Democracy, a Stepping Stone to the Worst
Some tragedies deserve to remain exactly what they are. The death of Quentin Deranque, a 23-year-old French far-right activist beaten to death during a street fight in Lyon on February 14, is one of them. It is a human tragedy, and all the compassion in the world is owed to his family, which, incidentally, has itself condemned the “political exploitation” carried out in his name.
But in France, as elsewhere, grief has become prime political raw material. And what has unfolded over the past ten days around this incident goes far beyond Quentin Deranque’s personal fate.
Because the method is well known, well rehearsed, and imported. Americans even have a word for it: “martyrology.” Transforming a victim into a symbol, a symbol into mobilization, and mobilization into legitimacy. Charlie Kirk and his counterparts within the Trumpist right have elevated it into an art of governing. Every incident involving an opponent becomes proof of an existential threat; every death within the conservative camp signals the urgency of a total cultural war. The mechanism is relentless and requires neither a program, nor a record, nor coherence. It only requires an image, a crowd, and a designated enemy.
In France, the sequence was orchestrated perfectly. Within hours, Quentin Deranque’s death was no longer a homicide under judicial investigation, but proof that “the far left kills.” Jordan Bardella called for a republican cordon sanitaire against La France Insoumise. Marion Maréchal declared on television that “far-right violence is negligible; statistically, it does not exist.”
Meanwhile, activists from Italy, Belgium, and Germany marched through Lyon behind a portrait of the deceased young man, while mosques were vandalized with graffiti and left-wing offices attacked. And the Interior Minister authorized the march. That says it all.
But facts, in this kind of sequence, are never really the issue. The issue is opportunity. And the opportunity here is twofold.
First, to accelerate the normalization of the far right within the French political landscape. The Rassemblement National and its satellites are no longer seeking mere tolerance; they are seeking to replace the republican right altogether, a political family that has melted away like snow under the sun. To achieve that, they need a suitable image: the camp of order, defenders of victims, respectable patriots. Quentin Deranque, a deceased neo-fascist activist affiliated with the Allobroges according to established elements of the case, has become the martyr who makes presentable what should not be.
Second, the strategy aims to kill two birds with one stone by cornering La France Insoumise and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, fusing radical left-wing politics and physical violence into a single rejection, making the very idea of a Mélenchon vote toxic ahead of the next presidential election, and building a moral sanitary cordon around a candidate whom polls still place firmly in the political game. McCarthyism? The word may be old, but the method is similar: designate an internal enemy, assign them collective responsibility for violence, and demand public capitulation.
LFI nevertheless condemned the violence. It does not matter. In this game, condemnation is irrelevant; only association endures.
What is happening in France reflects a much deeper schism observable throughout the Western world. The dividing lines are no longer traditionally left versus right. They have become irreconcilable cultural blocs, tribes that no longer share the same facts, the same grief, or even the same dead to mourn. It is an Israeli-Palestinian logic imported into Western democracies. Each camp has its legitimate victims and its invisible victims, its martyrs and its structurally guilty enemies. In such a universe, politics is no longer the art of compromise. It has become the permanent theater of a war of narratives.
And that is where the deepest danger lies. Not in the violence of a few militants from either extreme, but in the way democratic systems themselves have become springboards toward something else.
Democracy has once again become a stepping stone, with elections serving as tools and institutions functioning as costumes. One recalls that Adolf Hitler came to power through the ballot box, that Benito Mussolini was appointed prime minister through perfectly legal procedures. Donald Trump returned to the White House through electoral means before signing executive orders in rapid succession.
The democratic form survives, while the substance empties out. Fyodor Dostoevsky once wrote that beauty would save the world. But watching what is happening in Paris, Washington, Budapest, or Rome, one is entitled to seriously doubt it.
Zouhair Yata
