He is always shirtless and soaking wet. His fat body and bad manners exhale an unpleasant impression of ugliness. He looks at you with that mixture of menace and malice reserved for people who know they have nothing to fear. He is only 14.
His name is Hamza, better known as La Douane – or ‘Customs’. He is the self-appointed landlord of the Canal Saint-Martin, the waterway that cuts across eastern Paris and was reopened to swimmers in June 2026 after weeks of unusually high temperatures.
This summer, Hamza was filmed charging cyclists a two-euro toll for the right to pass, pushing women into the canal and throwing a bicycle into the water. He cruised around the neighborhood on an e-scooter with a chair stolen from a café strapped to it. He sprayed municipal police officers with a water pistol. In June alone, he was reportedly arrested more than ten times. On one occasion, he escaped from a police vehicle by jumping into the canal after being detained. He was caught again two days later, only to be released shortly afterwards.
No one seems able to stop Hamza from ruling his little patch of central Paris. Not even his father, reportedly an Algerian immigrant, who told the press that his son was gentle and harmless. Nor the new Socialist mayor of Paris, Emmanuel Grégoire. He met Hamza on the banks of the canal but did nothing to have him arrested – not even to warn him to stop behaving like a fool. A few days later, Hamza cheerfully told reporters that he had said to the mayor: ‘I love you’.
Hamza is rarely alone. He moves around with a gang of teenage boys, shirtless like him, soaking wet like him, and just as fearless. They have no problem being filmed while roaming the streets. In one video, they appear to confront a disabled driver at an intersection, leaving him with no choice but to defend himself with his crutch.
Lacking any inhibitions, Hamza also displays a striking contempt for women. He locked a woman inside a public toilet and appeared to find it amusing. Another widely circulated video seems to show him entering a woman’s home uninvited before calling her ‘a whore’ when she demanded that he leave. Days later, on the Champs-Élysées, he was filmed hurling obscene insults at another woman.
Imagine, for a moment, that the person behaving this way had been a white French man. The public outcry would have been immediate. Feminist organizations would have condemned him. Prosecutors would have been under pressure to make an example of him.
Instead, Hamza appears to exist in a legal grey zone. And every sensible policier and gendarme understands why. For what if the ‘poor kid’ falls into the Seine while trying to escape the officers? What if he drowns? What if he gets injured? By the following morning, the officer’s career, and reputation, would already be over. In today’s France, it is safer to be accused of prevarication than of racism.
In June 2023, two motorcycle police officers, tried to stop Nahel, a seventeen-year-old French-Algerian driving recklessly through the streets of Nanterre, west of Paris. After a pursuit, the duo managed to intercept the yellow Mercedes. As soon as the car stopped, they positioned themselves near the driver’s side, in a somehow uncomfortable position between the engine and a wall. Florian M. pointed his firearm at Nahel and asked him to turn off the engine. Seconds later, the Mercedes started moving again. He fired a single shot at very short range through the window. Nahel died 30 minutes later.
Before the investigation had reached any conclusion, President Emmanuel Macron publicly declared: ‘A teenager has been killed. It is inexplicable and inexcusable.’ And Mbappé, the football superstar, said Nahel was a ‘little angel’ – though, in fact, he had no driving licence and had previously come to the attention of the police for traffic offences.
The shooting was followed by a month of riots. Hundreds of schools, libraries, town halls and businesses were attacked or burned. Thousands of cars went up in flames. Looting became commonplace. The damage approached one billion euros.
Yet the roots of this story go back much further. To December 1986, when Malik Oussekine, a young French student of Algerian descent, died after being beaten by officers from a motorcycle police unit during student demonstrations in Paris. Unlike Hamza, or Nahel, for that matter, Malik had no history of legal trouble. By every account, he was simply an innocent young man caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. His death transformed the relationship between the French state and the use of police force.
Forty years later, Oussekine’s ghost still walks the corridors of the Ministry of the Interior. Every confrontation involving a young man of Muslim or African origin carries the memory of that night – a memory has become a form of paralysis.
And what about the man in the street? If the state no longer projects authority, why should ordinary citizens? Apparently, in Paris, they should not.
No one dared to confront Hamza or the boys around him. Had he behaved the same way in Algeria or Turkey, a handful of local men would probably have taken care of him. That does not necessarily mean beating him up. It means showing enough resolve to wipe that defiant grin off his face. To make him lower his eyes for once.
At least one restaurant saw its terrace soaked by Hamza’s water attacks. No one reacted. The elderly woman whose home he entered appeared to have no husband, no son, no cousin willing to stand up for her. The same goes for the women harassed in the public toilets or insulted on the Champs-Élysées.
Where are the men?
You already know the answer. They avoid trouble. No one wants to be called a racist. Better to look the other way than to get involved. Besides, they have been taught that individuality is the highest virtue. Why risk your neck for a stranger? They have also been taught that masculinity is inherently toxic. That they are the danger – not Hamza, not Nahel, not the repeat offender, not the foreign-born delinquent, but themselves.
So, they do nothing.
They belong to a generation trained to operate laptops and sip low-fat drinks. I belong to that generation too, like millions of men living in Western cities and working, directly or indirectly, for the corporate world. They have been deconstructed to fit the needs of globalisation: compliant, docile, predictable. A giant washing machine has scrubbed away whatever danger was left in them. Myself included.
But danger, in itself, is not the problem. Danger is deterrence. Hamza and his gang understand that instinctively. They know the difference between a dangerous man and a harmless one. I was about to send this article to the magazine in mid-July when something unexpected happened: The forests of South-West France burst into flames.
The fires triggered an extraordinary civic response. What I thought had long since disappeared suddenly resurfaced, brought back to life by a climate-driven catastrophe. And for once, the French state behaved like a man.
The firefighters were brave, disciplined and audacious. They displayed remarkable skill in coordinating men, aircraft, helicopters, bulldozers and tanker trucks. Suddenly, the Republic came alive. In the middle of an inferno, it recovered something that had seemed lost: its self-respect. What had to be done was done. No excuses. No endless meetings. No procedural paralysis. Just action.
Farmers, a species some governments seem determined to drive into extinction, became the firefighters’ lifeline. These supposedly alcoholic and racist ‘petits blancs’ worked around the clock, fuelling and refuelling the endless columns of fire engines converging on Biscarrosse, Lacanau and Cap-Ferret. Bakers handed out free food. Hotel owners opened their doors without asking for payment. Mayors calmly organised the evacuation of 200,000 people. Local police patrolled deserted towns and villages. Looting remained remarkably limited.
Everyone behaved as though they were playing in the same orchestra.
Frenchmen are at their best when the state stops castrating them. And the French state itself can be admirable at its lower levels, where captains are more numerous than four-star generals, where practical competence matters more than political connections, and where meritocracy can still prevail over networks and privileges.
So, is everything solved? Is returning to the bottom, rebuilding from the ground up, the answer? I doubt it.
France has proved that it is ready to face Dantean mega-fires. But I am less convinced that it is ready to face Hamza. The Arab, and the foreigner more generally, have become taboo subjects in the French psyche. They paralyse people who would otherwise show courage. I am not sure that the brave men of the Gironde or the Var would know how to extinguish a small flame lit by a small Hamza.
A catharsis is needed. Maybe it is already on the way. Because France’s problem is not that it has lost its courage. The firefighters proved that. The farmers proved that. The ordinary citizens proved that. The problem is that courage has become selective. France knows how to fight a fire when the enemy is obvious. When the flames are visible. When nobody can accuse anyone of hatred or intolerance for trying to put them out.
But human fires are harder to confront. Social fires. Moral fires. They spread quietly. They consume trust before they consume anything else. And these cannot be extinguished with water.
