The small Norman town of Yvetot has just buried an 11-year-old girl. The funeral was private, the grief public, and the anger simmering. This is not a story of a random predator, but of a failure so institutional it stinks of bureaucratic decay. The child, whose name is now a whisper of tragedy, was known to social services. The suspect, her father, was known to police. Yet the system twiddled its thumbs while a monster lived under the same roof.
We have seen this before. In the late Roman Empire, the urban prefects of Rome were so consumed by political infighting that they ignored the mounting violence in the slums. The result was a city that citizens fled in terror. Today, French police are drowning in paperwork, bound by protocols that prioritise quotas over instinct. The local gendarmerie had visited the home three times in the past year. Three times they left without a charge. Three times a child was betrayed.
What is it about modern bureaucracy that makes it so hollow? We are living in an age of intellectual decadence, where the catechism of 'due process' has replaced common sense. The officers involved will no doubt cite 'lack of evidence' or 'insufficient grounds'. But evidence is for the courtroom, not the doorstep. When a child's life hangs in the balance, a policeman's gut should be worth a thousand reports.
Consider the parallels with Victorian England. In the 1860s, the police were still a fledgling force, often mocked for their inability to catch Jack the Ripper. But they had one advantage over us: they knew their beat. They spoke to the locals, knocked on doors, and saw the same faces. Today, we have computers, databases, and a spectacular lack of human connection. The police in Yvetot did not know the family. They knew the file. That is the difference between a guardian and a clerk.
The French state, like so many in Europe, has become a machine for risk aversion. Every action must be justified in triplicate. A policeman who acts on a hunch is a lawsuit waiting to happen. A child who dies is a tragedy to be absorbed into the statistics. This is the essence of decadence: the system survives, but the people perish.
We should not be surprised. The same rot has infected our schools, our hospitals, our borders. Everywhere, the individual is sacrificed to the algorithm. The question is not whether the police were inept, but whether they are capable of being anything else. Perhaps we need to return to an older model of policing, one built on trust and intuition rather than forms and data.
But that would require a cultural revolution, and the French are not known for their appetite for change. So we will have more funerals, more questions, and more reports. And the system will absorb it all, like a bloated whale swallowing plastic. The child is buried. The questions will fade. The machine rumbles on.
