It was May 2016, a thousand years ago. Patrick Calvar, the director of the DGSI, had twice mentioned to the deputies the risk of a “confrontation” between the ultra-right “which is only waiting” for this confrontation, and the “Muslim world”. “Not the Islamists, but the Muslim world,” clarified the senior official, “worried,” he said, “about the radicalization of society and the underlying movement that is leading to it.” “I think this confrontation will take place. One or two more attacks and it will happen,” predicted the director of the secret service, pessimistic. It was before the attack in Nice, before the assassination of Samuel Paty, and many others. Before Marine Le Pen in the second round of a presidential election, also before the political emergence of Eric Zemmour, who had announced, in 2018, and without regret, a “civil war” to come in France.
Messy ideas initially spread. In an interview with World in July 2023, Nicolas Lerner, the current boss of the DGSI, lists “ten ultra-right terrorist actions” thwarted since 2017. Among these, the project of the Action of Operational Forces (AFO) group, which wanted to poison halal food at the supermarket. Its 15 members were arrested in 2018; several of them explained that they had joined in response to the Bataclan attack.
The “reply” finally took place, not in response to an Islamist attack, but to a news item, the murder of Thomas, 16, during a ball in Crépol (Drôme). According to a witness interviewed by THE Dauphiné Libéré, the attackers would have claimed their desire to “plant white people”. The homicide is presented by the far right as an attack by other means, an “everyday jihad” and a “francocide”, said Eric Zemmour. A mixture of absolute tragedy and comedy, the punitive expedition of 80 ultra-right thugs to Romans-sur-Isère, to the alleged home of several of Thomas’ attackers, ended in pants. The big guys didn’t do much damage, they left a seriously injured person and a phone. It was discovered that they were obeying the orders of a certain “big guy”. At the other end of the spectrum, Jean-Luc Mélenchon tweets about Mourad, a gardener who was the victim of a racist attack the day before the Crépol ball, about the racoonades, but not about Thomas. As if it was now incongruous to flatter anything other than a supposed electoral “clientele”. What if we got out of this spiral before the confrontation?