The southern French city of Nîmes, home to over 150,000 people, has decided to implement a nightly curfew for minors under the age of 16 as a desperate attempt to curb the spread of gang violence largely linked to drug trafficking in the city’s migrant-heavy neighborhoods.
The curfew runs between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m., and came into effect on the night of Monday, July 21st, for an initial two-week period that can be renewed every 15 days.
According to local authorities, the radical measure is needed because of “a succession of shootings, score-settling, and gang tensions” that have been gripping the city for the past weeks.
Nîmes follows the example of at least ten other French municipalities that implemented similar measures. Its curfew specifically targets six neighborhoods that are the epicenters of gang violence, including the Pissevin, Valdegour, and Mas de Mingue districts, where authorities will deploy additional riot police to patrol the streets.
Pissevin saw another shooting just days before the decision for the nightly lockdowns was made, and videos uploaded to social media show multiple men armed with assault rifles sprinting through the district at night.
On July 10th, unknown assailants shot and killed a man in his car in the Mas de Mingue district, while a shooting two weeks prior in Valdegour left six people, including four minors, wounded. A shot and partially burned body of a 19-year-old from Paris was also discovered last week just outside the city, and authorities also linked the murder to local narco gangs.
Jean-Paul Fournier, Nîmes’s long-serving center-right mayor, said the situation has become unbearable due to “the armed operations of narco-terrorists, which created an atmosphere of fear and terror” in the city.
Residents, especially those living in the affected neighborhoods, irrespective of their ethnic or religious background, agree with the mayor. “Even after the death of little Fayed [a ten-year-old killed in 2023], I hadn’t felt so much tension,” said Raouf Azzouz, the director of the Les Mille Couleurs community center that was forced to close recently out of concern for staff and visitors.
Deputy mayor for security Richard Schieven underlined that the curfew was necessary “to protect minors who have nothing to do with trafficking, but also those, sometimes as young as 12 or 13, who are used by drug traffickers.”
He explained that the police see the same pattern as in the nearby cities of Nice and Marseilles, where drug traffickers bring vulnerable children from all over France to employ them as dealers in Nîmes, far from their families and in total reliance on their employers.
According to the estimates of the French interior ministry, there are at least 10,000 minors involved in drug trafficking across the country.
While the curfew is regarded as a good step to address the issue in the immediate term, not everyone is convinced of its long-term sustainability and effectiveness. “Young offenders are shooting people with impunity, in broad daylight,” said police union ‘Unité’ official Wissem Guesmi. “A curfew is certainly not going to stop them.”
The obvious solution would be the immediate deportation of all migrant criminals, but that’s a question of high politics that the Macronist camp would rather avoid.
