A stabbing in a small town takes on greater significance for France
The traditional village ball 18 minutes outside the city ended in traditional fashion: young men fought outside.
What made it different were the flashing blades.
Three young men were rushed to hospital early in the morning of November 19. One, the 16-year-old captain of a local rugby team, died en route from a stab wound to the heart.
What might have been considered a local tragedy for the residents of Romans-sur-Isère, a working-class town 60 miles south of Lyon, quickly became a national story for one reason: race. The victim was a white teenager from the countryside, while many of the suspects were of North African descent and from the Munt, a rough urban neighborhood notorious for drug trafficking.
Almost immediately, far-right supporters, politicians and the right-wing media pounced on the case as evidence that France’s traditional values were under threat from immigrants and their descendants, who they say have refused to assimilate.
Fueled by this interpretation, fifty to a hundred ultra-right nationalists later came to the city to take revenge for what they characterized as an anti-white murder. Armed with iron bars and baseball bats, they chanted: “Islam, leave Europe.”
For others it was the far right growing strength and daring who posed the greatest threat to the country and their own security. Many Mint residents said they were now staying home, fearing they would be targeted for wearing hijabs or because of their North African roots.
“Today the far right wants to push us into a civil war,” Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said on national radio.
The events have left many residents of Romans-sur-Isère, a town still clinging to its former glory as the French capital of luxury shoe manufacturing, in a state of numb bewilderment.
“The horror of it is you send your child to a party, and they come back dead or as murderers,” said city council member Thomas Huriez.
“We are all restless and hypersensitive,” he said. “We are all a bit lost in it, but the majority want things to calm down and to learn the truth.”
The truth will have to wait until the extensive criminal investigation is completed. More than 100 gendarmes are on the case. Two days after the bloody scene, they moved in to arrest nine young men and teenage boys, seven of whom had fled 300 miles west to Toulouse. They are accused of murder and attempted murder in an organized gang. Several other suspects are still on the run.
The ball was held in the sleepy nearby village of Crépol, population 530. Weekend balls are a tradition in villages across France, and around 400 people packed into the stucco-decorated community centre, tucked down a narrow lane behind the supermarket.
As the party drew to a close, a minor insult over a haircut sparked a fight that was taken outside. Fights at the end of village fetes are so common that local seniors talk about them almost nostalgically – but this one quickly took the violence to a shocking level.
A knife wound to Thomas Perotto, the youngest son of a restaurant owner, turned out to be fatal.
Other details and motives remain obscure. At the beginning of the investigation, when the prosecutor tried to tame far-right suspicions on social media, he offered official reports. But after the charges were officially filed, the investigation was handed over to two investigating judges, who remained silent.
The official story so far comes from the first hundred or so witnesses interviewed, who told investigators that members of the small group from the Mint – reinforced by others who arrived in cars – threw rocks and metal fences and pulled out knives.
Nine of the dozens of witnesses said they heard hostile remarks against “whites” during the fight.
Since then, investigators have conducted hundreds more interviews, according to local prefect Thierry Devimeux.
“We only have one side of the story,” said Mr. Devimeux, the region’s top state official. “I’m not sure there weren’t equally ugly words in the other direction.”
In Crépol, however, many are still convinced that the city boys did not come to dance and talk to girls, but to attack white people.
Weeks after the confrontation, rain-soaked bouquets and burned-out candles decorated the entrances to the hall, which remained a sealed-off crime scene. A hand-painted sign called for the local resistance movement against the Nazi occupiers. “Fight the criminals,” it said.
“There are two population groups living in France, one of which must constantly flee from the attacks of the other, increasingly violent faction,” wrote Éric Zemmour, head of the French far-right party Reconquête. He posted on social media a list of North African-sounding names and claimed these were the suspects.
A week after the ball, the right-wing mayor of Romans-sur-Isère, Marie-Hélène Thoraval, declared that there were around fifty irredeemable “savages” at the Mint who, fueled by drugs and radicalization, represented a worrying trend throughout the world. country.
“The town of Romans crystallizes the national feeling of having had enough of this crime,” Ms Thoraval said, releasing a list of five local public buildings that had burned down in recent years, including a community center and a daycare center.
“I just said and translated what the reality was,” she said in an interview. “And this truth hurts.”
She has been placed under police protection following recent death threats.
But her opponents on the council accuse her of cutting funding for local programs at the Mint since her election in 2014.
The closures include a neighborhood association building that had offered jobs to locals and after-school programs for young children.
In 2016, teachers published “a cry of alarm” about the services that were taken away.
Like suburbs across the country, the Mint’s subsidized apartment buildings rose after World War II to house workers for new factories. Over time, the factories closed, unemployment rose, and those who remained were increasingly poorer immigrants.
Many buildings were felled and never replaced, leaving abandoned fields. The scars of burnt out cars are scattered across the streets. Drug deals take place openly at night.
Locals agree that there is a group of drug dealers and criminals committing arson at the Mint. Mothers at the busy Saturday market nearby said they were afraid their children would come into contact with them. But they did not find them personally threatening, nor did they find their neighborhood dangerous. They describe it as a close-knit place where neighbors send bowls of food.
They showed photos online of some of the suspects dancing at the ball that night. One of them was also stabbed.
“Stop saying that these young people went there to attack. That’s not the truth. They went to have fun, and it ended up in a fight,” said Samira, a mother of four who withheld her surname out of fear, when her daughter was threatened after photos of her with one of the suspects circulated online.
Many residents of the Mint said they now feared being targeted by far-right supporters, who were only stopped from entering the neighborhood by police in riot gear during their march. Families of the suspects received death threats online and delivered by mail. One mother terminated the lease on her home and moved.
More than a dozen far-right protesters were arrested; six were immediately tried and sent to prison for assaulting officers and participating in a violent group.
“My daughter is so scared that she did not send her children to school this week,” said 67-year-old Ajela Idir, a retired shoe factory worker who was shopping with her sisters.
Many said they felt stigmatized by the mayor’s comments, and they blamed her for fueling problems in their neighborhood, which led to crime.
“These boys were 5 or 10 years old when the mayor was elected,” said Salim Dlih, 42, who grew up in the Mint and had returned for a community meeting to protest the mayor’s words. “If they had gone through the same programs I did when I was young, if they had had the same opportunities I did, maybe they would be working as engineers at companies like me.”
He added: “Her hand was also on the knife.”
Sitting in a coffee shop in the city’s charming historic district, a few minutes away by car, Joseph Guinard, another city council member, said he felt conflicted. His grandson was among those injured that evening and he was one of nine witnesses who heard racist words against whites.
Mr Guinard agreed that the Mint has undergone cuts. But poverty doesn’t explain carrying a knife to a ball and stabbing someone, he said.
“I used to think everyone was good. I found excuses easily. It’s harder now,” said Mr. Guinard, 68. “It’s not a question of investment or money. It’s a matter of humanity.”
Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris, and Juliette Gueron-Gabrielle from Romans-sur-Isère, France.