A week. Felt: several months. Bruno Retailleau had barely set down his bags at Place Beauvau before he plunged into the whirlwind of current events, punctuated by terrible drama, murders, settling of scores, rapes, violence and attacks, such as France experiences every day. “The reality, the sad reality”he sighs. The new “first cop in France”a new expression for his Vendée predecessor Clemenceau, reads every morning the report of the night’s events, this “a chronicle of abominable facts that has become too banal”he said, of which “the media only knows a very small part”.
Monday September 23. Bruno Retailleau has just left the transfer of power with Gérald Darmanin when he reads the alert on his phone, via a monitoring system “extremely powerful and precise”about the murder of Philippine. Stupefaction. A few hours later, on a visit to the Courneuve police station, he spoke with the Paris police chief, Laurent Nunez. A few words and details have an even more serious effect than the cold description of the software: “You become aware of things. I understood that beyond the information, beyond the facts, it was going to move the whole of France…”
“I swore to myself to tell the truth to the French in a brutal way”
Philippine was assassinated between Friday and Saturday, the day before the government’s announcement. Bruno Retailleau was not yet a member, but this absolute tragedy marks his entry into the Ministry of the Interior. Faced with such an atrocity, how does a man, a father, a Minister of the Interior react? we ask him. “It’s the same reaction,” he snaps. A father like a Minister of the Interior has a duty of protection. »
The memory of the Lola affair then comes back to him. To avoid reliving the “recovery” trials coming from the left and the media, he warns: “She had also suffered abuse, in different and at the same time similar circumstances. I responded to these voices that are raised to keep things quiet, that indecency was silence. » He insists: “I swore to myself to tell the truth to the French, in a brutal, non-diplomatic way, because that is the condition: when we make the right diagnosis, we can provide the right remedies. These facts are not “news stories”. This term makes me bristle, because I see in it a desire to trivialize. We give it a dimension of chance, of fatality. A politician must refuse this inevitability. »
Philippine’s name will mark his time at the Ministry of the Interior, he knows it. “The internal commitment I made from the start of the week is to do everything in his memory, even if it means shaking up the rules, overturning the table, so that it doesn’t happen againhe says. Because each time, the same causes produce the same tragedies. »
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Grief, and now anger. The Minister of the Interior cites pell-mell “shocking releases and a maquis of legal constraints that are far too strong”. He also mentions two cases, revealed yesterday by the JDD: a Tunisian implicated in a case of kidnapping, sequestration and rape in the Nantes region, released after twenty-four hours from the Nîmes CRA after having invoked a surgical procedure for… the cruciate ligaments! The man vanished into thin air. The other individual, Chechen, subject to a territorial ban, drug trafficker, released after expiry of the 90-day deadline of the same CRA of Nîmes on September 18, and currently in police custody for acts of murder by an organized gang committed… a week later, September 25.
“That’s not possiblecomments the Minister of the Interior. We reach a point of imbalance where the rules end up protecting dangerous individuals more than victims and society. We can no longer accept protecting ourselves behind rules of law that do not protect our population. When the rules are faulty, they must be changed, whether on early releases, the penal response, sentence reductions, the length of detention, the conditions of expulsion, the non-suspensive appeal of the prefects at the time of the release in a CRA. Such tragedies must not happen again. » Senator Bruno Retailleau, who two years ago organized a conference on the rule of law, is not far away. “Protect the French. It is the first of their rights, he insists. The state was invented to protect the weakest. Protection is therefore the first duty of the State. »
“The commitment I made is to do everything in his memory”
The left and the press, again, have already begun to prosecute those who want to change things by caricaturing them as enemies of democracy and populists. He answers them: “The rule of law is not intangible or sacred. It is a set of rules, a hierarchy of standards, judicial control, a separation of powers. But the source of the rule of law is democracy, it is the sovereign people. »
We feel Bruno Retailleau marked by pain, “inhabited by a feeling of gravity and great determination”he said. He hesitated to go to the funeral on Friday in Versailles, before giving up: “I considered that this moment of contemplation, of prayer, should be an intimate moment, protected from media noise. On the other hand, when she deems it appropriate, I will see the family. » He has already sent a message to the parents, and exchanged with Father Grosjean, who celebrated the funeral mass. He didn’t watch the images of the start of the ceremony, and when he was told the words of Philippine’s father and fiancé, he blurted out: ” My God… “
