This is the chronicle of a city and a neighborhood 20 kilometers apart. And for much more. It is the story of a murder and the reaction it triggered. And how the death of a teenager at a rural party reveals deep fears in a society and fuels divisions.
The town is called Crépol, 500 inhabitants, a church, a café, a supermarket and an old nightclub. The district is called La Monnaie and is part of the small town of Romans-sur-Isère with 30,000 inhabitants.
Crépol, a living image of deep France, is inhabited mainly by white French people of European and Christian origins. The typical place where nothing ever happens. Children or grandchildren of Muslim immigrants live in La Monnaie, a banlieue or suburb with its usual 1970s blocks and endemic problems of violence and marginalization.
In Crépol, many are convinced that the murder of a 16-year-old teenager during a folk dance early on November 19 was the result of what some are calling a “punitive expedition.” According to witness statements quoted in the press in the following days, the attackers said they had targeted a white Frenchman.
“If you go to a party with knives, you don’t take them to the restaurant,” notes a neighbor from Crépol. The woman refuses to give her name, like others interviewed this week in Crépol and La Monnaie.
In the La Monnaie district in Romans-sur-Isère, where some of the young people who took part in the attack came from, things are different. They believe that what happened that fateful night at the old Crépol nightclub was an out-of-control incident. Other testimonies prove it: someone from the city touched a stranger’s long hair and called him “little girl,” the title of a popular song by rapper Jul. And he got into trouble. “A fight that ended badly,” says a resident of La Monnaie. Nothing else.
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At the moment there are more unknowns than certainties. The justice system must clarify what happened that morning. There are nine defendants.
But the death of Thomas Perotto – captain of the rugby team and, according to a message in Crépol’s condolence book, a “happy and valued boy by all” – has unleashed demons in France. As if a conflict between the French was brewing between the green valleys and hills in the few kilometers that separate Crépol from La Monnaie.
On November 25, dozens of hooded right-wing extremists armed with baseball bats and iron bars, some of them from other parts of France, gathered in the La Monnaie neighborhood. It was one of the largest demonstrations of violence by violent ultras in decades. The police prevented an escalation. Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin has called for the banning of three organizations involved.
The controversy had already flared up politically and in the media in Paris. While a part of the left saw Thomas’ murder as just another event, a part of the right and the extreme right considered that Crépol had come to confirm their predictions.
Serious words were spoken these days. There is talk of a France in which “armed militias” from the banlieues “organize raids,” said Marine Le Pen, leader of the first opposition party, the Rassemblement Nationale. Where, in the words of the ultra-talker and failed candidate for the Elysée in 2022, Éric Zemmour, a “Franocide” is being carried out. Translated: a genocide against the French. Marion Maréchal, Le Pen’s niece and Zemmour ally, sees in Crépol “the prolegomena of the civil war.”
The left and the government accuse this right of adding fuel to the fire that feeds radical groups like those that acted in La Monnaie a week ago. This right, in turn, accuses the government, the left and the so-called media bubble of turning a blind eye or sweeping under the rug the violence that threatens the country’s unity.
It’s raining in Crépol on this autumn Thursday. The streets, empty. You need to turn off the road that runs through the city and take a path along the river to get to the banquet hall. The doors and windows are still sealed with gendarmerie tape. There are bouquets of flowers and candles at the main entrance. And an oil painting with several messages written in red, the color of blood, on a green mountain background. “Live”. “Never lower your head.” “Resist the mob.” “Granddaughters of the Vercors resistance.” The Vercors is the mountain range near Crépol that was one of the strongholds of the resistance against the Nazis during the Second World War.
At the entrance to the town hall, the condolence book gives us an idea of the trauma of this still mourning and silent place. “A stolen life, a broken family and entire cities supporting you,” someone wrote. And one more thing: “Wow!”
At the Café de las Colinas they talk about Thomas. From the reactions in Paris.
—A lot of nonsense is said.
This is Thierry Michalet, a retired hairdresser who stopped by for a coffee and some mineral water. He is 62 years old, has a goatee and an earring. And makes it clear:
—It was said to be a confrontation between gangs. No. They came to attack. It was deliberate. They brought knives.
Michalet remembers his childhood summers near Castellón with nostalgia. He explains that one of his sons, who lives in Strasbourg, told him that now that he says he comes from Crépol, everyone knows him.
—This is a small town without stories where the peace is broken.
“The night of November 18-19 marks the importation of unleashed violence from abroad into cities where such barbarism seemed unimaginable,” wrote Victor Delage, founder of Terram, an ideas laboratory dedicated to the study of territory, in Le Figaro. “Nobody feels safe because these events no longer only occur in so-called sensitive areas.” Read the cities and their banlieues.
Le Monde denounced in an editorial “the indecent exploitation of anger” for the murder of Thomas Perotto. “Social networks and right-wing media,” denounces the newspaper, “have orchestrated a campaign that directly calls for revenge and hatred and is overwhelmed with messages linking Thomas’ death to immigration and a confrontation between the France of the bell towers and the France of the Connecting Bell Towers. Suburban Neighborhoods.
Thursday, 3:30 p.m. Quiet in La Monnaie, the neighborhood from which at least some of those accused of the Crépol crime came. The banlieue, where a few days later the ultras came looking for more fights.
There are six police cars in a parking lot. Agents come out, some in plain clothes. They enter several buildings with trained dogs. “They are looking for weapons,” commented a local journalist who visited the crime scene. On the street, groups of men watch and grumble. “The mothers are afraid,” says one who, like the others, refuses to give his name. “The extreme right is playing a dangerous game,” he comments.
A young man approaches the journalist. He is 22 years old and says he knows some of the prisoners: “In this country there are French-French and French-Arabs, but the former are not French.” And there is a background of rivalry between the two. And sometimes the spark jumps.”
There are events that end up being even more events. Because they give rise to the worst nightmares. Because they are the perfect fuel for extremists. In the end a boy is left dead. A city and a banlieue confused. And a country once again faced with the mirror of its fears and obsessions.
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