Lola’s Murder: Searching For Political Decency

France is reeling from the shock of an abominable crime, one of those atrocious crimes that haunts the minds and dreams for generations; that tears at the hearts of mothers and crushes the confidence of fathers. On Friday, October 14th, in Paris, a twelve-year-old girl, still a child, Lola, was raped, tortured, half decapitated, thrown into a suitcase, and abandoned. 

The primary culprit is a young woman, a twenty-four-year-old Algerian, who was legally obligated to leave French territory three years ago. If the law had been applied and if she had been expelled in time, her path would never have crossed that of the poor little girl with the angelic face. These are the raw, but cruel facts; not wishful thinking.

The trauma is there, and it is deep. No sane person can shake off the terrible images one forms when reading the murderer’s first confession, hinting at the child’s ordeal. This is one crime too many in this ‘Clockwork Orange’ France, denounced for too many years already by the sharp pen of the essayist Laurent Obertone. Just when we thought we were like Mithridates, insensitive to pain, reading the miscellaneous facts that accumulate in the newspaper columns, anger awakened in the face of this crime that should never have happened. 

Beyond the horror of the facts, anger has been fanned by the reactions of the French government. When the country discovered the tragedy, President Emmanuel Macron tweeted about the memory of the Algerian victims of the war of independence, and then about Karim Benzema’s golden ball—a football player who recently claimed that his real homeland was Algeria, that he didn’t care about France, that he played for France to appease the “sporting side.” 

Not a word for the child. 

At a time when emotions run high, such silence in high places seems difficult to understand. On the side of the minister of the interior, Gérald Darmanin, compassion was not to be found either. Instead, he expressed annoyance at the ‘recuperation’ of Lola’s death by the Right, and pointed out the difficult childhood of the murderer (inverting the relationship between victim and culprit).

For several days, the tone has continued to rise—first of all, in the National Assembly, where the prime minister was vigorously attacked by Marine Le Pen. The Minister of Justice, too, was the subject of a courageous attack by a Les Républicains MP, Éric Pauget. “Lola lost her life because you did not proceed with the deportation of this national who had no business being here. This is the heavy consequence of your inaction,” he said, while Dupont-Moretti was greeted with boos. 

The protest has taken to the streets. Everywhere in France, rallies, marches, even rosaries are being organised in memory of Lola. A demonstration is planned in Paris on Thursday, October 20th, in memory of the victims—Lola, and all the others—victims of judicial and migration laxity. 

The initial location had to be changed by the police prefecture, due to the expected number of people. Representatives of the Rassemblement National and Reconquête are expected. 

Faced with the obstinate and implacable resistance to the facts, the government defends itself. The censors drape themselves in their moral dignity, indignant at the scale of the mobilisation. The left-wing newspaper Libération stigmatises reactionaries as “scavengers.” The Left in particular defends itself, and accuses all those who proclaim their outrage at Lola’s death as guilty of “political recuperation.” 

Let’s stop for a moment. What does this accusation of ‘recuperation’ mean?

The Left and progressivism, in France as elsewhere, function entirely on ‘recuperation.’ It may be translated as the act of recovering a political loss by applying it to cross purposes; we see it most in the misappropriation of political events, their instrumentalisation to pound home some progressive ideological sticking point. The news of the last few years has provided us with many illustrations of this. In 2015, little Aylan, a Kurdish refugee, died face down on a Turkish beach. His photo was repeated in all the media. “Never again,” we heard on all the notes of the scale. Aylan’s red T-shirt became the totem of our obeisance to the unlimited welcome given to migrants. Press cartoons, tribunes, emotional declarations with tears in their voices multiplied to denounce the heartlessness of those who wanted to deny these migrants their journeys of despair. The solution, the Left insisted, would be found not in regulation, but in opening our borders. It was easy to take advantage of such a martyr.

The Left on the other side of the Atlantic had their own Aylan moment in George Floyd. George Floyd, in Minneapolis, in May 2020, died during his violent arrest by an unscrupulous police officer. Afterward, he was almost instantly an object of ‘recuperation.’ He became a symbol of police violence and racism. He acquired the post-mortem status of a muse for the democrats who wanted Donald Trump’s skin in the run-up to the presidential elections. Multiple recuperations, even. His last words, “I can’t breathe,” if we are to believe President Emmanuel Macron, made him the embodiment of citizens’ climate anxiety. 

The Minneapolis ‘news story’ had been internationalised. In Paris, Berlin, and Madrid, people were marching for George Floyd. City walls were covered with murals in his honour. Not many people complained, like Minister Dupont-Moretti, that “his coffin was being used as a stepping stone for political claims.” Nobody called, like Elisabeth Borne, for “decency” to “respect the pain.” 

The unavoidable evidence points to the fact that the battles of progressivism—gay marriage, ‘trans’ rights—all function, without exception, on a system of recuperation. A particular case or a tragic individual event is made into a story. Testimonies are dissected in order to ‘raise awareness,’ and to draw from an isolated experience the need to make a law for all. Recuperation is quite simply the preferred and almost exclusive modus operandi of the Left. The militant Left is in itself a gigantic enterprise of ‘recuperation.’ Having long since evacuated the idea that there is a transcendent good and truth above us, it must indeed look for something else to fuel its battles. 

We do not have to apologise for ‘recuperation.’ There is no ‘recuperation’ here. There is righteous anger, which does not come from an isolated experience, but rather from an unbearable accumulation of unpunished crimes, all of which, or almost all of which, have the same, terribly identifiable origin: the disappearance of a national community ordered to the good of its children, under the blows of uncontrolled immigration which is only the mask of a false charity, all with a view to erecting a society without morals and without rules. 

Instead of the ‘recuperation’ that the Left has made its specialty, we prefer to bear witness: Martyr, in ancient Greek. Nothing should prevent us from summoning with dignity, in the name of justice, the victims of the cowardice of a political class that patiently builds a hell for the innocent. Let us take up here the words that are attributed to Napoleon III: “It is time for the good to be reassured and for the bad to tremble.”