CHRONIC. Crépol, the unworthy recovery

Clément Viktorovitch returns every week to the debates and political issues. Sunday December 3: the assassination of Thomas, in Crépol. A drama which gave rise to a political recovery.

It is an atrocious tragedy: the death of young Thomas, 16 years old, during a brawl which left the ball in the village of Crépol, in Drôme, bloody. And, in fact, it did not take long before the extreme right took over this event: the next day, Jordan Bardella already castigated the “savagery of city criminals”Marion Maréchal is alarmed by “beginnings of a civil war” and Eric Zemmour denounces the “Everyday Jihad”.

Political recovery? These political leaders respond that they are content to face France’s problems. Contrary to Bourdieu’s well-known phrase, no, the news item does not necessarily create a diversion. There are realities that are so harsh, or far from us, that a news item can help us take full measure of them. This is the case, for example, with the death of young Nahel, which brought to the forefront the issue of police violence and discriminatory treatment suffered by racialized people. However, these problems have been documented on multiple occasions, whether by the defender of rights, or in studies by Cesdip, the sociological research center on law and penal institutions. When a news item echoes an established, studied social fact, supported by data: we can hardly blame politicians for seizing it.

But there is a fundamental difference with what happened in Crépol. It doesn’t matter what we know about the tragedy today: what we must remember is that when the far right reacted, we knew absolutely nothing about it. Was it a fight gone bad? A tragic confrontation between two rival gangs? An expedition organized to “break white”? There was nothing to determine this. However, this drama was immediately used to establish a rise in generality.

A definition of recovery

To be convinced of this, we can look more specifically at the reaction of Marine Le Pen. Barely hours after the tragedy, she declared to the weekly Current Values : “We are witnessing an organized attack, emanating from a certain number of criminogenic suburbs in which there are armed militias carrying out raids”. What did she know? Nothing… But she didn’t need it. During the 2012 presidential campaign, at a meeting in Châteauroux, she made, word for word, the same remarks, evoking “violence [qui] pours without resistance on France from fields and steeples, coming from our cities and our suburbs.

“With death in our souls, we abandon traditional festivities in more and more villages, for fear of seeing a gang carry out a raid.”

Marine Le Pen in 2012

in a meeting in Châteauroux

We could say that recent events prove her right if, at the time, she had relied on studies, data, statistics, facts – or even, at the very least, news items. But no, none of that. Marine Le Pen’s tirade on gangs, raids and campaigns, repeated many times, was nothing other than a story, never substantiated, only asserted, to arouse fear. It was this narration that she unfolded when Thomas died, even before having the slightest solid information. Enlisting a news item to place a pre-established political narrative on it, independently of the facts themselves: this is the clearest definition of recovery.

Is there an increase in violence in the countryside?

No, according to the statistics we have: absolutely not. As a recent franceinfo column showed, most of the violence remains stable in the countryside – notably homicides, which, moreover, have been halved in the space of forty years. It is true that there are two indicators that are increasing: domestic violence and sexual violence. This is regrettable, of course, but it has nothing to do with alleged raids. Moreover, the word itself was not chosen at random: “razzia” is, originally, an Arabic word, of which we can clearly see the imagination it carries. A racist imagination – which, unfortunately, found echoes even in the government.

Government spokesperson Olivier Véran, who visited the site, denounced the political exploitation of the Crépol tragedy. But before that, Gérald Darmanin spoke of these facts as a “turning point in wildness”. As for the President of the Republic, he once again used the concept of “decivilization”. However, these two words constitute a rhetoric assumed by the far right, aiming to present immigrants and French people of immigrant background as savages, incapable of repressing their violence. It is this discourse that the executive also helped to legitimize. With the consequences that we know: the punitive expedition of dozens of ultra-right activists last weekend, in Romans-sur-Isère. This, unfortunately, is not a news item.