After the Trappes attack, the town demands to be something other than a backdrop

According to franceinfo, a 39-year-old man killed a resident of Trappes, in the Yvelines, on 23 October. He regarded the commune as "a den of Islamists." In a report published on 30 October, the channel says that residents of Trappes point to the responsibility of politicians and the media for the stigmatising image that clings to their town. "They make out that it's dangerous here," says one of the report's headlines. The file is still thin: the dispatch does not detail the political statements or the media coverage in question, and we will not invent them. A man is dead; that is the central fact, and nothing that follows should make us forget it.

What follows is our reading. Let us look first at the mechanism: a killer names a town as a nest of enemies, and its inhabitants find themselves having to argue against a reputation they did not create. They are both bereaved and obliged to explain themselves. It is a rather convenient reversal: the victim here is not only the person who was killed, but also the community that is always spoken of in the third person.

One can see in this a small textbook case of what Gramsci called common sense. Hegemony does not rest only on force; it holds when a way of seeing becomes so commonplace that no one notices it any more. That Trappes should be "a problem," a subject for televised debate before being a place where people live, belongs to that self-evident truth without an author. No one has to decree it; it circulates through headlines, studio panels and offhand remarks. When a man takes it literally, the disturbing question is not who "armed" him, which is for the courts to establish, but which climate of opinion this discourse feeds on, and who made it breathable.

The Gazette's concepts on ideology offer a useful rule: it is not a matter of lies, but of a partial image presented as universal. An accurate statistic, a real scene, an authentic news item can add up to a false portrait as long as one only ever shows those. Framing does the work that an outright falsehood would not have dared to do. And it always raises the same question: who benefits from this common sense? Those for whom a suburb forever under suspicion excuses them from talking about jobs, transport and public services.

Franceinfo's report has at least the merit of giving the floor to residents, organic intellectuals in their own way: people who know their town from the inside and know what the clichés stuck to it are worth. There remains a paradox, one that the Gazette's own newsroom is not the last to share: they are listened to mostly when someone has died. Against the "harassment" they denounce, a single report is not enough; their version would need to stop being a counterpoint and finally become a starting point. (our translation)