Trappes: after the racist attack, the battle over 'common sense' begins

According to Le Monde, nearly 12,000 people, according to the town, gathered on Friday at 6 p.m. in Trappes (Yvelines) to honour the victims of the racist attack that struck the commune. Political figures, mostly from the left, including Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Raphaël Glucksmann, Olivier Faure and Ségolène Royal, were present. The mayor, Ali Rabeh, declared: "What more is needed to open your eyes?", pointing to the responsibility of the RN (National Rally, the far-right party led by Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella). The dispatch we have says nothing about the circumstances of the attack, the identity of the victims or the state of the investigation; we will not invent them. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First, restraint. People have died or been injured, and a town is in mourning. This is not the moment to turn the victims into exhibits for an argument. But the gathering itself is political, and so is the mayor's sentence: it speaks not only of a crime, but of what makes such a crime thinkable. It is for the courts to determine criminal responsibility; political responsibility, by contrast, is a matter for public debate.

This is where the notion of common sense becomes useful. For Gramsci, a social order holds less through coercion than through consent: a worldview settles in until it seems natural, almost self-evident. A discourse that, for years, casts certain residents as a problem, a threat or a foreign body does not win overnight. It advances in small touches, on TV panels, in headlines, in the "common-sense" formulas people repeat without thinking. Over time, what once shocked becomes "a legitimate question".

The mayor's sentence cuts against this: if people have not "opened their eyes", it is because their vision was trained not to see. Still, the other side will not be stripped of its common sense without a fight, and one can already bet on the response: accusations of exploitation, calls not to "politicise the tragedy". Note the paradox: neutrality is demanded precisely when it would leave the order of obviousness intact. In this theatre, everyone knows who plays the reasonable adult.

Our own profession is not off the hook. The vocabulary of the media, somewhere between "gaffe", "controversy" and "controversial remarks", has long softened what it described. A society that treats its racism as an excess of language rather than as a relation of power has already covered half the distance towards normalisation.

The 12,000 people of Trappes, a figure provided by the town and not by an independent count, say at least one thing: consent is never secured once and for all. It is worked on in institutions, schools, associations and newsrooms. Whether this gathering will be a moment of mourning, or the start of a lasting counter-hegemony, remains to be seen. On that point the dispatch tells us nothing, and the future does not yet either.