As Marseille’s murder toll rises, so too do doubts over France’s ability to restore order.
France has long been accustomed to soul-searching moments — bursts of violence, political shocks, and the occasional national reckoning over the state of the Republic.
Yet even by the turbulent standards of recent years, the murder of 20-year-old Mehdi Kessaci in Marseille feels like a turning point, a grim signal that one of the country’s most troubled cities may be slipping beyond the grasp of the state.
The facts, as they stand, are shocking enough. Mehdi, a young man with ambitions to join the police, was gunned down in the centre of Marseille as he parked his car. A motorcycle drew up; the pillion passenger fired several rounds from a 9mm pistol. The attack was not a dispute, nor a robbery gone wrong, but a targeted execution — one that followed the same brutal logic that has governed Marseille’s worsening drugs war for years.
The killing also carries a harrowing personal dimension. Mehdi is the second brother that young anti-violence campaigner Amine Kessaci has lost to suspected gang crime. In 2020, their elder brother, Brahim, was shot and his charred body left in a burned-out car — a “barbecue,” as such killings are grimly known in the city’s criminal underworld. That is the sort of term that should chill any national leader. When a society has informal vocabulary for this level of violence, it tells you how embedded the phenomenon has become.
Brahim, investigators acknowledge, had drifted into the orbit of local drugs gangs. Mehdi, by contrast, appears to have had no involvement of any kind. His ambition was to enter the police — a tragically ironic dream, given how his life ended. Prosecutors fear that his death was not about him at all, but a warning, or retaliation, aimed at his brother Amine, who founded an association to support victims of drugs violence and even took their cause to President Emmanuel Macron.
That possibility is not speculation from the fringes; it comes from Marseille’s chief prosecutor, Nicolas Bessone. “That hypothesis is absolutely not being ruled out,” he said on French radio. If proven, he added, it would signal “another threshold” crossed — recalling dark periods in French history when killings were carried out simply because of one’s family affiliation.
It is a sobering assessment from a senior judicial figure, and it raises an unavoidable question: have French authorities lost control of Marseille?
For years, leaders in Paris have insisted that the Republic would impose its authority on the city’s gang-dominated districts, particularly the northern arrondissements: dense, marginalised neighbourhoods with high levels of unemployment, parallel economies, and criminal networks operated by increasingly young recruits. Successive interior ministers have deployed more police, more raids, more resources. The rhetoric has been uncompromising.
And yet, the killings continue. They have become so frequent that Marseille’s residents have developed a grim resilience to nightly gunfire, getaway scooters, and the sight of masked teenagers carrying automatic weapons. Even jaded commentators now admit the city is caught in a hybrid conflict: part drugs turf war, part fragmented insurgency, operating in pockets where the state’s reach has thinned.
What is especially alarming about Mehdi’s murder is not just its brazenness, but its symbolism. A killing intended as a message to a citizen engaging with the political establishment is a direct challenge to the authority of the French state. It crosses a red line that separates criminal violence from something far more destabilising: organised intimidation aimed at undermining democratic participation itself.
Marseille’s descent did not happen overnight. For decades the city’s gangs have evolved from local outfits into heavily armed, internationally linked networks. The profits of drug trafficking are vast, and the competition for control has grown correspondingly fierce. Turf disputes that once might have resulted in beatings now end in military-style assassinations. The average age of contract killers has dropped; some are barely out of school.
Authorities know this, of course. They have launched high-profile crackdowns. They have promised additional officers, surveillance tools, and judicial reinforcements. But on the ground, the reality is that the gangs remain several steps ahead — faster, more agile, and utterly ruthless. When a crime is committed with such precision, in central Marseille, against a family already in the public eye, one must ask what deterrent remains.
There is also a deeper political discomfort. Successive French governments have struggled to address the underlying conditions in the city’s high-immigration northern districts — social fractures, economic stagnation, and long-term governance failures. These neighbourhoods have become fertile ground for rival networks who offer young men a perverse form of status and income. Left unchallenged, these groups have woven themselves into the fabric of local life, filling the vacuum left by insufficient state presence.
It is not just criminality that is metastasising; it is impunity.
Amine Kessaci’s campaign has given a voice to families living in fear. His plea to President Macron was not a display of youthful naivety, but a desperate attempt to force the national government to treat Marseille’s crisis as the national emergency it is. If the murder of his second brother truly was intended as a warning, it is not only a personal tragedy — it is an indictment of the Republic’s inability to protect those who speak out.
France cannot afford to allow this to become the new normal. Once citizens believe that the gangs, not the state, hold the real power in a city, trust collapses — and with it the social contract that underpins the entire French model.
Marseille is not beyond saving. But it requires more than reactive policing. It demands a strategic, sustained reassertion of the Republic: not just in force, but in opportunity, governance, and everyday presence. Without it, the next killing will merely reinforce the same grim pattern.
And so we return to the central question: have French authorities lost control of Marseille? The honest answer is that they are losing it — slowly, publicly, and with devastating human cost. Mehdi Kessaci’s death is not just another statistic in a bleak tally. It is a warning of what happens when a modern European state allows criminal power to become entrenched.
If that does not compel decisive national action, one shudders to think what will.
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