Wednesday 10 November, 7:30 p.m. Hervé * dines in a restaurant in central Paris to celebrate a friend’s birthday. The atmosphere is festive, when suddenly one of the guests gives him violent punches by surprise. Result: head trauma with a seven-centimeter wound on the scalp, fractured right hand and 10 days of ITT. “This guy, who has been in hard conspiracy for ten years, could have disfigured me, even killed me, according to the doctors. I thought that one day this violence induced by the conspiracy would affect me, but I did not think so. really not like that “, tells, still stunned, this journalist specializing on the ultra-right.
Jade Dousselin, his lawyer, seized the prosecutor’s office in Créteil (Val-de-Marne). But the penalist wants to go further. “It is not only about an individual who loses his sanity one evening in a bar, it is an act thought out, reflected with an obvious motive”, she believes.
“For me, he was an individual who had thought of his act.”
Jade Dousselin, criminal lawyerto franceinfo
“Since the OAS trial last October and especially since the presidential campaign began, I open an average of two cases per week for physical violence, death threats or cyberstalking because of this ultra-right movement, she adds very upset. This is madness !”
This worrying observation, Mathieu Molard, the editor-in-chief of the online media Street Press, also shares it. “I did the accounts: just 12 hours after the end of our survey on the ultra-right activists of the small group Gallicane Family, who support Eric Zemmour for the presidential election, I had already received several thousand public or private messages of insults or death threats on my Instagram, Facebook and Twitter accounts … C ‘is just mind blowing “, reveals this journalist specializing in the far right, who has also just taken legal action.
Violent insults on the web and physical attacks as these journalists experience, above all because they are investigating the ultra-right, there are dozens of them each year across the country, according to the intelligence services. “They are not necessarily given to the knowledge of the media, but the actions of these individuals who claim to be ultra-right are frequent “, confirm to franceinfo a police source.
Political and public figures are also directly targeted on social networks and on platforms such as Telegram. It is precisely via this encrypted messaging that two affairs related to the ultra-right were brought to light in early November.
Dthem men, suspected of having called for violent actions and for having made racist and anti-Semitic remarks, were in fact arrested by the General Directorate of Internal Security (DGSI) Tuesday, November 16. According to a source familiar with the matter, they would be considered “supremacists white “ and would belong to the “tendency accelerationist“, that is to say that they would be persuaded that it is necessary to provoke a “race war”.
Another recent case involving theultra straight : the publication, always on Telegram, nine portraits, including that of the presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, all with a gun sight on the forehead. A visual published by Villains Fachos 2.0. This racist and anti-Semitic ring made up of some 2,300 members has just been closed by the government platform Pharos, which fights against online hatred.
On Tuesday 23 November, 13 members of the Recolonization France group were even arrested in Ile-de-France and in the South by the gendarmes of the Central Office for the fight against crimes against humanity. Spotted by the DGSI in the summer of 2020, this small survivalist group would have called on its members to form four armed groups to prepare for a civil war, which it considers imminent due to migratory pressure.
Who are these ultra-right supporters who have chosen hatred and violence as their business? According to the latest figures communicated to franceinfo by the national police, confirming a parliamentary report from the National Assembly of June 6, 2019, the ultra-right would bring together less than 3,000 people in France. Corn “a hard core of 500 excited”, says an investigator, mostly male, rather young and often disappointed by the National Rally, would be determined to carry out violent actions. A stable figure since 2005, date of the last official census of this political movement in France.
The intelligence services distinguish four main families. First, the identitarians represented by the Social Bastion, the heir to the GUD formed in Lyon, and by Génération identitaire, two groups which were dissolved by the Ministry of the Interior. Second big family: localist movements like Fraternité Bourgogne, Vent d’Est in Alsace or the Alvarium, an identity association from Angevine dissolved last week in the Council of Ministers.
We also find the group of royalists, relatively few in number, and finally the fascists and neo-Nazis, whom the intelligence services now call “the neopatriots”. “They are often survivalists like Rémy Daillet, the small group White Unit or Suavelos”, explains a police source, who participated two weeks ago in the arrest in the greatest discretion “of several armed supremacists”.
“They’re all fighting what they call ‘the big replacement’ and they have a habit of running racial appeals on social media.”
A police sourceto franceinfo
Individuals ready to do battle with the Republic who, for some, find themselves in the aborted projects of Rémy Daillet-Wiedemann. Figure of the ultra-right in France, the 55-year-old conspirator is suspected of having ordered, from Malaysia, the kidnapping in the spring of little Mia and of having set up an underground organization to commit large-scale attacks in France .
Faced with this growing threat, the French intelligence services have stepped up the surveillance of all of these networks. “This threat is taken very seriously and the services are working on it, with regular arrests and fact groups or associations dissolved”, assures Franceinfo the Ministry of the Interior. “After the report, we analyze the phenomenon in open or closed sources with two strategies: integration into the group or the compromise of a person therein, by targeting the weaknesses and vices of the latter”, complements a territorial intelligence officer.
Despite everything, it remains difficult for the police services and the judicial institution to identify with precision the very diverse profiles of these men ready to fight. “To sum up, these are people who combine hatred of the system and hatred of multiculturalism in France”, summarizes a police source, which has been following these phenomena for twenty years.
To try to see a little more clearly, franceinfo has peeled several public accounts fed by the ultra-right. Anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, homophobia, conspiracy … In the form of cartoons, conspiratorial videos or hateful comments, some are displayed in favor of Eric Zemmour while others claim not to support “no candidate in the system”.
On the Young Nation site of identity Yvan Benedetti, who has just declared his candidacy for the 2022 presidential election, the former member of the RN, for example, invites his supporters to attend militant meetings “guarantees without added Licra and zero percent Crif “. Conspiracy theories against the Jewish community but also against the Freemasons or against the pro-abortion that we find on Telegram loops on which dozens of personalities are vilified because of their origins or their religious affiliations.
But what especially worries the intelligence services, it is the will of these small groups to bring together nationalist and xenophobic struggles with fashionable conspiracy theories. “The revival of this anti-Semitic right, with the resurgence of survivalists and other followers of collapsology, is the worst-case scenario for us”, recognizes an investigator. The latter fears “an agglomeration of discontent that is difficult to control”.
Anti-vaccines, sanitary pass, anti-5G relay antennas, “yellow vests” … Everything is good for the leaders of the ultra-right to enlist new soldiers and swell the ranks of small groups that initially have nothing in common. “Look, the Mia affair: the mother of the little girl was close to the One Nation movement, which advocates an approach to society through well-being and meditation taken to the extreme. nothing to do with a survivalist like Rémy Daillet. And yet, the kidnapping of little Mia was indeed the result of this improbable meeting “, recalls Tristan Mendès-France, associate lecturer at the University of Paris and specialist in social networks.
A strategy often very close to Salafist propaganda where the most fragile are caught in the nets of their gurus, believes the one who also works with the Observatory of conspiracy.
“In three clicks, you can create a closed national loop, then a variation of this loop in the region. It has become very easy for them to coordinate and decide whether or not to take action.”
Tristan Mendès-France, associate lecturer at the University of Paristo franceinfo
A phenomenon which also challenges the justice system and in particular the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office (Pnat). The anti-terrorism section of the Paris prosecutor’s office has been seized ten times since 2017 for cases relating to the ultra-right, compared to none in previous years.
With less than five months of the presidential election, supporters of the ultra-right have probably not finished talking about them, especially as they have found with Eric Zemmour a pole of attraction, like the remember Le Monde (paid item). “In the campaign teams that are now assembled around Eric Zemmour, there is what is called a nationalist compromise, which is a notion that comes from the long history of the French far right”, confirms to franceinfo the historian and specialist of the European far right Nicolas Lebourg.
Between an electoral context which is dangerously radicalized and an extended health crisis where conspiracy theories have become legion, the ultra-right could well become a serious threat to our democracy. “Even if it is not a greater threat than that linked to Islamist terrorism, we know that we will unfortunately, one day or another, have a French Anders Breivik”, warns an anti-terrorism magistrate.
* The first name has been changed