“Politics,” the mayor added, “often do more harm than good.”
Even in a country with ingrained traditions of violent contestation, where the revolutionaries of 1789 guillotined King Louis XVI and Queen Marie-Antoinette, an upsurge of physical and verbal attacks and online torrents of hatred directed at public officials — often, now, over COVID-19 policies — are ringing alarm bells.
Violence hasn’t approached the level of the storming of the U.S. Capitol by Donald Trump supporters in 2021. Nor have French lawmakers been killed like their counterparts in Britain. There, the fatal stabbing of a member of Parliament in October prompted renewed national soul-searching about the safety of elected officials with a proud tradition of readily meeting voters.
Still, there’s mounting disquiet in France in the wake of apparent arson attacks in December that targeted a lawmaker and a mayor, both aligned with President Emmanuel Macron, and other violence targeting elected officials as the government steadily increased pressure on the non-vaccinated to get COVID-19 jabs to curb the surge of infections fueled by the omicron variant.
The Interior Ministry recorded a year-on-year increase of 47 percent in acts of violence directed at elected officials through the first 11 months of 2021, with 162 lawmakers and 605 mayors or their deputies reporting attacks. Lawmakers say death threats have become everyday occurrences. Titled “decapitation,” an email received by lawmaker Ludovic Mendes in November read: “That’s how we dealt with tyrants during the French Revolution.”
This month, during protests against France’s vaccine pass that bars the unvaccinated from cafés and other venues, about 30 angry people besieged the office of lawmaker Romain Grau, shoving him and yelling furiously.
