The ultra group that the French government wants to outlaw

They are few — a few thousand — but noisy.

The militants of Génération Identitaire, one of the most active ultras groups in France, are less than 30 years old.

Their references are not those of the old neo-fascist or neo-Nazi organizations.

They are obsessed with "Arab-Muslim" immigration, they say, and what they call "the replacement" of white Europeans by foreign populations.

The preferred method is media operations, such as the most recent, at a border crossing in the Pyrenees in which some 30 young people deployed with drones to search for immigrants and waved flags that read: "Defend Europe."

They like to describe themselves as a "right wing Greenpeace", for their spectacular actions;

a prosecutor investigates them for "public provocation to racial hatred" and the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, wants to dissolve them.

Génération Identitaire presents itself as a “counter-model to the radicality of recent decades”, writes

historian Nicolas Lebourg

in the publication

Le 1

.

"It takes place in the light of day, with open faces, with women in the group and operations designed according to their potential media impact, claiming to defend those who would be oppressed by Islam," he adds.

"No more fascist references, radical anti-Zionism, violent activism, the prototypical aspect of militants and underground propaganda," he explains.

The creed is: "Scare the adversary, not our grandmothers."

Génération Identitaire was born from the ashes of Unity Radical, an ultra-group dissolved by the authorities after one of its members unsuccessfully attacked President Jacques Chirac in 2002.

"The evolution between Radical Unity and identitarians is that physical violence is renounced and replaced by the symbolic violence of media actions: shock is sought, it seeks to hurt, in some way", explains Marion Jacquet-Vaillant, author of the thesis entitled

The French Identity Movement.

For a mixed approach to margins in politics

.

"They say they renounce physical violence, which has a strategic dimension, because physical violence is what can lead to dissolution."

Jacquet-Vaillant draws a sociological profile of the militants.

"There are more young people and men than in the other parties, and they are less likely to come from the upper classes," he says.

They are present, above all, around large cities such as Lille, Paris, Lyon, Toulouse and on the Mediterranean coast.

"For them it is important to belong to a community, to the group, and the means of action, the

agitprop

side

."

Lebourg claims that Génération Identitaire militants have been involved in altercations.

And he cites the case of a member of the Toulouse section who went to Ukraine to fight with the Russians.

But today the preferred route is another.

Watching Greenpeace unfurling banners at nuclear power plants or with ships on the high seas, the leaders of Génération Identitaire realized that it was not necessary to be many - or use force - to spread certain ideas.

Its financing comes mainly from donations through collection platforms on the Internet.

In 2012, they occupied the works of the Poitiers mosque with a banner that read: "Gaul, wake up, no mosque at home."

In the summer of 2017, they chartered a boat to prevent the rescue of immigrants across the Mediterranean.

The most striking action was organized in April 2018 on the Franco-Italian border in the Alps, with helicopters and drones, and supporters from countries such as Germany, Austria and Italy.

The campaign on January 18, 19 and 20 at the Portillon pass, in the Pyrenees, was more modest - there were no helicopters - but followed the same method.

On paper, it was about locating immigrants: they did not locate any.

For practical purposes, they intended to create the media sensation.

"We mount spectacular, shock actions to sensitize public opinion and get our ideas into the public debate," says Jérémie Piano, spokesperson for Génération Identitaire who participated in the event in the Pyrenees.

“I am Provençal, French and European.

And I defend [these identities] against everything that can deny them: their replacement, linked to immigration, Islamization, anti-white racism ”.

The goal, he adds, "is to end immigration and reach re-emigration."

“They say re-emigration, but it is what is called deportation, even of people from the second and third generation of European immigration, and who are French.

It goes very far ”, observes left-wing deputy Muriel Ressiguier, president of a commission of the National Assembly that in 2019 investigated“ the fight against extreme right-wing groups in France ”.

Génération Identitaire is situated to the right of Marine Le Pen's National Regrouping (RN), but there are ideological affinities, and some former members of the formation now hold positions of responsibility in RN.

After the operation in the Alps, three members of Génération Identitaire were sentenced to six months in prison for "creating confusion in the public mind about the performance of a public function" by giving the impression that they were acting as forces of order.

Last December, an Appeal Court exonerated them, considering that the operation was nothing more than an act of public propaganda.

And this is all the difficulty that the Government will have if it wants to outlaw them.

"I am scandalized by the work of erosion of the Republic by the militants of Génération Identitaire," Minister Darmanin declared at the end of January.

The minister, who has dissolved Islamist associations in parallel, promised to gather information on the small group.

"If there are elements," he concluded, "I will not hesitate to propose to the Council of Ministers its dissolution."