This article from June 29th, 2025, is excerpted from Patrick Le Hyaric’s weekly letter. Click here to read the full letter for this week, and here to subscribe to it.
This government keeps spiralling into a twisted reversal of meaning and confusion, with the National Rally (RN/FN) sitting at the top.Now, they've taken it upon themselves to pervert, to turn inside out the meaning of June 18th, a date traditionally associated with the refusal of occupation, the refusal of collaboration, and the refusal of erasure, embodied by General de Gaulle's appeal.
The leader of the party inheriting de Gaulle's legacy, acting as the Minister of the Interior, launched a nasty nationwide control operation in train stations and on trains on June 18, 2025.The primary targets were undocumented individuals, those in transit, often survivors of wars and massacres.
That day, in a media landscape so normalised it made one sick, we witnessed a strategy of ambush, a military-bureaucratic dragnet searching for undesirable faces.That this could happen at the heart of our railway system, which organises movement and flows, recalls the worst of times. Travel would no longer be a necessity of life, but a threat, a place of suspicion.
Already unbearable, this organised roundup on June 18th is chillingly cynical.The sinister Minister of the Interior, trained by Viscount de Villiers, who presides over CNews and the Journal du Dimanche, is inverting the symbols of resistance to turn them against those who, today, are fleeing wars, persecutions, famines, and organised misery.
June 18th was a call to insubmission; Retailleau turns it into a day of total obedience to the security order.
June 18th is no longer a date of shared memory; it becomes a weapon of legitimation, a historical alibi for a policy of selection.
For this minister, June 18th is not a day for a call to liberation, to the universality of rights, but one of controls and manhunts.
The undocumented person becomes a "non-being," a subject without status, thus without rights. The foreigner becomes a danger. The repressive State seeks them everywhere, identifies them, pins them against the wall of a station or a metro, and makes them disappear from our common scene.
Much could be said about this grim day. It speaks volumes about the shift currently underway. At the end of the gutter carrying this grey, muddy water, the far-right opens its purse and waits for it to be filled.We must revolt.
Illustration image: "Home Secretary Yvette Cooper attends G7 in ItalyHome Secretary", photograph from October 3rd, 2024, by Andy Taylor – UK Home Office (CC BY 2.0) – photographie recadrée
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