On October 14, the mutilated physique of a blond-haired 12-year-old named Lola was discovered folded up in a plastic suitcase within the courtyard of her household’s housing mission in Paris’s nineteenth arrondissement. The official reason behind Lola’s demise was asphyxiation, however investigators additionally discovered indicators of torture, together with cuts on her neck and face, and the numbers 1 and 0 scrawled, inexplicably, on the soles of her toes. She might have been sexually abused. This stunning and brutal crime has dominated the information in France and reverberated all through right-wing conventional and social media effectively past Europe. The most important suspect within the killing, recognized solely as Dahbia B., is a 24-year-old Algerian girl within the nation illegally since overstaying a pupil visa. She was jobless, had no mounted handle, and had been experiencing “waking dreams” throughout which she made “incoherent remarks,” based on her sister. And she had acquired an expulsion order as lately as August 21, when she was stopped by customs officers at an airport in Paris.
In some ways, the response to this atrocity has been predictable. “Once again, the suspect of this barbaric act should not have been in France,” Marine Le Pen, the runner-up in final June’s presidential election and the chief of the right-wing National Rally occasion, informed Parliament on Tuesday. “What are you waiting for to act so that this out-of-control illegal immigration is finally stopped?”
Le Pen’s chief rival, the author and media persona Éric Zemmour, whose Reconquest occasion outflanked Le Pen on the suitable, capped off every week of activism and feverish tweeting concerning the homicide with a protest billed as #ManifPourLola (“Demonstration for Lola”) in Paris on Thursday night. Demonstrators included “the monarchists of Action Française, the hooded and masked youths of the violent Zouaves, and the fundamentalist Christian group Civitas,” based on Le Monde. Before heavy rainfall and lighting reduce the gathering quick, they broke out right into a rendition of the French nationwide anthem whereas “shouts of ‘Remigration!’ ‘Death to pedophiles!’ and ‘This is our home!’ resounded briefly, a reminder of the protesters’ political affiliations.”
Lola’s mother and father have requested the tragedy not be made right into a political weapon. Nevertheless, Zemmour, Le Pen, and their sympathizers have insisted that it’s out of respect for the slain woman and her household that they refuse to let the media and the Macron administration escape accountability for the disaster of unlawful immigration. And to an extent, they’ve some extent that calls for to be taken severely. “Over 62,000 people identified by the authorities as being in France illegally were ordered to leave the country in the first half of 2021,” The New York Times reported. “But less than 6 percent of them actually did so, and since Mr. Macron’s election in 2017, that figure has never been higher than 15 percent.”
A rustic should be capable to implement the integrity of its personal borders, and France is failing to expel enough numbers of undocumented migrants who enter illegally or, like Dahbia B., overstay their visas. Stating this reality needs to be no extra controversial than it’s to insist {that a} specific can by no means show a common: Immigrants, no matter standing, are as morally assorted a bunch as some other.
Where the discourse has turned sinister is within the not-at-all delicate racial instigation. In current years the time period femicide has been popularized by graffiti campaigns to lift consciousness of the quotidian actuality of gendered violence that seldom makes headlines. Just this previous September, Zemmour, coined a by-product neologism: “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,” he informed a crowd at his occasion’s summer season college within the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence area. “No more a news item than the murder of a woman by her husband. It is a political fact that I will now call ‘francocide.’”
Since Lola’s demise every week in the past, that ethno-term has gained widespread traction—significantly on social media, the place it’s change into a well-liked hashtag—fueled by the underlying assumption that any assault or crime perpetrated by a non-French migrant in opposition to a French individual is inherently racist and racially predatory. Unstated however clearly supposed is the corresponding understanding of Frenchness as synonymous with whiteness and foreignness as equal to nonwhiteness. As the author Raphaël Enthoven replied to Zemmour on Twitter, “The fight against the ‘francocides’ would probably be less lively if the victim were a black French Muslim and the culprit a white Polish Catholic.” Although proving a counterfactual is inconceivable, it’s definitely tough to image the nationalists grabbing their umbrellas and massing within the pouring rain to protest the latter state of affairs.
What the abysmal homicide of a 12-year-old—by all indications by the hands of a severely troubled individual—has revealed, then, is the diploma to which recourse to summary identification markers and crude identitarianism obscures as a substitute of illuminates complicated human realities.