Paris is in flames. Not literally, perhaps, but the moral outrage over the murder of young Lyhanna has ignited a fury that threatens to consume the French political establishment. And what is the response from Macron’s technocrats? To import the British model of policing. One can almost hear the ghost of Talleyrand chuckling from the grave. The French, a people who pride themselves on Cartesian logic and republican universalism, are now to be saved by the very system that gave us the Met’s institutionalised incompetence and the sordid spectacle of ‘county lines’ drug gangs. It is a tragic farce, a historical irony so rich it could curdle milk.
The murder of Lyhanna, a 12-year-old girl of North African descent, has become a cause célèbre. The details are grim: a botched police intervention, accusations of racial profiling, and a community left to grieve in the shadow of the banlieues. The French government, desperate to quell the unrest, has announced a raft of measures. Among them, the adoption of British-style ‘neighbourhood policing’ and a new emphasis on ‘community engagement’. This is the intellectual equivalent of using a stained tea towel to mop up a flooding Seine.
To understand the folly, one must first understand the French tradition. Since the days of the Commune, French policing has been centralised, militarised, and fundamentally suspicious of local autonomy. The Préfecture de Police is a state within a state, a relic of Napoleon’s administrative genius. It is rigid, hierarchical, and utterly unsuited to the messy realities of a multicultural suburb. But at least it is French. The British model, by contrast, is the product of a gentler, more amateurish tradition: the bobby on the beat, the local constable who knows the shopkeeper by name. This was never a system of rigorous law enforcement, but of negotiated order. It worked in a society that was homogeneous and deferential. In modern Britain, that order has collapsed. The police are now overwhelmed by drugs, knife crime, and a culture of impunity. They have become social workers in stab vests, arbiters of a failed multiculturalism. And the French think this is a solution?
The parallels with the decline of the Roman Empire are striking. As the barbarians pressed at the gates, the emperors adopted foreign mercenaries and alien customs, hoping to buy time. Instead, they accelerated the rot. The French are now doing the same: importing a system that has demonstrably failed in its native soil. The Lyhanna murder is not a problem of policing models. It is a problem of cultural cohesion, of failed integration, of a state that has lost its moral authority. No amount of ‘community engagement’ will fix that. The French need to look inward, to their own traditions of laïcité and republican rigour, rather than aping the tired nostrums of Anglo-Saxon liberal democracy.
There is also a deeper, more troubling issue: the intellectual decadence of the French elite. Once, they were the masters of political thought, the authors of the Enlightenment. Now they are reduced to copying the worst of British social policy. This is the final victory of the Anglo-American model: not through conquest, but through the seduction of a hollowed-out intelligentsia. The French should be ashamed. They should be outraged. But instead, they are simply enraged at the wrong target. The murder of Lyhanna is a tragedy, but the response is a farce. And in the wings, the Fourth Republic’s ghost waits, ready to applaud the collapse. As a Briton, I can only offer this advice: look to yourselves, not to us. We have nothing to offer but our failures.
