This murder, one more horrible crime committed by a foreigner against a French citizen, had a particular resonance amongst the ocean of murders, rapes, and other crimes committed all too frequently in France. It has greatly shaken the population, as evidenced by the many anonymous passers-by laying flowers in front of the building where the victim lived, coupled with the numerous rallies and moments of silence observed throughout France. At the funeral on October 24, which the minister of the interior deigned to attend, the church was too small to accommodate the entire audience.
Lola’s murder resonates with many not only because of its gruesome details, but because of its location and her family’s background. It took place in the north of Paris, a part of the capital known for its massive presence of immigrants. Lola’s parents are building caretakers, a working-class profession. They are the kind of people who get up early, work hard, and remain discreet. They are so discreet that, since the murder of their daughter, they have barely spoken to the media.
The crime also resonated because of the murderer’s own background. Dahbia B. was an illegal immigrant. She had arrived in France legally in 2016 with a student residence permit, but outstayed her visa. The French government asked her to leave the country. But as is almost always the case, her deportation order was not enforced. Even when others complained about her violent behavior, in 2019, the law still was not enforced. The simple fact is that, had Dahbia B. been deported, Lola would still be alive. The state, supposed to ensure the safety of the French people, failed.
The co-responsibility of the authorities is obvious. But the chattering classes are on a crusade to denounce the “indecency of the extreme right,” to focus the conversation on the stigmatization of foreigners and people with psychiatric disorders, and to raise concerns about the possibility of “political exploitation” of this event by the same “extreme right.”
The media decide either to relativize the event—making this atrocious murder of a little girl a simple news item among others—or to intimidate those outraged by it, deriding those who mourn Lola and who do not want such a murder to happen again as “neo-Nazis.” When a white woman is murdered by a non-white perpetrator, they argue, only silence is dignified. It is indecent to look for responsibility up the chain of command, and downright fascistic to hope that this would be the last time an illegal immigrant the state could not bring itself to deport kills a French native.
So rarely do we respond to tragedy by denying death any symbolic weight. Americans endure the symbolic exploitation of death during every mass shooting. The French endure a symbolic narrative every time there’s a hunting accident—though these are rare and dramatic events, it prompts a cycle of stories about how important it is to ban hunting. And there is the symbolism of BLM, where every act of police violence against black people becomes an event endowed with global significance. But when it comes to murders that touch upon awkward truths about mass immigration, these kinds of generalizations are flat-out denied.
In the end, more TV time will have been devoted to denouncing the “political exploitation” than to recounting what actually happened and what can be done to avoid these easily preventable crimes. Éric Zemmour stated the problem pithily: “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.”
It takes no genius to see that Lola’s story is suppressed because she is too perfect a symbol for France’s woes. The Left does not care when tragedies happen outside its favored groups. Some cries are more legitimate than others. The tears of Lola’s family are not worth less than those of George Floyd’s, but we are told the former have no place in the public square. This exacerbates working-class frustration with the system. The working classes are supposed to go back home and remain silent about the mass immigration on which they were not consulted and which they reject en masse.
The collective shock of the French working classes is met with the complete indifference of their elites. They are completely powerless, expected to play Russian roulette à la française. Instead of putting a revolver to their head, they go out to work and to school. Every day they must ask themselves—my son is waiting for the train, are Moroccans going to hit him and rob him on the platform? Or will an Algerian attack him with a knife on the train? Will my wife be raped in the street by an Algerian man who was not in the country legally but had not been deported, or will another just run me and my grandson over with his car? Lola is supposed to be just one more victim. There will be more after her.
Three days after the discovery of Lola’s murder, the president of the republic tweeted his condolences—not for her, but for the members of the National Liberation Front of Algeria who died during a demonstration in Paris 61 years ago. The death of Algerians killed by French people decades ago affects the head of state more than the death of a French little girl by an Algerian woman the same day.
This invocation of the Algerian War raises a terrible irony. During the last days of French Algeria, the Algerians warned the French settlers they could choose “the suitcase or the coffin”—leave Algeria or be killed. With Lola, the French have discovered that now, the two choices have become the same.
Pierre-Hugues Barré is senior lecturer in Constitutional law at Sciences Po Paris and academic visitor at the University of Oxford Faculty of Law.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
