The death of Quentin Deranque

On February 14, 23-year-old Catholic French student Quentin Deranque died in a Lyon hospital from brain injuries sustained during a violent assault two days earlier. He had been thrown to the ground and beaten by at least six individuals while on the side-lines of a protest outside the Lyon Institute of Political Studies. What began as a political demonstration in France ended in a young man’s death and now, a nation’s reckoning.

Deranque was at the protest alongside the women of the Némésis Collective, founded in 2019 to defend the rights of Western women, partially against false doctrines that claim to support them while ignoring sexual violence of illegal immigrants across the continent. The group was protesting a conference organised by the far-left La France Insoumise party. Authorities have since arrested several individuals, some of whom may be linked to the illegal far-left militant antifascist collective Jeune Garde (Young Guard). The investigation remains ongoing, but the broader implications of the attack are already evident.

The French Republic has long prided itself on a culture of vigorous debate, grounded in the premise that speech and assembly are rights secured for all citizens. If demonstrators can be beaten into fatal silence, that premise is weakened. The people of France know this, and this is one of the reasons why there are prayer vigils and other events calling for justice that have been organized after Quentin’s tragic death.

Yet the darker reality is this: France’s current political leadership has allowed a culture of intimidation to take root against the French population that wants to defend its heritage, its culture and its way of life. This manifests largely as disproportionate scrutiny and marginalisation of right-leaning movements, and as indifference to the native French population’s victimisation at the hands of violent immigrants. The failure to respond decisively to violence overall only widens the space in which it flourishes. A republic cannot ask its citizens for civic loyalty while seeming indifferent to their security and safety.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni described Quentin Deranque’s death as a wound for all of Europe. It can just as easily be understood as a wound to the broader West. The events in Lyon are not as distant from other democracies as they might appear. The tragedy carries echoes of the killing of Charlie Kirk only months earlier. When a young man is killed at a public gathering, whether speaking into a microphone or standing beside women attempting to make their voices heard, it signals that something in the civic order has gone profoundly wrong.

As is well known, those of us in the US have experienced our own share of episodes of political violence that have shaken public confidence in the stability of its institutions. Charlie Kirk’s death was the most recent in the past few decades featuring assaults on lawmakers, attacks on demonstrators, shootings targeting religious communities and political organizations, and repeated attempts on the lives of public officials.

The pattern is familiar. The Left recasts views that were commonplace a short time ago as extremist and fascist. Their opponents are portrayed not as fellow citizens with whom one disagrees, but as existential threats to be neutralised. In that climate, violence becomes rationalised as defence. The line between protest and coercion blurs. The result is a corrosive cycle in which citizens self-censor for fear of their own lives, and their loved ones.

This epidemic of violence plaguing the West is more than a Left versus Right issue; it is a conflict between those who accept that political differences must be addressed through debate and those who resort to force. The Left has been the one to demonstrate a preference of silencing its adversaries through intimidation, with little regard to the preservation of the democratic order, despite stated claims otherwise. Couple that with a clear disregard for the now decade-long stream of violent immigrant crimes against the French citizenry, which show no signs of slowing down, and there is little question as to why a tragic death like Quentin’s has occurred.

The death of Quentin Deranque forces a question that France’s leadership has long postponed: Can a republic survive when it is fierce toward one form of extremism and hesitant toward another? Innocent French people have paid dearly, in some of the worst attacks on its native population in present-day Europe. The Charlie Hebdo attacks in 2015 was the first of many subsequent attacks of native French people at the hands of violent Islamists, whether it was the Bataclan Massacre, the Nice truck attack on Bastille Day or the beheading of teacher Samuel Paty. Each time, there are vows of vigilance from the French elite, but an absence of concrete action needed to prevent future attacks like this. Subsequently, ordinary citizens find their rhetoric branded as anti-republican, fascist, and otherwise extremist for national identity or simply wanting an end to violence in their community. That imbalance breeds resentment and distrust. It sends a message that certain ideologies are confronted with the full force of the state, while others are acceptable. And it resulted this month in another killing of an innocent Frenchman.

France faces a choice that extends beyond this single case. France must decide whether it will remain France. Either it can continue down a path of ideological favouritism and empowering the forces destabilising its society. Or it can reassert the principle that the republic exists first to protect its citizens, their safety, and their right to speak without fear of violence. If it fails to do the latter, tragedies like Quentin Deranque’s death will not remain exceptional. And when that happens, the question will no longer be whether France can preserve its political traditions. The question will be whether it still possesses the will to defend them.

Kristen Ziccarelli is a writer living and working in Washington, D.C.