Brutal murder of 19-year-old woman has exposed clash between ‘New France’ and Catholic conservative ‘Old France’

France has in many ways become accustomed to the savagery that has swept the country in the last decade. But the murder of a 19-year-old female student last month may prove a turning point.

The young woman, named only as Philippine, was a student in Paris, described by her peers and her lecturers as clever, conscientious and compassionate. A member of the Scouts, Philippine was one of six children all brought up in the Catholic faith.

She lived in Paris during the week but returned to her home near Versailles each weekend, where she would attend church each Sunday.

The man who has been arrested on suspicion of murdering Philippine in the Bois de Boulogne, the sprawling park in the west of Paris, close to her university, is a 22-year-old Moroccan.

In June 2019, he entered France on a tourist visa and because he was 17, a child welfare authority took him into their care when his visa expired. A short while later he raped a 23-year-old student, a crime for which he was sentenced in 2021 to seven years in prison.

In June this year, the man was released into a retention centre in readiness for his deportation to Morocco. But it took several weeks for the documentation to be sent from Morocco, and so a court, though conscious of the danger he posed to the public, released him on the proviso that he report daily to the local gendarmerie. He didn’t.

He absconded from his hotel and made his way to Paris – and to the Bois de Boulogne.

Philippine’s funeral took place on Friday 27 September at the Saint-Louis de Versailles Cathedral. There were nearly 3,000 mourners, inside and outside the cathedral, who listened to the dignified eulogies of Philippine’s family, fiancé and the address of Abbé Pierre-Hervé Grosjean.

The priest spoke of “the mystery of evil…the unbearable injustice and violence unleashed”, but urged mourners not to let evil “have the last word…We want to oppose evil, its violence and ugliness, with the strength of our love, our hope, our faith and the beauty of our unity”.

Among some mourners, however, an anger bubbled beneath the surface. One man, whose daughter is the same age as Philippine, told a journalist that “criminals are taking valuable people away from us”. Another said: “When Nahel died, they rioted all over the country. We light candles. Should we not revolt too?”

Nahel was the 17-year-old French Algerian who was shot dead by police in Paris last year when he sped away from a vehicle checkpoint in a stolen car. As a consequence of his death – the investigation of which is ongoing – rioting erupted across France for a week and resulted in damaged estimated in the region of €1 billion.

Nahel represents what many on the French left call “New France”. This term was coined by Jean-Luc Melenchon of the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI) party earlier this year during the European and parliamentary elections.

LFI is regularly accused of anti-Semitism and of courting the Muslim vote by adopting extreme positions against Israel and what the LFI deems as “Islamophobia”.

Melenchon’s strategy is predicated on his belief that the changing demographics of France, caused by the arrival of millions of legal and illegal migrants from Africa, mean that the Muslim vote is now worth courting.

It is alleged that an LFI activist was among a mob that on Saturday 28 September interrupted a vigil for Philippine in a town in south-eastern France. They chanted anti-fascist slogans and accused those holding photographs of the dead woman of racism.

That was an extreme if isolated response; nonetheless, the Left’s general response to the death of Philippine has been either silence or to denounce toxic masculinity while ignoring the specifics of this particular case.

That is because Philippine is representative of what one might describe as “Old France”. This is Catholic conservative France, where faith, flag and family is integral.

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France’s new Interior Minister, Bruno Retailleau, is very much a product of Old France. In an interview with a newspaper at the weekend he declared that multiculturalism was “at a dead end”, adding: “Our culture is Judeo-Christian. The French melting pot was created in Jerusalem, Athens and Rome. It’s a unique civilisation.”

He then attacked the Left and its culture of self-loathing that only emboldens Islamism: “How can you integrate young people who have doubts, by telling them that France is unlovable, that it is guilty of all crimes?”

A recent poll found that three in four French support Retailleau’s position, which includes holding a referendum on immigration. 

But the Left and Emmanuel Macron’s centrists swiftly attacked Retailleau’s remarks.

“The rule of law is what protects our democracy, it’s what protects all the citizens of our country,” said Yaël Braun-Pivet, an ally of Macron and the president of National Assembly.

But the law no longer protects all citizens in France. Philippine was not the first female whose life was taken by a foreigner who should have been deported.

Across Europe, immigration and the insecurity it breeds have become the defining issues of the age.

It pits those who are proud of “Old Europe” against those who are bent on building a “New Europe”.

It pits those, like Bruno Retailleau, who are proud of Europe’s Judeo-Christian culture, against those on the Left who are ashamed of it.

RELATED: The rampant anti-Catholicism of the French Left

Photo: Attendees hold portrait placards reading “Philippine could have been our sister” as they take part in a gathering to pay tribute to Philippine, the 19-year-old Paris student found dead and buried in a Parisian park, Paris, France, 29 September 2024. (Photo by GEOFFROY VAN DER HASSELT/AFP via Getty Images.)

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