The southern town of Alès was thrust at the forefront of France’s drug wars this week when it emerged its mayor had been taken from his home at night and placed in police custody – for his own safety.
Christophe Rivenq, a member of the conservative Les Républicains party, was whisked away by the elite RAID police unit in the early hours of Tuesday after authorities got wind of a potential attack against him.
He remains under police protection at an undisclosed location.
The incident marks a further escalation in France’s battle against deadly drug crime that has brought bloodshed and fear to Marseille, the country’s second-largest city, and beyond.
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Drug-related killings have become increasingly common, promoted in chilling social media footage and often involving children coerced into the trade. Attacks against elected officials, however, have so far remained rare.
Bullets in the mailbox
Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said he took the decision to remove the mayor of Alès after credible intelligence suggested an attack was imminent by members of the DZ Mafia, a powerful gang originating in Marseille, about 160 kilometres (99 miles) south of Alès.
“Alès is clearly a place where the DZ Mafia is trying to establish a foothold,” Nunez told reporters on Tuesday.
Local media cited reports of a suspicious vehicle parked near Rivenq’s home that police believed may have been laden with explosives.
The mayor had found 9mm bullets in his mailbox and threatening graffiti on the walls of his home earlier this month, France’s National Prosecutor’s Office for the Fight Against Organised Crime (PNACO) said.
After those threats, Rivenq had vowed to carry on with his job, telling reporters: “I will not give in to threats or intimidation. We must not give in here or anywhere else, otherwise it will spell the failure of the Republic.”
PNACO, a recently created unit tasked with tackling France’s surging drug crime, said Tuesday it had taken over the case from Marseille prosecutors.
Over the past year, the DZ Mafia has made inroads into the capital of the Gard department, with a population of 46,000, attempting to supplant local networks.
In early June, an 18-year-old man was shot dead in the town’s Près-Saint-Jean neighbourhood, an area plagued by drug trafficking. A 54-year-old man was killed and a man in his thirties was injured near a drug dealing spot there in mid-January.
Days before the June killing, four young people from the Seine-Saint-Denis area around Paris were targeted by a burst of automatic gunfire as they arrived in the Près-Saint-Jean neighbourhood.
A burgeoning trade
The fast-growing DZ Mafia has morphed from a local player in Marseille into one of France’s main security threats through its domination of the drug trade and ruthless elimination of rivals.
While its methods evoke the most violent mafias, the name can be misleading, says Yann Bisiou, an expert on drug trafficking and public policy at Paul-Valéry University in nearby Montpellier.
“People tend to think of it as a mafia-like pyramidal structure, when in fact it’s really a brand, a horizontal network operating through local franchises,” Bisiou explained. “Money is the lifeblood of the operation, fuelled by a surge in consumption of cocaine and other readily available drugs.”
France’s illicit drug market nearly tripled in value between 2010 and 2023, rising from an estimated €2.3 billion to €6.8 billion, according to a report published in December 2025 by the French Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (OFDT).
The authorities have struggled to counter the increasingly violent turf wars fuelled by this burgeoning trade.
Last November, Interior Minister Nunez declared a “turning point” in the war on drug crime after the killing in Marseille of Mehdi Kessaci, the 20-year-old brother of prominent anti-drug activist Amine Kessaci.The murder was treated as a warning to Amine, who had lost another brother to drug crime five years earlier.
Read moreTargeting the family?: Brother of French anti-drugs activist shot dead in Marseille
Elected as a deputy mayor of Marseille earlier this year, Amine Kessaci said he had called the mayor of Alès on Tuesday to express his support.
“What this shows is that a mafia-style group, a group of drug traffickers, is now attacking our democracy,” Kessaci, who lives under police protection, told French daily Le Parisien.
‘Hit them in the pocket’
Politicians from across the political spectrum, including candidates in next year’s presidential elections, have also expressed their support for Rivenq and urged the authorities to step up their war on drug gangs.
“The state must reaffirm its authority and restore law and order across the whole of the country,” wrote far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in a post on X. “Drug trafficking is establishing itself worldwide as a counter-power, exploiting every weakness to seize control,” said veteran leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
Former prime minister Gabriel Attal, the candidate for Macron’s Renaissance party, expressed his “gratitude” to “police officers who intervened and who are working tirelessly, day and night, to eradicate this scourge”.
The Association of French Mayors has called on the state to “mobilise all its resources in the fight” against drug trafficking “in the areas of security, criminal justice and diplomacy”.
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Guillaume Garcia, a lawyer and former president of the Alès Bar Association, called for the appointment of a juvenile court judge in the jurisdiction, pointing to drug traffickers’ growing exploitation of children.
“As soon as a minor is arrested at a drug dealing spot, they are very quickly released,” Garcia told AFP, lamenting “an explosion in the number of drug dealing spots run by ‘jobbeurs’ – young minors recruited on social media and coming from all over France”.
The interior minister says police have carried out dozens of arrests since December, including 11 in Alès alone, seizing sports cars and other assets belonging to gang members. Such seizures amount to little more than “marginal running costs” for the organisation, cautions Bisiou at Paul-Valéry University.
“To really hit them in the pocket, you must cut off their core sources of income, for instance by legalising the least harmful drugs,” he said. “And you must work at the grassroots level, by reintroducing the type of community policing that France abandoned years ago, rather than opting for crackdowns that only escalate the violence.”
