Cologne is the setting of a mass assault on women during the 2015–2016 New Year’s celebrations and the political controversy that follows. The episode matters beyond the city itself: it tests Claire Farel’s insistence that women’s accounts must be heard even when doing so complicates political allegiances, and it becomes entangled with the public exposure of the case against her son Alexandre. In the novel, Cologne is both a real site of reported violence and a point of collision between competing accounts of feminism, migration, and responsibility.

The New Year’s assaults and their political aftermath

During the night of December 31, 2015, to January 1, 2016, hundreds of women in Cologne went to police stations to report sexual assaults and rapes at a main square during New Year’s festivities. The number of assailants was estimated at 1,500. Some suspects were arrested; most of those identified were immigrants from North Africa. The reports quickly became part of a broader political argument over Angela Merkel’s policy of large-scale migrant regularization, including migrants arriving from Syria.

The controversy was not only about how the attacks should be described, but also about which concerns could be voiced without being dismissed as politically suspect. Some far-left intellectuals and politicians, Claire observes, warned of racist exploitation of the reports before condemning the assaults themselves. The mayor of Cologne similarly cautioned against generalizations, but her advice that women should keep away from men became a particular provocation. Claire’s objection was that women should not have to avoid men in order to be safe.

Claire’s position combines two claims that her critics treat as incompatible: she rejects collective blame based on origin, while also insisting that the assaults must be condemned and that those responsible must be punished. She argues that fear of strengthening the far right cannot be used to silence women who have been attacked. In her view, assigning priority to the defense of foreigners over that of assaulted women amounts to a failure of feminist responsibility. The distinction she draws is between condemning people for what they have done and condemning them for who they are.

Claire Farel’s intervention and the public dispute

Claire’s interview on Cologne is scheduled for publication beneath a headline and article about the events. Françoise Merle tells Jean Farel that she has criticized the interview at an editorial conference, warning that it will further stigmatize foreigners in Germany and France, particularly Muslims. Jean responds with a joke about being in love with an “Islamo-leftist,” reducing the disagreement to a teasing label rather than engaging its substance.

The dispute follows Claire into an ultrasound appointment. While anxious about the examination, she is recognized by the doctor, who praises her stance and interprets it as a warning against allowing newcomers to impose a culture that humiliates women. Claire objects that he has misunderstood what she said and explains that the interview is due to appear the next day. Her unease is not limited to the medical uncertainty: she fears that her words will be distorted, cut down, and misread in public. The examination ultimately shows nothing abnormal, but the episode makes clear how the controversy has entered even an intimate, private moment.

After publication, Claire receives a stream of abuse, including accusations that she is Islamophobic and an exponent of a “white and bourgeois feminism.” She agrees to a radio debate not to seek publicity but to denounce rape culture and clear up misunderstandings about her text. Her interviewer argues that Claire has singled out migrants when the real issue is sexual violence in general, and that violence was not imported by migration. Claire responds that she condemns sexual violence generally but that, in the Cologne incidents under discussion, the assailants were largely young men from Syria or the Maghreb, societies where relations between men and women may differ from those in France and women’s bodies may be controlled by men.

The exchange sharpens rather than resolves the disagreement. Claire’s interlocutor insists that the central issue is patriarchy, not ethnic, social, or religious origin, and rejects Claire’s proposed emphasis on information and education as paternalistic and neocolonial. Claire answers that this is a feminist argument, but says her opponent has abandoned women by refusing to insist that sexual aggressors, including foreigners, be heavily punished. At the end of the broadcast, Claire offers her hand; the association leader avoids it, puts on her headphones, and leaves. The refusal gives the debate a physical ending without producing reconciliation.

From Cologne to the Farel case

Cologne continues to shape how the public receives Claire when Alexandre’s legal case becomes news. After he is placed in police custody on suspicion of rape, Agence France-Presse reports the arrest, and the case becomes public despite Jean’s request that it remain secret. The report arrives against the background of Claire’s interview about the Cologne assaults. She is then subjected to insults on Twitter, where the two controversies collide: her argument about violence and public silence is read alongside a rape accusation against her own son.

By the time Alexandre’s trial begins, the public atmosphere has also been transformed by the revelations about Harvey Weinstein. Six months earlier, actresses had accused the American producer of sexual abuse, and an investigation by The New York Times had exposed a longstanding system of threats and intimidation. Women’s accounts multiplied across social media as others were encouraged to break their silence. In this climate, the Farel case attracts intense attention. Claire refuses to sign public statements and stays out of the debate, later experiencing that silence as a personal failure and an intimate betrayal of her ideals.

The trial’s public framing includes sharply opposed judgments. Alexandre’s lawyer, Maître Célérier, argues that online condemnation has already damaged his client’s presumption of innocence and life prospects; he points to the label attached to Alexandre’s name in Google searches and contrasts media punishment with the court’s duty to convict the guilty and acquit the innocent. Outside the courthouse, women protest the verdict, and one demonstrator describes it as protection for a white man with a promising future. The contrast does not settle the case’s moral meaning; instead, it shows how arguments about women’s testimony, social privilege, and public judgment have become inseparable from the legal proceedings.

Narrative significance

Cologne links a reported collective assault to a later, intensely individualized accusation. The connection does not make the cases equivalent: it shows how public arguments about whether women are heard, how responsibility is assigned, and how accusations should be judged travel between events. Claire’s interview places her between two forms of simplification. One turns the Cologne reports into a rationale for stigmatizing migrants; the other, as she sees it, risks making concern about racist exploitation an excuse for not confronting the assaults. The radio debate leaves that division intact, and the subsequent abuse demonstrates the cost of speaking across it.

The location also gives the novel a way to examine the distance between a principle and its application within a family. Claire argues publicly that women who have been assaulted must be heard and that perpetrators should be punished, then finds her public reputation entangled with her son’s accusation and his lawyer’s appeal to the presumption of innocence. The collision does not itself decide what happened in Alexandre’s case. Rather, it makes visible the competing demands placed on public speech: to oppose sexual violence, to resist racial generalization, and to avoid treating media condemnation as a substitute for judicial process. The Cologne episode therefore remains consequential not as a solved argument but as the beginning of a conflict whose terms return throughout the Farel case.