After Trappes, the 'atmospheric racism' didn't fall from the sky

According to Le Monde, the suspect in the attack carried out on Friday 23 October in Trappes acknowledged his ideological roots in the far right. In an opinion piece, the daily argues that this political family has been imposing its themes on French society for far too many years and creating a noxious atmosphere, six months before the presidential election. The file before us is thin: nothing on the details of the facts, nothing on the victims. We will therefore say nothing about them, except that their suffering calls for restraint, not exploitation. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

It would be comfortable to file the affair under the heading of the isolated individual, the "lone wolf", the personal pathology. That would be convenient for everyone, except for the truth. A criminal act remains the act of a man, and the courts will say what they have to say. But the ideas that feed it circulate, and one can ask where they come from and who benefits from them.

We speak of "atmospheric racism": not a slogan shouted from a platform, but a background hum, a vocabulary that settles in, subjects that come back every evening on the television panels. Marxists know the mechanism. Those who own the means of dissemination, newspapers, channels, opinion pages, tend to pass off as common sense what is merely a partial view of the world. The "common sense" that marks the foreigner, the neighbour, the Muslim as the problem diverts attention from rent, wages and the hospital that has closed. The useful question is always the same: whom does this common sense serve?

Gramsci called this hegemony: a power that holds as much through consent as through force, and that is won in the everyday trenches of media, schools and conversation. The far right has understood this, and has gained ground, not only through its vote totals, but because its opponents ended up adopting its words so as not to lose sight of it. By chasing its agenda, we give it a leg up.

Six months before the presidential election, the temptation will be strong, on the government side as well as the reformist side, to respond with occasion-driven indignation and a security crackdown, then return to quiet management. This is precisely the slope Rosa Luxemburg criticised in those who make adjusting the system their horizon: one administers what exists, and leaves intact the machinery of division.

The answer will not come from ministerial offices or television studios. It will come from what ordinary people build together: unions, associations, neighbourhood groups, collectives that remind us that those who share the same building and the same employer have more in common than what they are told to see. The poison in the atmosphere does not dissipate with press releases; it clears by opening the windows, and by opening them together.