On the night of November 18th, 2023, 300 to 400 young people gathered in the village hall of Crépol, a small settlement in the department of Drôme, France for a dance party.
But what began like an evening of carefree fun soon turned into a nightmare. As we reported at the time, a gang of individuals broke into the party and spread terror by attacking the participants with knives. A youngster of 16, Thomas, a member of the local rugby club, died of a stab wound during his transfer to a hospital in Lyon. Two others were severely wounded, and more than a dozen other people suffered various degrees of injuries during the rampage, including the bouncer who had his fingers cut off.
While the mainstream media kept referring to what happened as a “brawl,” in the local press—who had actually spoken to those who had attended the party—as well as on X, the incident was described as a bloodbath. The witnesses also made it clear that the violence was absolutely unprovoked, and some only stood up to the attackers after a while to defend themselves. The profile of the attackers also became clear thanks to social media posts: the attackers were youngsters from North African immigrant families from La Monnaie, a so-called “sensitive neighbourhood” of the nearby town of Romans-sur-Isère. In a video that went viral on social media, the assailants can be heard saying “We are here to kill white people.”
While the gendarmes in charge of the investigation described the incident as “homicide and attempted homicides by an organised gang,” a number of left-wing columnists went into denial and victim-blaming mode. Others tried to shift the blame by accusing the bouncer in charge of security at the entrance of the ball of possible “racial profiling.”
Even though the perpetrators were arrested and have since been prosecuted and sentenced, the matter is far from closed. As a recent Valeurs Actuelles article (cited by Remix) points out, the surviving victims and their families are still traumatised, struggling with legal fees and the slow pace of justice. “They come across videos showing one of the arrested attackers partying in prison. No one talks about it, and they suffer in silence,” Marie-Hélène Thoraval, the mayor of Romans-sur-Isère, the town from where the Crépol assailants came, told the French paper.
Thoraval spoke to Valeurs Actuelles to express her strong criticism of a recently released book by leftist investigative journalists Jean-Michel Décugis, Pauline Guéna, and Marc Leplongeon, which apparently “seeks to reframe the Crépol attack as a politically exploited ‘news item’ rather than a racially-motivated crime.”
With total disregard for the corroborating testimonies of the victims, the book claims the incident was “seized upon” by “fascists”, effectively denying that anti-white racism exists.
According to the mayor, the book also exploits the absence of a police report mentioning anti-white racism as a possible motive for the attack, despite a meeting between then-Minister Olivier Véran and the victims’ families, at which they all testified that the attackers had shouted openly racist and anti-French insults.
In the interview, the mayor also rebutted the notion endorsed by the book that the incident was a random attack. She stressed that the black youth who attacked the Crépol partygoers did not engage in a random act of violence, but were clearly there on a premeditated, “punitive expedition,” armed with knives.
Thoraval warned of the religious sectarianism that is plaguing France, with neighbourhoods that used to be working-class turning into immigrant enclaves. In these neighbourhoods, the mayor opined, “the rules and customs are no longer those of the [French] Republic. Lawless zones are being established, where the law of religion and drug trafficking prevails.”
