The Normandy prisoner escape shines a light on France’s criminal underworld

‘Sometimes when we turn on the television we get the impression that nothing’s going well in France,’ Emmanuel Macron said on Monday. ‘I don’t think it’s true.’ France’s president has developed a knack of being overtaken by events – and so it has proved once again. A huge manhunt is underway after two prison guards were shot dead near Rouen in Normandy. The security officers were gunned down as they transferred a prisoner, described by police sources as a notorious drugs smuggler nicknamed ‘The Fly’, whose real name is Mohamed A. Two vehicles blocked the prison van on the A154 motorway and, as the prisoner was sprung, two of the guards were killed and three wounded in a fusillade of gunfire. The officers were shot with ‘heavy weapons’, the French justice minister Eric Dupond-Moretti said.

The attack happened as the Senate published a report about the influence of the drugs trade on French society. Shocked by what they had learned during their six months of investigations and interviews, the Senate said drugs have become a ‘scourge that is affecting our country.’

The scourge of drugs and violence now pervades every nook and cranny of France, even the remote corner of Burgundy where I live. Last Wednesday evening, two miles from where I write these lines, a man heard a disturbance on his property on which there are ponies. Going outside with his shotgun, he was attacked by a man with a knife. He parried the assailant’s thrust with his weapon, thereby suffering only a minor wound to his chest. But as the victim told the local paper he had no doubt the man ‘was there to kill’.

The assault garnered a few paragraphs in the local paper, a crime that is now worryingly common across France. In a newspaper interview earlier this year, Jean-Christophe Couvy, national secretary of a police union, said of knife crime: ‘Over the last three or four years, we’ve seen an increase in this type of attack on the ground…the violence is uninhibited and cold, with no awareness of the consequences.’

It isn’t only knife crime which is afflicting France. On Monday night, vandals used paint to cover a Holocaust Memorial in Paris with red handprints. The Wall of the Righteous lists the names of 3,900 people who risked their lives to save French Jews during the Second World War. ‘No cause can justify such degradations that dirty the memory of the victims of the Shoah,’ said the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo.

Two Frances have emerged since Macron took office in 2017. One is the France where, for a minority, business is booming and foreign investors are falling over each other to splash money. This is also the France of the Olympics, and the Cannes Film Festival, which opens today, and where for the next fortnight the beautiful people will cavort in the sun without a care in the world. They’ll probably virtue signal about Palestine and MeToo, the two issues of utmost importance to the global elite, but they won’t give a thought to the millions of Frenchmen and women who inhabit the other France.

Macron prefers to show this side of France to the world: the country’s president was in his element at the start of the week during his ‘Choose France’ initiative. Surrounded by some of the business world’s movers and shakers, the president of France joyously announced that 56 different projects will invest in France in the coming years to the tune of 15 billion euros (£13 billion).

These include Microsoft, which is pumping into France 4 billion euros (£3.5 billion) in its cloud and AI infrastructure, and Amazon, whose 1.2 billion euro (£1 billion) investment will focus on logistics and Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) cloud infrastructure.

Macron, who came to power in 2017 with a promise to turn France into a ‘start-up nation’, wants the Republic to be at the European forefront of the AI revolution. Microsoft president Brad Smith was bowled over by the president’s enthusiasm and charisma.

But the majority of France inhabit a different place. There, standards of living have slipped in the last seven years as crime has soared, from sexual violence to burglary to attempted murder, cases of which have rocketed by 59 per cent since 2016

There is scant investment in the inner cities and rural communities. There is only despair. Over nine million people live below the poverty line in France, 14.5 per cent of the population, a figure that is also on the up in recent years.

The truth is that Emmanuel Macron is a president who governs for the few and not the many. The appalling violence that has cost two prison guards their lives today is becoming sadly all too common in France.