No one has seen "Madame" for four days. Madame is 77 years old, so the story could be one of a worrying disappearance, as happens at this age. But Madame didn't get lost, she was abducted. The small town of Trévoux, in eastern France, was stunned. In the early hours of June 21, four hooded men burst into the quiet subdivision of this town of 7,000 inhabitants, guns drawn, and broke down the door of a small house. Madame was there, just as they had planned. She was loaded into the trunk of a BMW. The investigations carried out by the local gendarmes quickly passed into the hands of other investigators, from a specialized unit, more suited to dealing with organized crime than the disappearance of elderly people.

Through the kidnapping of a septuagenarian with a clean criminal record, one of her less immaculate sons was being targeted. Madame was found four days later, shocked and weakened. Now the small town of Trévoux finds itself at the heart of a sprawling case of international drug trafficking – so sensitive as to make it impossible to even use the initial of the victim's first name – and unwillingly becomes the symbol of a growing phenomenon in France: the use of kidnapping, sometimes combined with violent acts, to settle commercial disputes linked to drug trafficking.

There was also a man kidnapped in a supermarket parking lot in Castelmoron-sur-Lot, in the east, left for dead in March in the forest of Migelane outside Bordeaux and another, missing in March 2023 near the Swiss border, whose body was discovered still in flames by a hiker in the Thise communal forest. To these scenes sketched out in a few lines in the news pages of the regional daily newspapers, the same terse response is given by the investigators questioned: "Settlement of scores against a backdrop of drug trafficking."

Kidnapping is reappearing in the toolbox of criminal organizations in France, with a new feature since its golden age, some 40 years ago, when wealthy figures were targeted to ensure a lucrative return on investment. Today, the operations are often subcontracted to very young teams, who compensate for their inexperience with unbridled violence. As Yann Sourisseau, head of the Central Office for Combating Organized Crime, explained, "In recent years, the phenomenon has evolved from an approach aimed at collecting a ransom to a kind of collection method, particularly in drug trafficking, where the 'narco' less and less often takes care of the dirty work, preferring to delegate either to teams specializing in 'force operations,' this is, to young recruits.'"

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