A 15-year-old boy beaten to death by four teenagers as he walked home from his school in a Paris suburb; a 14-year-old girl left in a coma after a brutal attack by fellow pupils in Montpellier; a 22-year-old man killed by a gang near Dunkirk: just three recent examples of the youth violence epidemic searing France, said Stefan Brändle in Der Standard (Vienna).
And as the perpetrators get younger and younger, the public reaction gets more intense. “The law of the Taliban” now prevails in the French banlieues, is how right-wing extremist Éric Zemmour depicts it. And Macron and his ministers aren’t far behind. They regularly lament what they see as the “decivilisation process” afflicting France, the “ensauvagement of society” in the words of the interior minister, Gérald Darmanin.
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