On February 12, the head of French far right organization Génération Identitaire received notice from France’s interior minister Gérald Darmanin that the group would be officially dissolved in two weeks’ time. The impending ban was prompted by a recent demonstration on the French-Spanish border, which Darmanin argues constituted the formation of an illegal “private militia.” However, the organization’s action in the Pyrenees was not the first of its kind. Génération Identitaire has been engaging in aggressive, sometimes potentially life-threatening activities for the past eight years.
The January 19 demonstration at the Spanish border was carried out under the slogan “Defend Europe” in an action they dubbed “Mission Pyrénées.” About thirty participants claimed to be defending France against “invading” migrants crossing the border from Spain. More specifically, spokesperson Thaïs d’Escufon said that they were looking for “suspect profiles” who were “traveling alone, on foot, and are of Afro-Maghrebi origin.” Their demand: “total closure of the border.”
Locally, the public prosecutor for the department of Haute Garonne initiated an investigation into the group’s “public provocation of [racial] hatred” that same day. Activists had unfurled a large red and white banner with the words, in English, “You will not make Europe home! No way!” Prosecutor Christophe Amunzateguy has stated that his argument is “based on their mediatization and the message on that banner. That media gimmick is, in my opinion, an incitement and a provocation.”
On the national level, however, dissolving the organization has been under consideration for months. As early as November, government spokesperson Gabriel Attal said that, “the question [of dissolving the group] has been raised,” explaining that, “from the moment someone has evidence that there is a call for violence, for hatred, a decision has to be made. Nothing has been ruled out.” Finally, on January 26, Darmanin announced that he was “particularly outraged by [Génération Identitaire’s] undermining the Republic” and that he was “gathering the elements that would allow [him] to propose dissolving Génération Identitaire.”
A Record of Xenophobic Action
Since its formation in 2012, the group has developed a lengthy track record of aggressive and pointedly xenophobic actions. It made its debut in October of that year, when seventy-three members occupied a mosque construction site in Poitiers, citing a battle that took place there in 732 between French Christians and invading Islamic forces. The implication, made without a trace of subtlety, was that modern-day Muslims in Europe are also invaders comparable to a trained, armed military force.
In May 2013, less than a week after French New Right ideologue and former terrorist Dominique Venner killed himself in Notre Dame cathedral to protest against marriage equality and “Afro-Maghrebi immigration,” twenty members of Génération Identitaire occupied the roof of the Socialist Party headquarters in Paris, also to protest marriage equality and immigration. In March 2016, about eighty Génération Identitaire activists (its leaders claimed 130 activists) used burning tires and smoke bombs to blockade two bridges in Calais (the organization claimed three bridges) that would have allowed access to downtown from the city’s large migrant encampment.
The group first used the “Defend Europe” slogan during the 2017 effort to interfere with rescue ships charged with saving migrants from drowning in the Mediterranean. Defend Europe was a milestone project in that it brought together members of the “identitarian” camp from multiple countries for a large-scale project. Participants raised money to hire a boat and there were at least three representatives from the French identitarian group onboard as well as others from Italy, Germany, and Austria plus Canadian Lauren Southern and American Brittany Pettibone, both prominent far-right YouTube personalities. The expedition was a failure insofar as they never found the shipwrecks or the rescue boats they were hoping to obstruct, they were continually beset by legal problems, and in the end, they wound up transporting undocumented Sri Lankan crew members to Europe. By now, it might be best remembered as the moment when Austrian identitarian leader Martin Sellner first made his mark on the international scene.
Not content to leave rescue ships alone, in October 2018, twenty-two members of Génération Identitaire were arrested after they forced their way into the headquarters of the non-governmental organization SOS Méditerranée in Marseilles, occupied their offices, and unfurled a banner outside their windows accusing the rescue organization of being “complicit in human trafficking.” Those arrested were charged with “violence with intent” (violence volontaire) and “unlawful confinement as a group” (séquestration en réunion).
In April 2018, Génération Identitaire executed a demonstration on the French-Italian border in the Alps under the “Defend Europe” slogan titled “Mission Alpes.” There, they established the blueprint for the January 2021 action on the Spanish border as they brought together about a hundred international far-right activists and one helicopter emblazoned with the Defend Europe logo to perform a blockade. They encountered no migrants.
In December 2020, three members of Génération Identitaire were convicted of assault and one of them of incitement to terrorism. During an undercover investigation by Al Jazeera journalists, they had been caught on video attacking people and threatening to “sow carnage” at “a mosque, whatever … even a car-ramming” in and around an identitarian bar in Lille.
Legal Issues
While the French identitarian group has largely escaped serious criminal charges thus far, its impending dissolution is only the latest in an ongoing series of legal restrictions and surveillance its various iterations have been subjected to across the European continent. The network has come under greater scrutiny since it was revealed in March and April 2019 that the assailant in the mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand had corresponded with Sellner over a six-month period and donated €1,500 to the Austrian group Identitäre Bewegung Österreich and another €1,300 to Génération Identitaire.
At the time, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz openly discussed the group’s dissolution, although he insisted that it was a decision that could only be made based on whether or not the group had actually broken any laws. Nonetheless, Austrian defense minister Mario Kunasek declared that Identitäre Bewegung members and supporters in the army could have restrictions placed on their service or even be removed from duty on the basis of a domestic intelligence report that labeled the group an “extreme right-wing association.” Sellner’s apartment in Vienna was searched both immediately after the Christchurch shootings and again in June 2019 on “strong suspicion of forming a terrorist organization.” Nothing came of that investigation, however Sellner has been barred from entering the UK and was unable to enter the United States in 2019 due to his connection with the Christchurch murderer. In December 2020, Austrian authorities banned the identitarian logo as part of a broader anti-terrorism bill.
The network’s legal entanglements have been less drastic in Germany, although the head of the national domestic intelligence agency there did describe it as opposing “the liberal-democratic constitutional order” as early as 2016 when he announced that the organization was formally under surveillance. No fewer than nine of Germany’s sixteen federal states had already done the same.
In France, penalties for the actions described above have generally amounted to little or are still under investigation, sometimes years later. The 2012 mosque occupation resulted in a one-year prison sentence for five members of the Génération Identitaire for “provocation of racial or religious hatred” plus fines of €600 each and additional fines and damages amounting to tens of thousands of euros in 2017. However, the verdict was overturned on appeal due to a technical error on the part of the prosecutor. The banner drop on the roof of the Socialist Party headquarters brought €500 fines each for fifteen members. The charges brought after the SOS Méditerranée action are still under investigation, but the putative blockade at the Italian border produced six-month prison sentences for three of the group’s leaders and €2,000 fines for each of them in addition to a €75,000 fine for the organization. They were charged with attempting to “create confusion in the public mind by engaging in civil service activities,” which is to say that they deceived people into believing that they had adopted the functions of the police. However, these charges were again dropped on appeal.
Dissolution in Context
Within hours of publicly announcing that the interior minister intended to dissolve it, Génération Identitaire also began issuing statements from public figures who had declared their support for the group. Arguably the most prominent among them, and certainly the most internationally recognizable, were National Rally leader Marine Le Pen and her niece Marion Maréchal, also a prominent National Rally figure. The links between the party and Génération Identitaire are substantial. For one, the party has employed former official Génération Identitaire spokesman Damien Lefèvre, known publicly as Damien Rieu, in one capacity or another fairly consistently since 2014, including a stint working for Maréchal. Rieu was a founding member of the organization and was present at the mosque occupation in 2012. He was also one of the three members threatened with six months in prison for the “blockade” at the Italian border in 2019. Since that year, he has been a parliamentary aide to Philippe Olivier, a member of the European Parliament and a close advisor to Marine Le Pen.
Historian Nicolas Lebourg has described Génération Identitaire as oscillating “between a school for Rassemblement National cadres and playing the lead role in a transnational agit-prop movement.” The group’s independence from the party has allowed the two entities to play off each other. Because Génération Identitaire is ostensibly more radical, it helps the party’s efforts to “de-demonize” itself by presenting as the worse alternative. Nonetheless, Le Pen has publicly defended the group before, as when she took to Twitter to describe the 2018 “blockade” in the Alps as a “funny outcome” before blaming left-wing politicians for creating the putative need for that action.
If Génération Identitaire is dissolved, it wouldn’t be the first time the French government has taken this kind of action in recent years. In 2019, it did the same to Bastion Social, an organization modeled after Italy’s CasaPound and dedicated to co-opting the traditionally left-wing tactic of squatting vacant buildings and turning them into social centers. It was founded by former members of the neo-fascist student organization Groupe union défense (GUD) in 2017 and, when it was dissolved two years later, the stated reasons were its “discriminatory actions and incitements to racist and anti-Semitic violence.” Despite its formal termination, however, Bastion Social has not really gone away. Rather, it has decentralized and carried on the same work, notably in the groups Audace Lyon and the Strasbourg-based Vent d’Est. It is impossible to know for certain, but the end of Génération Identitaire could result in a similar development.
