Weaponized tragedies

In the guise of caring about women, France's far-right has turned a femicide into a blanket statement condemning immigrants.

“We can’t even mourn Philippine the way we want to,” my partner said to me the other day, softly as we were getting ready for bed. “The far-right has taken that away from us too.”

Which Philippine?

Philippine, the 19-year-old whose lifeless body was discovered in the Bois de Boulogne to the west of Paris? Philippine, the economics student, the woman engaged to be married, the devout Catholic? Philippine, who died a horrible death, asphyxiated in a park?

Or Philippine, whose name trended on social media for the past week? Philippine, whose death was protested and counter-protested? Philippine, whose death has become a flashpoint in the French culture wars?

On September 21, Philippine was murdered by a Moroccan immigrant with an outstanding deportation notice.

The death came at a particularly turbocharged moment in French politics. France’s new Prime Minister was about to name a reactionary, conservative cabinet aimed at placating the far-right. Details of another sexual assault case — this time in Mazan, a small village in southern France, where a man had invited more than 80 strangers he found on the internet to rape his drugged, sleeping wife — were emerging in court. It came at a time when the deficit had never been more insurmountable and prisons had never been fuller.

Yet the death of Philippine still managed to capture the national attention. Rallies for Philippine were organized at the Denfert Rochereau traffic circle and near La Sorbonne in Paris. In Vienne, a city south of Lyon, Hanane Mansouri, a representative of a right-wing political union, organized a vigil. Across from her, left-wing protesters stood nearby chanting anti-fascist slogans. The two groups in a standoff, the lifeless Philippine in the middle: it felt like a perfect metaphor for French political discourse in 2024.

France’s army of talking heads and right-wing politicians quickly jumped on a simple narrative: that Philippine’s killer had been recently given a deportation notice, a so-called obligation de quitter le territoire français, or OQTF. Philippine’s death was avoidable, they said, if only France were to have done a better job of carrying out deportations.

“Today there are 700,000 people who should not be on French territory. And among [them are] people who have been convicted, repeat offenders, people who have served time in prison, or who sometimes have not served time and should have done so,” Laurent Jacobelli, a member of the far-right National Rally said on talk radio shortly after the murder.

“You stick them on an airplane and send them back home,” Cyril Hanouna, a right-wing talk show goon who has been convicted of hate speech and recently had one of his shows taken off the air, said of immigrants with deportation notices.

French Interior Minister Bruno Rétailleau promised to go to extreme lengths in order to prevent another case like Philippine’s from happening, and casually pooh-poohed the rule of law.

Less than a week after Philippine’s death, the narrative was spun. The same tired, overdone trope that immigrants lead to lawlessness and crime that catapulted Trump, Orban, Bolsonaro and countless other tyrants to power. “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime…”

“The state killed me,” read a banner held by members of the alt-right feminist collective Nemesis at one of the marches. Another read “killed by a migrant.” “They’re killing our women,” a third decried.

In France, Philippine’s awful death was the exception that proves the rule, and the far-right went at it like vultures.

Of course, like most narratives, this one was cherry-picked.

It’s true that Philippine’s killer was Maroccan, and that he had an OQTF, but this only tells part of the story. The large majority of OQTFs are given out by the French police prefecture when a visa renewal is rejected or when an undocumented immigrant is randomly searched. Only a fraction of the OQTFs that are handed out go to immigrants who have actually committed a crime. Philippine’s killer should — legally speaking — have been deported, but he wasn’t because he didn’t have a passport and because of particular French statutes pertaining to its former colony Morocco, a human rights lawyer told me.

And even if he had been sent back to Morocco, I’m not sure this would have been the correct response either. Philippine’s killer had a prior rape conviction. Should the French state simply unleash him on another country where he would almost certainly do the same thing to other women?

The truth is the French right-wing only cares about women when they’re dead — preferably murdered by an immigrant of color. Much like how in the US conservatives only care about children before they’re born. Where were the talking heads when a white, French man drugged his wife and had her repeatedly raped by strangers? They were too busy trying to chip away at her credibility to feel any sort of sympathy. “Il n’y a pas eu mort d’homme,” the National Rally mayor of Mazan said about the case. This literally translates to “no man has died,” but in French it’s something more akin to “it could have been worse.”

The end result of Philippine’s death most likely won’t be sympathy and dialogue. It will be repression and more violence. It will be increased policing, increased vitriol. Hate crimes against migrants will almost certainly go up.

In 2015, hundreds of thousands of French people took to the streets after the terror attack perpetrated against the satirists at Charlie Hebdo. They spanned political parties. It felt like something was coming together.

In 2024, it felt like if you joined the commemorations of Philippine’s life and death, you were capitulating to the far-right. It felt like something was coming undone.