There is something uniquely French about the collective gasp of horror that accompanies every fresh indignity emerging from the housing estates of Marseille. The latest revelation, splashed across the international wires with the grim breathlessness usually reserved for failed sub-Saharan states, is that the local narcotics cartels have dispensed with veteran enforcers in favour of teenagers recruited on encrypted messaging boards. Boys barely old enough to shave, let alone comprehend the finality of an exit wound, are now being dispatched with automatic rifles to settle wholesale accounts for four-figure sums. The commentariat in Paris has duly responded with its traditional repertoire of solemn commissions, demands for more ping-pong tables in community centres, and dark mutterings about the moral corruption of the internet.
One might almost admire the purity of their denial. To listen to the French interior ministry, which has never encountered an urban catastrophe it could not reclassify as a temporary administrative oversight, this descent into child-soldier logistics is a sudden, foreign pathology. In truth, it is merely the ultimate, unregulated triumph of market forces operating within a vacuum created by decades of republican cowardice. The republic promised universal integration, a grand secular fiction that looked splendid in eighteenth-century pamphlets, but delivered instead sullen concrete archipelagos where the gendarmerie rarely venture past sundown without tactical armour and an evacuation plan.
What the grandees of the Fifth Republic cannot bear to admit, though anyone with eyes and a working passport saw it coming years ago, is that crime has simply adopted the modern labour model. Why maintain expensive, unionized capos with inconvenient loyalties when one can contract out cold-blooded murder to an expendable minor whose brain will not finish developing for another decade? The juvenile hitman is the dark apotheosis of late-capitalist efficiency: cheap, legally shielded from severe retribution by an antiquated penal code designed when youth offending meant filching apples, and instantly replaceable via a push notification. It is Deliveroo with a Kalashnikov, operating in broad daylight while the state drafts white papers on social cohesion.
The legal system, entirely by design, is entirely toothless against this species of nihilism. When a fourteen-year-old shoots an innocent driver in the back of the head because he mistook him for a rival dealer, as occurred recently to national bewilderment, the magistrate is constrained by a jurisprudence that still views the adolescent as an inherently salvageable cherub who merely wandered off the path of civic virtue. The cartels know this. The children, possessing a terrifyingly cynical grasp of their own immunity, know this better still. A brief stint in a rehabilitation facility is not a deterrent; it is merely an interlude for physical conditioning and professional networking.
Naturally, the political classes will offer their usual sterile dichotomy. The left will insist, against all available evidence, that another billion euros poured into municipal landscaping will turn teenage killers into productive library patrons. The right, clutching its pearls with predictable vigour, will demand curfews and the deployment of troops, forgetting that the military is trained to defeat an enemy, not to baby-sit armed adolescents on mopeds who vanish into stairwells they know far better than any paratrooper. Neither faction has the stomach to confront the real sickness, which is the total dissolution of authority in the very neighbourhoods the state abandoned thirty years ago to preserve its own Parisian comfort.
Europe spends an enormous amount of time lecturing the developing world on the virtues of the rules-based order, a sermon delivered from ever-shrinking islands of domestic stability. Yet here, in the second city of the continent’s premier military power, the social contract has been rewritten by adolescent sociopaths taking freelance contracts from anonymous handles. It is a grotesque spectacle, certainly, but hardly a surprising one. If you allow the law to become a polite suggestion for an entire generation, you should not express astonishment when their younger brothers decide that murder is just another entry-level job.
Rupert Halloway