris suburb, an already deeply divided France appears to be sliding further toward the “civilizational conflict” that Mr. Zemmour and his followers insist has become inevitable in their country. And Mr. Macron’s government has seemed helpless to stop it.

In May, the President ordered members of his government to avoid using “moral arguments” to combat their far-right opponents, including Mr. Zemmour and National Rally leader Marine Le Pen. This came after Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne referred to Ms. Le Pen’s party as the “heir” to Philippe Pétain, the Nazi-collaborationist head of Vichy France during the Second World War.

Mr. Macron’s theory is that moralizing about the hateful rhetoric of far-right leaders only serves to further alienate their white, working-class supporters, who do not want a lecture on political etiquette. He is not wrong about that.

Still, it is hard not to see the recent deterioration of France’s political climate as proof that Mr. Macron’s go-soft approach is not working. The aftermath of Thomas’s death has made that clear.