(Nantes) Several hundred anti-Zemmour demonstrators protested in Nantes on Saturday against the arrival of the far-right essayist for a meeting at the city’s Zenith, giving rise to sometimes violent clashes with the police, according to a photographer from AFP.
More than 600 people, according to the prefecture, came to demonstrate against the arrival of the polemicist at the call in particular of the collective “Nantes revolted”, managing to enter the enclosure of the Zenith, to block a door of the site and to force the gates. .
The police used tear gas to push back the anti-Zemmour who were facing, a hundred meters away, several dozen supporters of the polemicist, at the Atlantis parking lot, near the western ring road of Nantes.
Shortly before the arrival of Mr. Zemmour at the Zenith in Nantes, the mobile gendarmes tried in a kind of game of cat and mouse, to push back the anti-Zemmour, who tried to block the four-lane separating the Zenith of the parking lot.
“Let’s stop the horror film”, proclaimed a black banner, carried by the demonstrators, and illustrated by caricatures of Emmanuel Macron and Eric Zemmour.
PHOTO JEREMIAS GONZALEZ, ASSOCIATED PRESS
The Loire-Atlantique prefecture has confirmed the presence of “650 people including 150 ultra left and yellow vests particularly animated by a desire to do battle with the meeting of Mr. Zemmour”.
Protesters, some of whom invaded the four-lane and a footbridge spanning the national road, threw several supermarket carts in the direction of the police positioned below, without causing injuries, according to the photographer.
For its part, the prefecture of Loire-Atlantique has confirmed the presence of “650 people including 150 ultra lefts and yellow vests particularly animated by a desire to do battle with the meeting of Mr. Zemmour”.
A hundred police and gendarmes were engaged around the area of the shopping center of Saint-Herblain, according to the prefecture which reported a “succession of skirmishes” which led the police to secure “the areas that can allow access to the Zenith ”.
“Several assaults against the police” took place, according to the prefecture which referred to the “degradation of a police vehicle”, and “an attempt to throw a bottle on another”. A member of the police force was injured during a crossing, said the prefecture.
The demonstration ended around 6.30 p.m. “No arrests were made. […] but work of investigation and identification “is now engaged, underlined the prefecture.
Eric Zemmour, who went to Nantes for the promotion of his latest book “France has not said its last word”, reacted in the evening from Nantes to the clashes that occurred on the occasion of his visit.
“We know who Joseph Stalin was, we know the hundreds of thousands of deaths he caused, these people are only their distant descendants,” Eric Zemmour told reporters, according to images broadcast by BFM TV.