Terrorism in Rambouillet

Yesterday afternoon, a man of Tunisian origin attacked and killed Stephanie, an employee at the Rambouillet police station, with a knife. He cut her throat before being killed by policemen on the scene. I found this to be much more shocking than most news of this type because I am well acquainted with the neighborhood around the police station. Our children’s school is a few hundred yards away. We’ve lived in Rambouillet for almost four years now, and for our town to be in the national spotlight and to make world news, albeit very briefly, for a story like this is actually quite surprising.

Rambouillet is a town that grew a lot in the twenty years preceding 1990, nearly doubling its size. In the thirty years since then, the town has increased its population by less than ten percent. As a result, the population continues to age. With an aging population comes a statistical tendency to vote for more conservative values and political representatives. As such, François Fillon, the Republican candidate, won the most votes in the first round of the 2017 presidential election, despite accusations of political nepotism, for which he was later convicted. Rambouillet is a town which in my mind aspires to be a miniature Versailles, and the comparison is easy to make. Rambouillet has a large château which was a residence for French royalty, including Marie Antoinette, who loved its large park and its creamery, gifted to her by her husband Louis XVI. In short, it’s not at all a hotspot for violence of any kind.

Sadly, events of this nature are not really surprising anymore in the Yvelines department as a whole, where the teacher Samuel Paty was infamously beheaded for showing cartoon caricatures depicting Mohammed in his class. Besides that, the town of Trappes has been known as being a hotspot for violence for decades, and is also recognized as having sent a lot of people to fight for the Islamic State relative to the rest of France. There continue to be clashes with police, often including attacks on police cars with rocks, and attacks on the police station with fireworks.

As a foreigner and a Christian in France, the political repercussions are at the forefront of my mind. It’s clear that President Macron has not become more popular since taking office in 2017, and his path to re-election will be a challenging one. He must convince voters that he deserves re-election in the face of discontent from the more liberal political spectrum, which supported the squashed Yellow Vest movement and strikes, as well as discontent from the more conservative political spectrum, which is not happy about continuing islamist and immigrant violence.

Continuing violence will probably cause Macron to either lose the election to someone who promises to impliment harsher actions, or Macron will have to implement those actions himself. When that happens, the response is likely to place more restrictions on religious activity in France as a whole, as the response to islamist attacks has been the promotion of secularism. Similarly, the response to immigrant violence is likely to inconvenience us as well, as we are non-European immigrants and France is unlikely to single out specific African and Middle Eastern immigrant groups. In summary, the situation is almost certainly going to get worse before it gets better.