Blaming Macron for the death of a murdered priest is a cynical move from the French Right

Heads of government – be they prime ministers, chancellors or presidents – are rightly held responsible for what goes wrong when their administrations put their foot in it. The buck, the pound and the euro stop at their desks. 

But when President Macron is blamed by the Right in France for the death of a priest, Father Olivier Maire, murdered by a mentally-disturbed asylum-seeker, we are surely approaching a new low. 

Fr Maire – the sort of priest who gives the Catholic Church a good name – was battered to death last weekend by Emmanuel Abayisenga, a refugee from Rwanda, who had been released into Maire’s custody pending trial on the charge of setting fire to Nantes Cathedral in July of last year. 

In the days that followed, Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Rally (formerly the National Front), issued a series of tweets in which Macron and his interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, were accused of a disgraceful dereliction of duty amounting to moral bankruptcy.

Valérie Pécresse, head of the Ile de France region that includes Paris and a leading contender to represent the centre-right Republican Party in next year’s presidential elections, said the Government’s refusal to act tough on illegal immigration was responsible for the “cascade of failures” that had led to Fr Maire’s death. 

Ignoring the fact that until last Sunday Abayisenga was charged only with arson, she told journalists that “the murderer should never have been freed”. 

Xavier Bertrand, Pécresse’s chief rival for the Conservative nomination, went further, calling for the immediate expulsion of all asylum seekers whose applications to remain had been rejected. The Republicans’ chair, Laurent Wauquiez, spoke of the “cowardice and blindness” that had resulted in Fr Maire’s murder. 

So what should President Macron and his interior minister have done, not knowing then what they know now? Under French law, as in the UK, policy is proposed by the Government and approved by the National Assembly, but must broadly conform to the terms laid out in the UN Convention on Refugees, signed in 1951. 

Darmanin could, in theory, have exerted himself in the case of Abayisenga, classifying him as a risk to the security of the state. In reality, given that the Rwandan was under arrest and was not seen as a terrorist per se, it is hardly surprising that he preferred to let the courts deal with the situation. 

A date for the trial in respect of the arson attack had yet to be fixed when Abayisenga evidently lost control a second time, with fatal consequences. Father Maire, the head of the Montfort Missionary Order in France, based in the Vendée department, south of the Loire, was filled with pity for the troubled Rwandan, whom he took in and promised to look after until such times as justice took its course. 

It was judges, not the State, who, after hearing both sides of the argument presented by counsel, released the accused into Fr Maire’s custody. Darmanin was probably informed of the decision, which may also have passed over Macron’s desk in the Élysée. But it would have been strange if either had cited force majeure in a case that (leaving aside the status of Nantes cathedral as a national monument) did not seem to justify their intervention.

It could be argued (unfairly in my opinion) that the judiciary should have taken a harder line. In placing a dangerous man into the care of a pacifist priest, knowing that he had a history of mental instability, they were taking a risk. But hindsight is a wonderful thing. If Abayisenga hadn’t “lost it” last Sunday after twelve months of uninterrupted good behaviour, the likelihood is that the priest would have appeared at his trial as a character witness, with an impact that can only be guessed at. 

Consider the opinion, delivered to the magazine l’Observateur after the murder, of a second priest, Fr Jean-Baptiste Dombélé, who was familiar with the accused: “Emmanuel didn’t do anything out of the ordinary. He ate with us and participated in the Eucharist. He had hearing problems and couldn’t always make out what was said. There was no problem. He didn’t talk about the [attack on] the cathedral. Olivier was the one who was closest to him. He took care of him for everything.”

Not exactly an alarm call, still less a call to arms. 

Abayisenga, a Hutu, aged 40, first arrived in France in 2012, claiming to have been a childhood victim of the Rwandan genocide in 1994. His father was executed for the part he played in the slaughter of thousands of Tutsi; his uncle spent year in prison. As a boy, he was under constant suspicion, not least from the police, and eventually, aged 30, having been unemployed all his adult life, fled to France believing there was no place for him in his homeland.  

A devotional Christian, in 2016 he made a pilgrimage to Rome in the company of fellow Catholics from Nantes, hoping to meet the Pope. His crimes, egregious though they were, followed years of appeals against three separate deportation orders and were individual acts, unrelated to the wave of Islamist killings that have so disfigured France in recent years. 

In the same year that he visited Rome, Abayisenga was diagnosed with serious mental health problems that largely went untreated. Today, he is clearly deranged and, having confessed to murder, is being held in a secure psychiatric hospital. Perhaps that is where he should have spent the last five years. 

The key fact is that until his arson attack in Nantes, Abayisenga had no history of criminality and was in fact serving in the cathedral as a verger. First arrested in 2019 as the ancient church was still smouldering (for the second time in 20 years), he was released soon after, with an apology for a too-soon presumption of guilt, only to be rearrested as the police investigation into the outrage continued. 

No one should be surprised by the hue and cry that greeted the murder of Fr Maire, a true man of God who will now be held up as a martyr, as was Father Jacques Hamel, murdered in his church in Normandy by an Islamist assassin in 2016. But is the French President to blame? Should Gérald Darmanin have turned the judicial process upside down in 2019 to appease the Right?

Britain’s home secretary Priti Patel will be following the case with interest. Her latest attempt to deport failed asylum-seekers ended in farce this week when a plane that was supposed to have been full of deportees took off with only a handful on board – a humiliation she has experienced at least twice before. British and French judges are sticklers for the facts and demand due process. Would Ms Patel have seen to it that Abayisenga was safely returned to Rwanda, to face whatever may have awaited him? I very much doubt it.

Macron, somewhat untypically, has refused to rise to the bait offered by his detractors. Having expressed his shock at the murder and rendered his “hommage” on behalf of the nation he is expected at Fr Maire’s funeral on Friday. But he did not speed to the scene. 

Instead, he resumed his holiday on the Fort de Brégançon, the presidential retreat just off the Riviera coast. He knows that a tough autumn and a tougher winter lie ahead, to be followed by a bruising election campaign. In the meantime, he is not going to carry the can for a failed asylum system that has been in place in France, more or less, for the last 70 years. 

If Marine Le Pen or the Conservatives wish to take on the system and clear out what they regard as the augean stables, they know what they have to do.