The funeral of a murdered child is always a sombre affair. But in France this week, the burial of the young victim has become something far more than a private grief. It has become a public indictment. The nation watches, and the question hangs in the air like smoke over a battlefield: How did the police fail this child?
The details, as they always are in such cases, are sickening. A child, taken. A system, meant to protect, crumbling in the face of bureaucracy, indifference, or worse. The usual suspects have emerged: underfunding, poor training, a culture of defensiveness. But let us not be so quick to accept these excuses. This is not the Fall of Rome, not yet. But it is a very French decadence, a rot that grows not from external invaders but from within.
Compare this to the Victorian era, when the Metropolitan Police was founded precisely to prevent such anarchy. There was a sense of duty, of moral purpose. Now, we have a police force that is terrified of being called racist, so it fails to protect all. We have a government that talks of security yet starves the very institutions that provide it. The child is dead. The police are sorry. The politicians express their outrage. And nothing will change.
This is the tragedy of the modern state. We have perfected the art of the apology, the inquiry, the commemoration. We have forgotten the art of prevention, of vigilance, of justice. The funeral will pass. The headlines will fade. But the failure remains. And France, like the rest of the West, will continue its slow, comfortable slide into irrelevance, clutching its platitudes while the barbarians, whether they be criminals or simply the agents of fate, lay waste to our certainties.
Let us not pretend this is a one-off. It is a symptom. The police are a mirror of the society they serve. And a society that cannot protect its children is a society that has already begun to eat itself. Requiescat in pace. But do not rest easy.
