Edouard Retamar does not need to be asked twice to show the photos of his future counter, found in Lille, a symbol of his new beginning. “It took me a year, but I finally found the one I wanted to refurnish the shop in the same spirit! “, explains the merchant in the store where he has temporarily resumed his activity in the fall of 2023, while awaiting the refurbishment of his old address. “There are ups and downs, but we are moving forward. I hope the work will begin soon. » The world met him a year ago, in shock: Alexander’s, his elegant ready-to-wear boutique, had just gone up in smoke, carried away in the mad descent of two hundred rioters in the calm Montargis, sub-prefecture of Loiret.
On the night of June 29-30, 2023, two days after Nahel’s death, killed by a police officer, nearly a hundred businesses were vandalized there. Set on fire, the building that housed the pharmacy on Rue Dorée collapsed. In its place, a large void, partially filled by the support beams of the neighboring building.
“It has become a place of pilgrimage, when people pass through town”, says a shopkeeper. “We were there when the pharmacy collapsed, it was a blow to our hearts”, remembers a couple with fear. ” A shock “, confides a fifty-year-old. “I thought, ‘It’s a shame that young people here dared to do this.'”says a student. “Since then, the city has come to a bit of a standstill,” judges a 60-year-old electrician.
” Turn the page “
The mayor, Benoît Digeon (Les Républicains, LR), notes a drop in attendance in the city “quite notable”which he attributes as much to the riots as to the high price of fuel: “Our catchment area is the 135,000 inhabitants of Gâtinais. Before, they came three times a week, now they only come once every ten days. » He managed to add at the last minute to the city centre revitalisation project the replacement of the pharmacy with a building of shops and apartments for the staff of the neighbouring factories, Hutchinson and ICT.
“Bounce back, quickly”was the local mantra a year ago. Most businesses had reopened less than a week after the events. At Christmas, the passing visitor hardly noticed the scars of the ransacking. The people of Montargois, for their part, have forgotten nothing, but would like ” turn the page “.
The legislative candidates understood this well, and hardly mentioned the event in the leaflets they distributed in front of the market on Saturday, June 22. “I think we put it somewhere…”hesitates the National Rally (RN) MP Thomas Ménagé, as he looks through his leaflet. A brief allusion, in the ninth of the eleven paragraphs of a text that mainly highlights his ” fieldwork “. “Some people thought we would make a big deal out of it, but we are not making it a major campaign event. The riots are just a reflection of the insecurity that people experience on a daily basis.explains the widely elected MP (63.4% of the vote) ahead of the New Ecological and Social Popular Union (Nupes) candidate, Bruno Nottin, in 2022. And we did not want to emphasize facts giving a negative image of the territory. »
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