Lyhanna Murder Puts French State on Trial

Some crises a government can argue its way out of. The murder of eleven-year-old Lyhanna was not one of them, because the accused was a man the state had already been warned about and done nothing. She vanished near Fleurance, in the rural Gers, on May 29; her body was found on a farm about six days later. What turned grief into fury was the paper trail: the chief suspect had been accused the previous August of repeatedly raping a ten-year-old, and in the nine months that followed he was never detained, never questioned, the file inching through a system too overloaded to act before it was too late.

The government moved into full crisis mode, which only underlined how little it had done before. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu held emergency meetings and announced new child-protection measures. The justice minister, Gérald Darmanin, apologised to Lyhanna's family and ordered prosecutors to review 70,000 outstanding allegations of violence against children by July 14 — an order whose sheer scale was its own confession that the failure was not a one-off. More than 60,000 people marched across the country, and the anger was aimed squarely at the state.

It did not take long to become a fight about power rather than protection. Jordan Bardella, who leads the far-right Rassemblement National, demanded Darmanin's resignation, turning a dead child into a weapon against a minority government that has no majority and little room to absorb a blow like this. The case gave the RN exactly the kind of opening it thrives on: a visceral, undeniable failure of the state's first duty, with a fragile administration holding the bag. The deeper diagnosis came from people like the children's lawyer Dominique Attias, who has argued for years that French child protection is too under-resourced to do the job the law assigns it — that Lyhanna's death was less an accident than a system performing as it was built to.

The cruel contrast is what France looked like abroad in the very same week. Macron stood beside Starmer, Merz and Zelenskyy in London, co-writing the five conditions for peace in Ukraine; a French Rafale shot down a Russian drone over Latvia, a first for the country; and France absorbed, with Germany, the death of their joint fighter programme. A state that can help steer the diplomacy of a European war could not keep an eleven-year-old safe from a man it had been told about. That gap between competence abroad and failure at home is the wound the week left.

Whether Lecornu's government survives it is now the open question. The RN has stopped debating policy and started demanding scalps, and a minority government has few to spare. The measures and the case review may buy time; what they cannot easily restore is the basic faith that the state can do the simplest thing it exists to do.