Shocking footage shows French teens dancing and filming inside a historic Vendée church while blasting a rap track that name-checks the Bataclan massacre and two of France’s most notorious Islamist terrorists.
The video, which spread rapidly on social media this week, was filmed inside the Église Saint-Hilaire in Soullans, a small coastal town in the Vendée department. Teenagers are seen moving through the nave and choir area, some dancing or gesturing to the music, others holding phones. Dark marks trail across the floor. A floral arrangement near a statue appears disturbed. Stained-glass windows and religious statues remain visible in the background as the track plays.
The lyrics, widely quoted by French accounts that first circulated the clip, include the lines “À la Mohamed Merah, v-esqui’ les caméras. Bataclan, je l’ai shooté à l’œil, chasse à l’homme, Salah Abdeslam” and “À part Allah qui peut m’arrêter.” Mohamed Merah carried out the 2012 shootings in Toulouse and Montauban that killed three soldiers and four people, including three children, at a Jewish school. Salah Abdeslam was a key participant in the November 2015 Paris attacks, in which gunmen and suicide bombers killed 130 people, 90 of them at the Bataclan concert hall.
Vendée deputy Véronique Besse reacted within hours. “Stupéfaction!” she wrote. “Young people have degraded the church of Soullans in the Vendée while broadcasting a rap piece that apologises for the terrorists Salah Abdeslam and Mohamed Merah. This act is an intolerable attack on a place of worship, on our heritage and on the memory of the victims of terrorism. Where has respect for the sacred gone?” She called for the individuals to be identified and for the justice system to respond firmly.
The incident lands against a documented rise in attacks on Christian sites. Interior Ministry figures reported 843 anti-Christian acts in 2025, a 9 percent increase on the previous year, of which 627 targeted places of worship. The majority involved vandalism, theft or graffiti rather than assaults on people, though disruptions of services and threats also rose. Early 2026 data showed a further 6 percent increase in anti-Christian incidents in the first half of the year. Separate tallies have recorded dozens of arson attacks or attempts against churches in recent years.
Soullans sits in a department whose identity is still shaped by the Vendée Wars of the 1790s, when local Catholic populations rose against the revolutionary government. The church itself, dedicated to Saint Hilaire, has stood as a parish centre through successive rebuildings. Local reports described the latest episode as teenagers treating the building as a backdrop for a short social-media clip.
French commentators noted that similar clips have appeared elsewhere. Days earlier, pupils at a lycée in the Loiret region were filmed during a blockade playing the same style of track. In Nice, students logging into remote classes used the names of Abdeslam and the perpetrator of the 2016 truck attack as screen names. Officials and opposition figures have described these episodes as evidence that certain strands of rap and online culture now treat jihadist killers as reference points for adolescent provocation.
No arrests had been publicly confirmed in the Soullans case by the time the video reached wider circulation. Church authorities and the local prefecture had not issued detailed statements beyond the condemnation from elected representatives. The clip continues to circulate alongside calls for stronger penalties for attacks on religious buildings and for clearer limits on content that glorifies terrorist acts.
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