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How many more knife attacks can France take? - by Gavin Mortimer for The Spectator - 01.02.25

Each day in France there are 120 knife attacks. On Saturday, one such incident resulted in the death of 14-year-old Elias as he left his football training in central Paris. He was stabbed after refusing to surrender his mobile phone. A 17-year-old has admitted the killing to police.


France’s Interior Minister, Bruno Retailleau, expressed his horror at the death of Elias, and reiterated his determination to make France ‘a country where parents no longer have to fear seeing their child murdered for nothing’. He added that it ‘will be a long and difficult road’ and will require an end to the culture of excuses which ‘has plunged some of our young people into a deep sense of impunity’.


Bruno Retailleau declared that France is encircled by what he called ‘four fires’.


Since he assumed his position in September last year, Retailleau has spent an inordinate amount of his time issuing grave warnings about the lawlessness of the country. In one week in November he had to respond to the deaths of three young men in separate incidents in 36 hours. Some on the left accuse Retailleau of hyperbole, of playing the game of the ‘far right’.


Similar accusations were levelled at Laurent Obertone in 2013 when he published a book called France: A Clockwork Orange. It was a riff on Anthony Burgess’s 1962 dystopian novel – subsequently adapted for the big screen by Stanley Kubrick – in which gangs of feral youths terrorise society.


There was one essential difference: the French version wasn’t a novel. It was a chronicle of how extreme violence had become endemic in the Republic, drawing on interviews with police officers and a study of crimes committed across the country.


Obertone’s book was rubbished by some of the media, which called it ‘nonsense’ and accused its author of being a mouthpiece for the far right. A decade on, however, and a ‘French Clockwork Orange’ is now part of the country’s lexicon. It was the headline of an editorial in Le Figaro in 2023, after a 16-year-old boy was fatally stabbed by a gang of youths who gate-crashed a party in a sleepy southern village. It was seen again last November after the deaths of the three men.

 

Much of the violence is the work of the drug cartels whose power and influence has led some – including Retailleau – to warn that France is in danger of being ‘Mexicanised’. Many of those working for the cartels are in the country illegally, and most are young men.


In one week last October in Marseille, a 14-year-old was arrested in connection with the murder of a taxi driver, and a boy a year older was burned alive. Last week, a 13-year-old boy – known to the police as a dealer – was badly burned when a fire was started deliberately at the door of his apartment in Marseille.


The previous week in Miramas, a town 30 miles north of Marseille, a mother and her 5-year-old son lost their lives in an arson attack; police believe the target was a relative with links to a drug cartel. Miramas was also in the news last year when an 18-year-old was shot dead, and a fortnight ago a man of the same age was left fighting for his life after being repeatedly stabbed in a gang fight.


There was a time when Miramas boasted that it was the ‘cultural capital of Provence’ but it is fast gaining a more unfortunate reputation. The same goes for many towns and cities across France as the drug cartels export their violence nationwide.


An elite police unit was last week deployed to Besançon, a city in eastern France that is on Unesco’s World Heritage List. The reinforcements were demanded by the city’s mayor after a wave of violence in which gunmen targeted shops and restaurants. ‘These mafiosi are taking the population hostage’ said the mayor.


One hundred miles south of Besançon is Mâcon, famous as a winegrowing region, but now in the news for its burgeoning crime rate. On the weekend before last, a district of Mâcon resembled a war zone as youths attacked public buildings and torched vehicles, including three police cars. The region’s prefect said the violence was committed ‘against a backdrop of drug trafficking’.


In an internal memo leaked this week to the press, the head of the Gendarmerie, Hubert Bonneau, warned that France was at ‘tipping point’ because of the range of external and internal threats. Organised crime is a cause of particular concern.


Increasingly, there are no safe spaces in France: what Emmanuel Macron has described as the ‘Décivilisation’ of the country now pervades every region. The latest trend is kidnapping. Last week, a cryptocurrency tycoon and his wife were snatched from their home in the Loire, and a video of the tycoon’s mutilated finger was sent to a business associate along with a ransom demand.


The video was the clue that led the police to the kidnappers, most of whom are young men from Marseille and the Paris region. Home kidnappings are on the rise, according to a police spokesman, who said in most cases they are committed by ‘youngsters aged between 14 and 20…who are amateurs and often very violent’.


In an address last week to a security think tank, Bruno Retailleau declared that France is encircled by what he called ‘four fires’: mass immigration, drug cartels, Islamism and daily delinquency. These fires are being fought but they are yet to be brought under control. A growing number of French fear that they never will.



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Written by Gavin Mortimer


Gavin Mortimer is a British author who lives in Burgundy after many years in Paris. He writes about French politics, terrorism and sport.


Here is a link to a photo from France TV Info:





 

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