Shock And Grief Over Annecy Attack
The stabbing of four children in a park has triggered debates over security, immigration, and mental health.
France is a remarkably safe country by global standards. While the number of voluntary homicides increased by 8% in 2022 to 948 victims, the homicide rate per 100,000 people is about 25% of the United States.
There is not the regular drumbeat of mass shootings or other violent crimes filling news shows each night. France has maintained a reputation for being a relatively safe place for international visitors (though constant warnings about pickpockets will echo during any trip here).
So when a truly horrifying act of violence happens here, it feels exceptional and deeply shocking. And not surprisingly, it generates major international headlines.
Such has been the case since June 8 when a man stabbed four pre-schoolers and two adults in Annecy. The attack happened in the Jardins de l'Europe, part of the Pâquier Park just on the edge of Lake Annecy. The lake is a huge tourist draw as is the city’s Venice-like city center that is lined with canals.
Amazingly, no one died, in part thanks to the extraordinary efforts of emergency room doctors and nurses. Three of the children — Ettie, Ennio, and Alba wages 2 to 3 — were severely wounded.
One of them was whisked 100 km by helicopter to Grenoble where the hospital has an ER unit that specializes in children. But the other 2 were so severely injured that they couldn’t be transported. So a team from Grenoble flew to Annecy to treat them. After stabilizing them, the children were then flown to Grenoble.
As the medical drama unfolded behind the scenes, the shock waves of the attack began to spread rapidly. Journalists descended on the scene while images of the attack began to circulate on the internet.
Witnesses described a terrifying scene.
"He jumped [into the area], he started screaming and directly he went toward the strollers and repeatedly stabbed the little ones," said one witness interviewed by BFM-TV.
Police quickly arrested Abdalmasih Hanoun whose shorthand bio seemed written to further inflame reactions: a 31-year-old Syrian refugee who had arrived in France by way of Sweden.
The diffusion of images and video clips across social media once again raised questions about how these platforms were monitoring violent and dangerous content. The European Union’s digital services act requires platforms to quickly identify and remove any harmful content or face stiff penalties.
However, as The Guadian noted:
Bystander footage of a man attacking children in a park in south-east France appeared online after the attack on Thursday and was still available, on Twitter and TikTok, on Friday.
The distressing footage has been used by TV networks but is heavily edited. The raw versions seen by the Guardian show the attacker dodging a member of the public and running around the playground before appearing to stab a toddler in a pushchair.
From there, multiple storylines emerged.
The Hero
Henri d’Anselme, 24, is a devout Catholic who happened to be in Annecy on June 8 as part of a personal nationwide tour of France’s cathedrals.
As the attack was in progress, d’Anselme confronted Hanoun by swinging his backpack at him. Eventually, Hanoun began to run and d’Anselme gave chase, a pursuit captured by videos that spread across social media where he was dubbed the “backpack hero.”
“I tried to act as every Frenchman should act. Or how every Frenchmen would act,” he said in an interview on BFMTV. “It was just impossible to leave defenseless people to be attacked like that by someone who seemed to me effectively to be a maniac.”
In addition, two city workers, a young man renting boats, a math teacher, and another tourist attempted to chase down Hanoun. These heroes of Annecy met with President Emmanuel Macron who thanked them and praised them for demonstrating the values of the republic.
France’s Interior Minister said he would nominate all of the people who intervened to stop the attacks and save the lives of the victims for the Legion of Honor, a special recognition for heroes of the republic.
D’Anselme asked Macron if he could be present at the re-inauguration of Notre Dame in Paris when it reopens, a request the president promised to honor.
The Suspect
Following his arrest, Hanoun was charged with attempted murder and reportedly refused to talk to the police to explain his motivations. But in the aftermath, given his background and origins, people began to speculate around the obvious questions: Was this an act of terrorism?
As it turns out, Hanoun’s story is a complicated one.
Hanoun had been granted refugee status in Sweden in 2013 and holds a residency permit there. But he had been denied citizenship. His wife, a Swedish woman, told Agence France-Presse that they had been divorced for several months.
"He couldn't get Swedish citizenship, so he decided to leave the country. We split up because I didn't want to leave Sweden," she told AFP.
That brought him to Annecy where local residents told reporters that he had been living as a homeless person, spending large chunks of his day around the lake, and sleeping in a cardboard box. He had applied for asylum in France, and on his application said he was a “Christian from Syria,” according to AFP. That request was rejected just 4 days before the attack.
In some of the videos circulating online, Hanoun is shouting “in the name of Jesus Christ.” As this angle emerged, observers began to ruminate on the way fate had thrown two devoutly religious Christians — d’Anselme and Hanoun — together on that day.
The picture of Hanoun continued to grow more complex. In subsequent interviews, his Swedish wife told reporters that she had become increasingly concerned about his mental health in recent months. She noted that he had fled Syria where he was serving in the Syrian army after his unit was attacked and everyone but him was killed, leaving him traumatized.
No one offered this as an excuse for his actions. But several days after the attack, Hanoun was placed on suicide watch and transferred to a psychiatric hospital, according to Le Parisien.
The Politicians
President Macron on Twitter called the crime an "attack of absolute cowardice" and added: "Children and an adult suffered life-threatening injuries. The nation is in shock. Our thoughts are with them, their families and the emergency services involved."
Shortly after the attack, Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne rushed to Annecy while the Assemblée Nationale, observed a minute of silence.
But many others tried to seize on the attack for their own political agendas, particularly to stoke anti-immigrant sentiment.
A French nationalist group organized an impromptu march in Annecy. Marine le Pen's niece Marion Maréchal promised that "The time for reckoning will come." Eric Ciotti, head of the conservative Les Républicains party called for "a reaction from all those who do not want our nation to be destroyed" while another member of his party talked about an "assailant dressed in green, wearing a turban" and insisted that “Uncontrolled mass immigration kills. Instead of lamenting every new crime, let's finally stop mass immigration!”
Most prominently, failed far-right presidential candidate and dimestore Star Wars villain Éric Zemmour leveraged the attack to attempt to become relevant again. He tweeted, “Our children are in danger of death as we look away. For how long?” He then added the hashtag: Francocide.
Maybe this doesn’t really need to be defined but to be clear, Francocide basically implies the killing of a “real” French person (IE, white) by a non-French person (whose skin is of a darker shade and comes from outside of France). Zemmour coined the phrase, according to The Local, last year after an Algerian woman killed a 12-year-old French girl.
Zemmour has been riding this anti-immigrant wave since Annecy to regular television appearances and newspaper columns to rant against the foreigners who are diluting the pure blood of the French. He even suggested that the rise in murders by knife over the past decade was the result of the growth in the number of people from foreign cultures.
Even better for Zemmour and his minions, the use of this term and its spread on social media prompted a condemnation by the U.N. Human Rights Commission which called on people to avoid generalizations and stereotypes linked to Hanoun’s background and refugee status. Which of course gave Zemmour the chance to denounce internationalists for undermining French culture.
Macron’s government has been mulling immigration reforms since last year, though it has yet to propose a concrete bill. Naturally, the attacks have turned up the heat on the subject, but it’s still not clear how that will translate into policy.
Attempting a more level-headed response, Macron highlighted the need to have a reasonable conversation about immigration. But he also said the country may need to revisit its approach to treating mental health.
“There are of course immigration issues that will have to be addressed. If we don't do it, others will do it in our place," Macron said, according to Le Parisien. But he added: “This horror is a symptom of the violence of society. But make no mistake, there is a mental health issue. It is a continent that remains to be conquered.”
Chris O’Brien
Le Pecq