The city of Nantes in Brittany has been in the news for several years because of its soaring crime rate. However, the socialist mayor’s priority for 2025 is to combat “sexism on the streets.” To this end, an experiment has been entrusted to a ‘civic community’ made up of women and ‘LGBT(QIA+)’ people. The obsession with defending the rights of minorities is commonplace among left-wing mayors incapable of curbing the rise in crime in the cities they administer.
The programme was launched by the mayor, Johanna Rolland, at the end of 2024. The community group is made up of “people concerned by sexism in public space,” and is tasked with creating an “egalitarian and pleasant public space” by identifying the restrictions suffered by the people mainly concerned by “gender inequalities,” reveals Le Figaro.
The survey’s required changes will be funded by a “gender-sensitive” municipal budget requested for 2025. This might include “rethinking” the width of pavements, street furniture, street lighting, or even planting.
Rolland’s approach is based on an observation made by the High Council for Equality: 25% of women say they are afraid in the street, and 99% of them have already been the victim of a sexist comment or act at least once in their lives.
Once these facts have been established, the Socialist conclusion is clear: if women are afraid in the street, or if they are subjected to assaults of any kind, it’s because of sexism, and only a plan devised by ‘LGBTQIA+ people’ can find the appropriate solutions—which do not involve punishing criminal behaviour but redesigning urban space. The city and its patriarchal organisation—not individuals—must be guilty.
This is not a new fad. Back in 2017, Caroline de Haas, a gay activist, founder of the Osez le féminisme collective and candidate in the Paris legislative elections, proposed “widening the pavements” and improving public lighting to combat the harassment suffered by women in the northern arrondissements of Paris—where the immigrant population is most concentrated.
In Grenoble, green party Mayor Éric Piolle proposed experimenting with “gender-neutral” playgrounds to put girls at ease and combat the separation of the sexes at school, considered to be a source of potential violence. In Strasbourg, green party Mayor Jeanne Barseghian has gone so far as to imagine equipping children with connected waistcoats to identify overuse of the school grounds by boys—a way, according to her teams, of “preventing sexual and gender-based violence in schools.”
It’s no coincidence that these dubious experiments are taking place in towns with a high immigrant population and a high crime rate. The fight against street sexism has one major advantage: it avoids naming the real evils and identifying the real culprits. For the Left, it’s not a question of delinquency or crime, but of sexism: The deterioration of the environment for women and homosexuals has nothing to do with immigration, because only sexists can be found guilty. For several years now, only the Rassemblement National (RN) has been denouncing the correlation between immigration and the rise in attacks on homosexuals. The rideshare sector, both in Paris and in the provinces, is particularly emblematic in this respect. Several cases have implicated Uber drivers in attacks on homosexuals. Yet the vast majority of drivers are recruited from Arab-Muslim communities, for whom public displays of homosexuality are intolerable.
In Nantes, we will have to wait a few more months before we can implement the measures advocated by the community and see the effects. What results can we expect when the working document setting out the experiment makes no mention of crime or delinquency? Unsurprisingly, the mayor of Nantes is also among those for whom the “migratory submersion” referred to by Prime Minister François Bayrou does not exist.
