These are a few words that will mark the 16th Legislature, by their meaning as much as by the very strong reactions they provoked. Thursday, November 3, Grégoire de Fournas, RN deputy for Gironde, shouted the sentence “that he(they) return(s) to Africa” while his colleague Carlos Martens Bilongo, elected from La France insoumise in Val-d’Oise, spoke in the Hemicycle. The latter asked a question to the government about the fate of hundreds of migrants stranded at sea after being rescued in the Mediterranean, on the boat ocean viking.
Suspension of sitting: While the Member @BilongoCarlos asks a question about immigration in the Mediterranean, a sentence disrupts the session. “Who said that sentence?” request @YaelBRAUNPIVET which suspends the session.#DirectAN #QAG pic.twitter.com/SgKcgFeiYg
—LCP (@LCP) November 3, 2022
The words of Grégoire de Fournas in any case scandalized a very large part of the political class and caused his exclusion for 15 days by the office of the National Assembly, after a vote on Friday afternoon. If the left opposition and the majority, as well as several associations, denounce the racism of these remarks, the National Rally and its Girondin deputy defend themselves.
However, the National Assembly did not wait for the massive arrival of 89 deputies from the far-right party to be shaken by accusations of racism aimed at its members. During the history of the Fifth Republic, they mainly concerned right-wing deputies, such as Alain Marleix, who had seen in Jean-Vincent Placé a “National Korean” in September 2011 during an interview on Public Sénat. A few months earlier, the elected Chantal Brunel affirmed that it was necessary to return the migrants “in the boats!” in the Hall of Four Columns.
These accusations of racism have sometimes been leveled against left-wing leaders, like the elected LFI François Ruffin. “I think I can be absent for the three additional years and Delphine O [ex-députée LREM] won’t even be able to get through half of my speeches or my written questions. I am 158 times cheaper. You see, I am not even the Chinese of the Hemicycle at this price anymore”, he dropped in March 2019, in a video posted on social networks. Before being immediately singled out by the deputies of the majority.
However, the words of Grégoire de Fournas represent “something we never knew under the Fifth Republic”observes the historian Jean Garrigues.
“Jean-Marie Le Pen was accustomed to anti-Semitic provocations, but that did not happen within the walls of the National Assembly.”
Jean Garrigues, historianat franceinfo
To find traces of racist incidents, we must go back to the Third Republic, during the 1930s, when far-right deputies made anti-Semitic remarks in the lower house of Parliament.
How to explain that the benches of the Palais Bourbon have been preserved for so long from such remarks, sometimes made by activists? As Jean Garrigues reminds us, “each deputy is not the representative of his electors but of the whole of France and this therefore takes on a very strong value”.
“The National Assembly is an enclosure that has a form of sacredness.”
The historian Jean Garriguesat franceinfo
Since the last legislative elections in June, however, the sacredness of the place contrasts with the sharpness of the debates held there. In the background, the question of racist remarks by members of the National Rally interfered in the discussions and invectives. And this, the day after the legislative elections, in June, when the young deputy LFI Louis Boyard had denounced “a pandemic of racism” by refusing to shake hands with elected RNs. During the introductory session, the dean of the deputies, the elected RN José Gonzalez, had meanwhile been strongly criticized for having referred to French Algeria at the opening of the legislature.
The return of the deputies, at the beginning of October, did not push this question to the background of the parliamentary debate. On the contrary. On October 11, Renaissance MP Astrid Panosyan-Bouvet was called to order by the President of the National Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet, for having denounced in session “50-year-old xenophobic DNA” of the RN. Three weeks later, the RN deputy for Var, Alexandra Masson, explained to the podium that the “first goal” of the National Sea Rescue Society (SNSM) “is to save lives at sea and not to always seek more migrants there”provoking the indignation of many elected officials of the Nupes.
To justify itself, the far-right party has continued since the legislative elections to denounce the “censorship” which is rife, according to its members, in the National Assembly. “Criticisms, within the confines of French democracy, have the right to be pronounced. [Yaël] Braun-Pivet punishes deputies of the majority as well as opposition deputies, it is a questioning of freedom of expression”had castigated the interim president of the Rassemblement, Jordan Bardella, on BFMTV, the day after the call to order imposed on Astrid Panosyan-Bouvet.
For the candidate for the succession of Marine Le Pen, the words of Grégoire de Fournas also intervene in “a calendar that falls very badly, on the eve of the party congress to appoint its president”explains political scientist Jean-Yves Camus, a specialist in the far right, in The Cross (paid item). Favorite against Louis Aliot, the young MEP would thus see his mandate begin with a controversy over the racist remarks of one of its members.
However, since the arrival at its head of Marine Le Pen, in 2011, the far-right formation has worked to sweep aside accusations of racism in a strategy akin to “de-demonization”.
“It’s a huge political mistake by Grégoire de Fournas. It blocks the process of normalization started a long time ago by Marine Le Pen.”
Jean Garrigues, historianat franceinfo
The exit of Grégoire de Fournas, who later reproached Carlos Martens Bilongo for having seen “a shot in the face of community victimization”could therefore weaken this strategy of the National Rally.
“Let them return(s) to Africa”: franceinfo has chosen to keep the parentheses to report the remarks made by the deputy RN Grégoire de Fournas, Thursday, November 3, at the National Assembly, whether in our titles, in our articles or in our live. Indeed, this sentence, expressed orally, could just as well have been pronounced in the singular (“Let him return to Africa”) or in the plural (“Let them return to Africa”).
The official minutes of the session transcribe it in the singular. Accused of having targeted Carlos Martens Bilongo, a black LFI deputy who was speaking at the podium on the fate of hundreds of migrants stranded at sea, Grégoire de Fournas assured that his “answer concerned the boat and the migrants”, and not his colleague. In a previous version, he explained that he had said “Let him return to Africa”, in reference to the “SOS Mediterranean boat”.