A wave of violence is sweeping France as gunmen attack the country’s prisons. In some cases, vehicles belonging to prison staff have been set alight and in other incidents bullets from AK47s were sprayed at the gates. In the eastern city of Nancy, a prison officer was threatened at his home.
The violence began on Sunday evening and is ongoing: overnight three vehicles were set ablaze outside Tarascon prison in the Côte d’Azur region, and a fire was started in an apartment where a prison guard lives close to Paris. Graffiti was also sprayed on the wall. No one has been hurt but the coordinated attacks, carried out the length and breadth of France, have shaken the Republic.
The despair is felt across France
Gérald Darmanin, the Minister of Justice, visited a prison in Toulon on Tuesday, where thirteen bullet holes scarred the gates, and attributed the attacks to France’s powerful drug cartels. At the start of this month, the National Assembly passed a new law that will target these cartels and Darmanin believes this was their response. ‘We are taking firm measures that are clearly provoking a reaction,’ he said. Darmanin described the violence as ‘terrorist attacks’.
No one has claimed responsibility for the assaults on the prisons, and police are keeping an open mind at this stage. Although the organisation and the use of assault rifles would suggest it is the work of the cartels, slogans of the extreme left (the initials ‘DDPF’ – ‘Défense des prisonniers français’) were sprayed on cars and the walls of some prisons.
There is an element of the extreme left in France that is well-organised and well-trained; they remain the prime suspects in the coordinated sabotage of the French rail network last July, which brought the system to a standstill on the day the Paris Olympics began.
Regardless of who carried out the attack, it is another sign of the ‘Mexicanisation’ of France, a term once used sparingly but which has in recent months become common currency. Last May, two prison guards were shot dead in a motorway ambush as they transported a cartel leader to another establishment; in October four police cars outside a station in the south of France were fire-bombed in revenge for a crackdown on local drug dealers.
Then there are the tit-for-tat killings, young men gunned down by rival cartels across France. On Monday night, a 23-year-old was shot dead in Arles, and the week before it was a 19-year-old in Vaulx-en-Velin, a suburb of Lyon. In its report of the murder, the local paper described the residents as ‘distraught’ because their neighbourhood ‘is plagued by drug-related violence’.
This despair is felt across France. During his visit to the prison on Toulon on Tuesday, Gérald Darmanin declared that ‘there is pressure on the Republic to back down, but it will not’. This is not true. Last week a primary school in northern Paris announced it was relocating because drug dealers in the neighbourhood endangered the staff and the pupils. Naïma M’faddel, a former deputy mayor and an advisor on inner-city politics, warned:
This is neither common sense nor pragmatism. It’s a renunciation. A humiliation inflicted on the authority of the State, on teachers, on children, and on all the inhabitants who still believe in the Republican ideal.
France’s Minister of the Interior, Bruno Retailleau, appeared on television on Tuesday evening and admitted that the Republic was ‘at war’ with the drugs cartels. Battles were being won, he said, such as the recent record seizures of cocaine, up by 202 per cent in the first two months of 2025 compared with the same period last year. Retailleau promised that the new drugs bill, which will be ratified by the Senate at the end of this month, will be a turning point.
An agency similar to America’s Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) will be established, allowing better coordination between police, customs and intelligence services. They will be assisted by the formation of a national prosecutor’s office dedicated to pursuing organised crime.
When he presented the bill to parliament last November, Retailleau warned that ‘either we all mobilise for this great years-long battle and win it, or there will be the ‘Mexicanisation’ of France’. That warning is more urgent than ever. The cartels are growing in strength and confidence. They see a Republic that is weak and afraid, and lacking the stomach for a long fight.
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