The instrumentalization of a drama to try to infuse racist theories. In recent days, the murder of Lola has particularly mobilized the far right, especially on the side of Reconquest!, the party of Eric Zemmour, who sees it as the symbol of the laxity of Emmanuel Macron’s migration policy. The main suspect, Dahbia B., a 24-year-old Algerian, was the subject of a obligation to leave French territory (OQTF) since the end of August. Zemmourian activists gathered Thursday, October 20 in Paris, to pay tribute to the 12-year-old schoolgirl and to all the “victims of ‘francocide'”, according to their formula used on social networks.
This neologism has become a hashtag on Twitter, massively taken up in identity spheres to describe the death of the teenager. Stéphane Ravier, senator Reconquest! of Bouches-du-Rhône, used it eight times about the murder of Lola, as did the vice-presidents of the party, Guillaume Peltier and Marion Maréchal, who also used it several times. If the term “turned on Zemmourian social networks already this summer”, as the historian and researcher Nicolas Lebourg points out, it is on the way to becoming a new pillar of the discourse of the ultra-right.
Eric Zemmour, who coined the word, presented this new concept on September 11, during his party’s summer university in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. “The beating, the rape, the murder, the attack with a knife of a Frenchman or a Frenchwoman by an emigrant, is not a news item. No more a news item than the murder of a woman by his husband. It is a political fact that I will henceforth call ‘francocide'”he launched solemnly in front of his supporters.
The disappointed presidential and legislative candidate explained that he was inspired by feminists – whom he nevertheless denigrates at length in his arguments – to create from scratch an element of language in the service of his ideology. Eric Zemmour recognized the capacity of feminists to “politicize” things, since they managed to impose the term “feminicide” in the public space. For Nadia Makouar, a linguist specializing in the analysis of political, media and legal discourse, the concepts of “feminicide” and “francocide” however have an opposite trajectory: “The first is the result of documented observations, which led to the creation of the word. The second starts from an intention to make believe that any murder of a Frenchman by an immigrant person would be intentionally a racist misdeed.”
To understand to what extent the term “feminicide” is misguided here, we must go back to its definition. For the World Health Organization (WHO), it is a “intentional homicide of girls or women, simply because they are women”. The gendered character of the motive must be present. In the book she coordinated, Femicide – a global story (La Découverte), the historian Christelle Taraud paints a dizzying picture, alongside a hundred other authors, of the intentional homicides that women have suffered and continue to suffer for millennia, showing that it is is indeed a documented, massive and rooted social phenomenon.
It is also quantified: according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), 47,000 women and girls were killed around the world in 2020 by their partner, or a member of their family. In France, the Ministry of the Interior has identified 122 women who were killed by their spouse or ex-spouse in 2021. “Femicide” is therefore not simply the fact that a “man kills his wife, his mistress”as summarized by Eric Zemmour.
“We cannot say that everything is the same and that everything is linked, as Eric Zemmour does. This seems to me extremely dangerous and above all very euphemizing for the violence suffered by hundreds of thousands of women victims of feminicides around the world. “
Christelle Taraud, historianat franceinfo
For lawyer Arie Alimi, “there is no analogy to be made between gender and nationality, because no data demonstrates a historical and lasting domination of a foreign nation over the French nation”. “Eric Zemmour comes to insinuate the idea that there would be a domination of foreigners over the French to feed a feeling of fear and insecurity”, point for her part, Anne-Sophie Wallach, national secretary of the Syndicat de la magistrature.
“It is very easy to link together isolated and well-chosen behaviors, to make people believe that it is a fact of society and to stir up racist or xenophobic ideas.”
Anne-Sophie Wallach, magistrateat franceinfo
In a tweet calling for demonstrations in memory of young Lola, the former CNews columnist quotes the names of Timothy, Laura and Mauranne, whom he also considers victims of “Francocide”. The first was stabbed by an Afghan in his thirties in 2019, recognized last March as criminally irresponsible because of his psychiatric disorders. Laura and Mauranne, two cousins aged 20 and 22, were murdered by a terrorist at Saint-Charles station in Marseille in 2017. ThisThe only thing in common between the homicides is therefore that they were committed by foreigners, in very different contexts and for very different reasons.
The notion of intentionality crystallizes the fragility of the theory of Eric Zemmour, who does not seem to know how to position himself on the subject. “I did not say it was a racist crime (…) I am not saying at all that there is a racist intention”, he said initially on BFMTV on Thursday, about the murder of Lola. A little later, however, he answered the question in the affirmative: “Do you think this suspect chose this little girl, Lola, because she is blonde with blue eyes?” And this while no element of the investigation corroborates, so far, his remarks.
For Karine Bourdié, co-president of the Association of criminal lawyers (Adap), “we are completely in the instrumentalization of a tragedy in which there is no spring relating to the nationality of the victim but which is used to start a fire at the entrance of the cemetery”. The lawyer notes in passing that “the legislative arsenal is already very complete” to fight against offenses against a person because of his real or supposed belonging to a nationality. “It is an aggravating circumstance provided for by article 132-76 of the Penal Code”she recalls.
For the criminal lawyer, the notion of “Francocide” “is not far from incitement to racial hatred” because it creates a “hierarchy of human lives which borders on supremacist theories”. That is to say an intrinsically racist ideology, which establishes the superiority of white individuals over the rest of humanity.
The term “francocide” echoes other conspiratorial and racist language used by the far right, such as the famous “great replacement”. Eric Zemmour is certainly not at the origin of the expression – which we owe to the far-right writer Renaud Camus – “but he did a lot to spread it”, notes linguist Nadia Makouar. For the specialist, the use of the word “francocide” marks “a new stage in the exacerbation of racist discourse” because the polemicist no longer speaks only of “destruction of French culture” but good “harm to persons”. She recalls that the suffix “cide” comes from Latin, which means “hit, kill”.
“Eric Zemmour’s remarks degenerate even further into a more exclusionary discourse.”
Nadia Makouar, linguistat franceinfo
Eric Zemmour’s line seems to have become even more radical in recent days. The former contender for the Elysee Palace said Thursday on BFMTV that “We are living in a historic moment where the French people are in mortal danger”. If linguist Nadia Makouar can’t find the word “francocide” “very intuitive”, she fears that he will end “by taking the meaning that Eric Zemmour wants to give it, by dint of hammering it”.