On July 26, 2016, a priest had his throat slit at the altar of his church in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray. Ten years later, philosopher Rémi Brague recalls that this murder was neither an isolated act of madness nor a minor news item, but a theological rationality fully embraced by its perpetrators.
A Crime Claimed in Theological Language
What Rémi Brague documents, contrary to the pathologizing interpretation long favored in public debate, is the nature of the discourse held by the two killers at the time of the events. According to the philosopher, “the two terrorists finally spoke theology”, an observation that radically shifts the meaning of the attack: it was not an individual derailment but the application of a doctrine.
Brague insists on this point: the perpetrators of the attack were not “uneducated brutes,” nor simple “unbalanced individuals” who could be conveniently filed under the category of psychiatric disorder. They held a structured, referenced discourse, consistent with a corpus they explicitly claimed.
“They showed by this that they were not uneducated brutes, or those ‘unbalanced’ individuals […]”, reports Rémi Brague’s text.
The philosopher goes further: in the eyes of the two killers, Father Jacques Hamel “deserved to be eliminated for theological reasons”. This formulation, clinically dry, points to an internal logic behind the act: the victim was not chosen at random, but as the representative of a function—that of the officiating priest—deemed condemnable according to a precise theological framework.
Naming the Structure, Not the Population
Rémi Brague’s analysis calls for a distinction that French public debate often struggles to formulate clearly: criticizing an ideological structure is not equivalent to stigmatizing an entire population. The philosopher does not describe an indistinct mass, but specific actors carrying an identifiable discourse, rooted in a particular reading of texts and precepts.
This distinction is crucial for at least three reasons:
- it allows for naming a motive without casting suspicion on a religious community as a whole;
- it restores full responsibility to the killers, setting aside the excuse of insanity which paradoxically absolves them of responsibility;
- it opens up the possibility of a theological and intellectual debate on the invoked foundations, rather than a simple security or psychiatric treatment of the phenomenon.
Refusing to name the theological logic at work deprives society of the language necessary to understand what took place in that Normandy church—and, by extension, in other attacks claimed on similar grounds elsewhere in Europe.
Euphemization, an Obstacle to Debate
Rémi Brague’s observation highlights a recurring phenomenon: the temptation, in French public commentary, to erase or tone down the theological motive of Islamist attacks in favor of alternative frameworks—social distress, psychological fragility, or “groundless” radicalization disconnected from any doctrinal content.
This euphemization is not neutral. It produces several effects:
- it prevents a direct and reasoned critique of the texts and interpretations mobilized by the killers;
- it maintains a confusion between describing a religious fact and accusing a community;
- it deprives religious authorities themselves—both Catholic and Muslim—of a clear ground for dialogue on what, in certain readings, legitimizes violence.
By recalling that the two men “finally spoke theology,” Brague emphasizes that denying the motive is intellectually untenable: the perpetrators themselves claimed a framework of thought, which must be examined as such rather than dissolved into categories that dismiss it.
A Priest at the Altar, a Christian Memory Questioned
The choice of location—a church, during the celebration of Mass—and of the victim—an eighty-four-year-old priest, officiating for decades in his parish—imbues the attack with a particular symbolic weight. It was not just a man who was targeted, but a priestly function, a liturgical act, a Christian continuity inscribed in the long history of Norman parishes.
Ten years later, the question raised by Rémi Brague goes beyond the sole case of Father Hamel: it questions Europe’s ability to accept and transmit the memory of its contemporary martyrs, without diluting them into a generic narrative of disembodied “violence” that would erase the specificity of both the motive and the victim.
A Selective Memory
One of the points implicitly raised by Brague’s analysis is the differentiated way in which society commemorates attacks depending on the ideology behind them. An attack motivated by an Islamist religious doctrine does not receive the same media and memorial treatment as an attack motivated by a far-right or far-left ideology, even though the gravity of the crime—the murder of a defenseless man—should demand equal clarity of analysis.
This asymmetry in naming motives feeds a sense of double standards in the public handling of politico-religious violence, and weakens trust in the ability of institutions to speak the truth about phenomena that threaten civil peace.
What Lucidity Demands
Rémi Brague’s work, ten years after the assassination of Father Hamel, is not a matter of polemics but of philosophical necessity: to state things as they were formulated by their authors, without covering them in a vocabulary that blunts their impact. Naming a theological logic is not accusing an entire religion; on the contrary, it allows for adversarial debate, which alone is capable of distinguishing, within it, what stems from violent exegesis and what does not.
At a time when Western Europe struggles to find the right vocabulary to describe the ideologies running through it, the anniversary of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray reminds us that a poorly chosen word for a serious event is never neutral: it is already, implicitly, a politics of memory.
