Sons and Daughters

The Sons and Daughters are the organization invoked in threats against the Tour de France, but the investigation into the kidnappings of Agnès Dantier and Vincent Dantier steadily separates the group’s apparent political role from the crime at hand. Paul Darac comes to regard the threats as a smokescreen: the organization is not responsible for the abductions, which he understands as personal rather than political. The authorities later confirm that the Sons and Daughters are real, but not a terrorist organization.

Identity and Public Presence

The organization appears in the investigation under the name the Sons and Daughters of the Just Cause, abbreviated as SAD. Its public identity is bound to written threats concerning the Tour de France and demands directed at the authorities. Darac’s analysis depends on distinguishing the existence of the group from the credibility of the terrorist role attributed to it: he does not accept that the threat proves either that SAD is a terrorist organization or that it carried out the kidnappings.

The novel also places the group’s name in a city where religious life is visibly contested. In Nice’s Old Town, Muslims praying outdoors on Fridays face disruptions including footballs, delivery vans, onlookers, and abuse, while Catholic worshippers inside the Basilique are disturbed by sightseers. Against this setting, a public appeal framed in religious or political terms can acquire force beyond the evidence that supports it. The contrast does not establish that the Sons and Daughters represent the worshippers or caused the hostility; it situates the dispute about public religion and civic belonging in the same social landscape.

Threats and the Tour de France

When Darac considers what is happening, he rejects the theory that the kidnappings are a government exercise. He also becomes increasingly certain that the Sons and Daughters are not a terrorist group, at least not in the sense needed to explain the crimes. He sees several unresolved possibilities but decides that he must choose the interpretation that best fits the available facts.

Frènes argues that the purported terrorist group has struck and may strike again, possibly against the Tour de France peloton the following day. In his view, the race must therefore be stopped. Darac counters that there is no intelligence supporting the conclusion that SAD is a terrorist organization. The disagreement is consequential: Frènes treats the threat as a reason to halt the race, while Darac insists that the investigation must continue without accepting the organization’s supposed identity as fact.

Darac tests the terrorist explanation against the sequence of communications. A cut-out note issued the threat on Friday afternoon. The authorities responded in the requested manner, saying that they were seriously considering the demands and asking the writers to make contact. They did not do so. Only hours later, notes appeared claiming that their cries had not been heard. Darac argues that there had scarcely been time for the authorities to hear them. The timing, and the use of notes rather than the expected follow-up, make the threat look less like a coherent campaign than a device intended to misdirect attention.

The Kidnappings and Darac’s Interpretation

The identities of the victims sharpen Darac’s doubts. Agnès is not the mayor, the Tour’s chief, or even the city’s most senior police officer. A terrorist organization threatening the race would have no evident reason, on the information available to him, to abduct her. The discovery that Vincent Dantier has also been kidnapped adds another note to the supposed campaign and further unsettles its political logic.

Frènes points out that the victims include both a current and a former commissaire, making the abductions high-profile. Darac does not dispute their prominence; he draws a different conclusion from it. The shared connection between Agnès and Vincent, rather than their usefulness as symbols in a campaign against the Tour, persuades him that the notes are a smokescreen. In his assessment, kidnapping the two commissioners is the actual crime, rooted in personal revenge rather than politics.

Darac’s explanation remains an inference rather than a fully established account of the kidnappers’ identity. He considers it most likely that someone whom the commissioners had imprisoned, or an associate of such a person, is taking revenge. He concludes that this is the only explanation that makes sense to him. The distinction matters: the investigation has a working theory about motive, while the group’s precise connection to whoever abducted the Dantiers is not established by these scenes.

Official Confirmation and Significance

The investigation eventually brings Darac’s assessment into direct contact with the group. He asks whether its representatives know anything about the abduction of Agnès and Vincent. They deny knowledge of it and agree with his view that the crime is criminal rather than political. A representative then confirms unreservedly that the Sons and Daughters are neither a terrorist organization nor a figment of a bureaucrat’s imagination, adding that this is why they came to inform the police.

That confirmation resolves one uncertainty but not every question raised by the threats. The group exists; the authorities’ earlier image of it as a terrorist organization does not hold. Its representatives disavow knowledge of the kidnappings, and the stated consensus is that the abductions are a criminal matter. The episode therefore turns on a distinction between a real organization and a false attribution of terrorist violence. Darac’s refusal to let the threatening label dictate the investigation allows him to treat the kidnapping of the two commissioners as a personal crime rather than as proof of a political attack on the Tour.