Crackdown on French far right urged after boy’s killing sparks protests

The French interior minister has called for the dissolution of three extreme-right groups after a series of marches were organised in response to the killing of a 16-year-old in the south-east of the country.

Gérald Darmanin told France Inter broadcaster he was seeking to shut down Division Martel and two other groups he did not name, warning there was a risk of militias targeting people of different skin-colour.

Thomas, a 16-year-old rugby player, died from stab wounds after a dance party at a village hall in Crépol in the Drôme, in south-eastern France, on 19 November.

Nine people believed to be connected to the incident have been arrested and placed under formal investigation for crimes including murder and attempted murder and some have been remanded in custody.

Even though eight of those arrested were French, and one Italian, and investigators are still working to establish what happened, far-right politicians have argued that Thomas’s death was evidence of a danger from immigrants and minorities who they alleged had come to the village from public housing blocks in a local town.

Amid a mood of growing tension, extreme-right groups have held marches over Thomas’s death.

About 100 people believed to be connected to extreme-right groups marched through the nearby town of Romans-sur-Isère on Saturday, where some carried baseball bats and clashed with police. The police prefect in the Drôme said they had come to the town to confront young people from the La Monnaie neighbourhood, from where some believe the Crépol suspects come, although no names or addresses have been given by prosecutors.

Six people aged between 18 and 25 were arrested as part of the far-right gathering on Saturday night. They were fast-tracked in front of a judge and given prison sentences of between six and 10 months for taking part in a gathering with a view to preparing violence. Five of them were also convicted for violence against the police.

“When you come with sticks, you don’t come to defend a cause, you come to attack,” said the prosecutor, Vanina Lepaul-Ercole.

Another far-right gathering in Romans was dispersed by police on Sunday.

About 30 people have been arrested over the extreme-right gatherings in recent days, including after an unauthorised march in the city of Lyon this week.

“I will propose that a number of small groups are wound up,” Darmanin said.

Darmanin condemned what he called the “reaction of extreme-right militia”, and said he had asked the police to be firm and make arrests. He said because police had dealt firmly with these groups, France had avoided an “Irish-style scenario”, in reference to riots in Dublin last week when about 500 anti-immigrant activists and gangs of youths looted shops, burned vehicles and attacked police.

Darmanin said: “I will let no militia, be they extreme-right or whatever radical movement [try to substitute themselves] for the law instead of the prosecutor and police.” He said there was a mobilisation of the extreme-right that wanted to “tip the country into civil war”.

He criticised such militia for aiming to carry out what he called racist attacks, attacking people of North African origin or “shouting their nostalgia for the Third Reich”. He said that since 2017, 13 violent projects by ultra-right groups had been prevented by the intelligence services.

The state prosecutor in Valence has said investigators are still working to determine what exactly took place at the end of the village dance party in Crépol, which 400 people had attended.

As well as Thomas’s death, nine people were wounded, four seriously. The senior prosecutor, Laurent de Caigny, said the violence appeared to have broken out for “petty reasons” rather than being a premeditated attack based on “race, ethnicity, nationality or religion” – and was perhaps sparked by a passing remark about “somebody’s haircut”.

Olivier Véran, the government spokesperson, went to Crépol this week and said the “tragedy” there and the tensions that followed had put France at risk of “a tipping-over of our society”.

He said: “It’s up to the judiciary to render justice. Not for the French public themselves.”

The communist politician Fabien Roussel said this week that French far-right politicians were exploiting the events at Crépol.

Marion Maréchal, the leading European election candidate for the far-right Reconquête party, run by former TV pundit and failed presidential candidate, Eric Zemmour, wrote of the events in Crépol on X: “Now anti-white racism is hitting our countryside.”

Jordan Bardella, the president of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party, which is the biggest single opposition party in parliament, told French TV this week that Thomas’s death showed the “daily terror lived by millions of French people and millions of parents who are worried about their children going out on the streets in France because they know they risk being attacked”.

Bardella alleged that witnesses had said young people from housing estates had behaved as “predators” and come to the village to “hammer whites” and “hammer young people”.