“Twenty years later, what remains in our collective memory of the Nanterre massacre? »

Tribune. On March 27, 2002, three weeks before the first round of the presidential election on April 21, at the end of the municipal council, a man tried to execute one by one the fifty elected officials present; despite the reflexes and the courage of certain elected officials who were still unscathed and who succeeded in disarming him, the toll was very heavy: eight dead, nineteen injured, including twelve with permanent disabilities. Forty-eight hours later, he committed suicide in police custody. Twenty years later, what remains in our collective memory of the Nanterre tragedy? Not much…

On the grounds that the assassin had benefited from psychiatric care, the killing was relegated to the “news item” category: the town hall pays homage each year on the sly to the deceased elected officials, without inviting the survivors; the republican recognition was made at a minimum – the dead elected officials and the saviors, forgetting the municipal council, symbol of the Republic, yet targeted as a whole and which, courageously, faced up with remarkable solidarity; and no analytical work has been done on the killer’s motives, what he stood for, and what his victims stood for.

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The survivors, without legal cover for an attack or industrial accident, without a trial or support from the Republic, pursued their mandates and their lives, come what may, assuming the aftermath of this tragedy and the sometimes dramatic impact , on their families.

For this twentieth anniversary, the town hall of Nanterre has finally invited them; a ceremony where they are relegated to the function of witnesses, when they were elected officials of the Republic in office, themselves victims.

Article 412-1 of the Penal Code: “ Constitutes an attack the fact of committing one or more acts of violence likely to endanger the institutions of the Republic. Decimating an entire city council is probably an act of madness, but it’s also an act of major violence against an institution of the Republic.

growing rage

The facts are stubborn: his psychological state did not prevent the assassin from working as a supervisor in a college, he was politically engaged, wrote entire pages about his anger against elected officials, had moved to the grave of Baruch Goldstein [militant d’extrême droite américano-israélien qui tua 29 musulmans en prière au Tombeau des patriarches, à Hébron, en Cisjordanie, en 1994]had a bedside book promoting terrorism, went to practice shooting the day before, attended city council for 5 hours with three loaded handguns in his bag.

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