Is Macron losing France’s war on drugs?

The story that dominated much of the French media last week was the vicious assault of a shopkeeper in Amiens. A gang kicked and punched Jean-Baptiste Trogneux outside his chocolate shop in a savage attack that left him bruised and nursing a couple of broken ribs. It was, alas, an all too common incident in a country where violent crime has been rising steadily for a number of years. 

What made this assault newsworthy was the fact that Trogneux is the great-niece of Brigitte Macron; she and her presidential husband condemned the attack, as did figures from across the political spectrum, many of whom tried to exploit the poor man’s injuries for their own ends on television or social media. Far from being political activists, the four people in custody are, by the admission of their own lawyers, social misfits with very low IQs. Dangerous, in other words, but not a threat to democracy. 

The assault certainly didn’t warrant the prominence it received in the media, overshadowing several other far more serious acts of violence that erupted across the country in the days before and after.