Right-Wing French Nationalists Attack, Declare Themselves Victims
Last Saturday, some 80–100 white nationalists from across France arrived in the working-class Monnaie neighborhood in the southeastern town of Romans-sur-Isère. They showed up with baseball bats, metal rods, and brass knuckles in hand, chanting things like “Islam hors d’Europe” (Islam out of Europe) and “La rue, la France, nous appartient” (The street, [and] France, belong to us). There were 20 arrests that night, and nationalist groups are now describing six of the arrestees, who have already received 6–10 month sentences, as “political prisoners”. They’re also saying that one of their people, who is still very much alive, was “lynched”.
The “march” was in response to the killing of a white 16-year-old boy named Thomas, who was stabbed to death outside a party in a nearby village a week earlier. Of the people who have been arrested in connection with his murder, The Guardian reports that eight are French, and one Italian. Police haven’t released any of their names or addresses, but right-wing activists have nonetheless claimed that they were immigrants living in public housing in Monnaie.
The rhetoric leading up to the “march” was incendiary. Renaud Camus, who coined the term “the Great Replacement”, described Monnaie as a “cauldron of global, genocidal replacist [sic] crime”. One nationalist group with around 1,300 followers on Telegram announced that “a horde of immigrants with French papers attacked a party with the intention of killing whites” and that “A war against our people is under way.” Thomas’ parents had called for a peaceful march in their son’s memory, but wheat-pasted posters declared “Faced with Murderers, More Than A Peaceful March — Legitimate Defense”.
The nighttime attack on Monnaie was met with a large police presence, and the six people who received jail terms were charged with “participation in a group formed for violent purposes” and “defacement” (i.e., vandalism). Five of them were also sentenced for “violence against police officers”.
The nationalists are also saying that at least one (some claim two) of their people was “lynched” that night. They say that he was beaten bloody, and that he says he was forced to strip by people who said they would douse him in gasoline and burn him alive if he didn’t. Apart from the alleged victim’s claim, no evidence for the threat of burning has been made public, but in any event he is still alive to make the claim, which largely contradicts the meaning of “lynching”.
The events in Monnaie came just two days after xenophobic nationalists rioted in Parnell Street, Dublin, also after a stabbing that they ascribed to an immigrant, and several weeks after nationalists in the United States attempted to ascribe an “anti-white” motivation to a school shooting in Nashville last March. After a far-right blog published three pages of the shooter’s diary earlier this month, white nationalists seized on the shooter’s references to “crackers” and “white privlages” [sic] as evidence that they had specifically targeted white people. In doing so, the nationalists disregarded the fact that the same diary entry also railed against “fa**ots” and rich kids “going to private fancy schools with those fancy khakis & sports backpacks w/ thier [illeg.] daddies mustangs & convertables”.
There is, to be clear, no evidence of disproportionate discrimination, hatred, or violence against white people. Not in the United States, not in Ireland, and not in France. On the contrary, the opposite has consistently been found to be the case.
In light of last weekend’s events in Monnaie, French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin has called for a ban on three far-right nationalist groups, including the neo-Nazi Division Martel, which was present in Monnaie on Saturday. Darmanin, who has been repeatedly accused of rape and sexual coercion, is no stranger to banning politically oriented groups, left or right. Division Martel derives its name from Charles Martel, a Frankish military leader who defeated the Umayyad Caliphate in the Battle of Poitiers in the year 732. Martel was a major symbol of the French “identitarian” movement, which Darmanin banned in 2021.
