A total of 39 members of the far right, including around twenty S-listed individuals, were arrested and placed in police custody on Saturday in Paris. According to information from the prosecutor’s office, the 39 members of the far-right movement arrested on Saturday in Paris are still in police custody this Sunday morning, February 11th. A source close to the case had indicated that they were being questioned for “participation in a group with the intention of committing acts of vandalism”.
The prosecutor’s office also provides more details on the profile of those arrested. The group is exclusively composed of men, most of them adults and the oldest of the group is 29 years old. Only two of them are minors, aged 17. In total, around twenty are on the S-list and several had been prohibited from going to Paris.
Among the 29 arrested men are well-known figures in the far-right movement, such as the former leader of the dissolved group “The Zouaves”, Marc de Cacqueray-Valmenier.
The group also includes Gabriel Loustau, a figure of the Groupe Union Défense (GUD), who is in his twenties and is the son of Axel Loustau, close to Marine Le Pen and former leader of this far-right student organization, known for its violent actions.
The 39 men were arrested by police from the Brav-M around 4:00 pm on Saturday at the exit of the Charronne cemetery in the 20th arrondissement of the capital. They had come to pay tribute to the far-right writer Robert Brasillach.
Several far-right groups have been dissolved in recent months by the government. Most recently, the Lille association La Citadelle was dissolved by the Council of Ministers after being banned from organizing an event entitled “Let them return to Africa” in February 2023. In December, another group, La Division Martel, was dissolved after a demonstration resembling a punitive expedition in Romans-sur-Isère (Drôme), in response to the death of a young man, Thomas, in Crépol.
Former Director General of Internal Security (DGSI), Nicolas Lerner, now at the head of the DGSE, had warned in July on the “very worrying resurgence” of violent actions by this extremist fringe since the spring of 2023, in an interview with Le Monde. Since 2017, 10 terrorist plots inspired by the far-right movement have been thwarted, according to the authorities.
