The Place de la République has the gloomy air of rainy days.
They arrive half an hour late, friendly, already almost communication professionals, warning that they have to leave at 6 p.m.
He, Clément Martin, spokesperson for the Generation Identity group, quickly takes off his mask, she keeps hers.
Her blond hair, her blue eyes, the roundness of her face identify her yet.
In one program, the “Balance ton post” of January 21, resisting with a slightly tense smile at the curling of Eric Naulleau or Karim Zéribi, repeatedly and tenaciously reaffirming three simple, even simplistic ideas, Thaïs Descufon (his true first name, followed by a pseudonym linked to the family of which she is the fourth child) has become the media pasionaria of the ultra-radical movement Generation Identity (GI).
The talk show, where the 21-year-old activist unashamedly affirmed that "every woman knows very well that the people who come to annoy her in the street, who come to insult her, are young men of African origins. and North Africans ”, had the best audience of the season.
On March 3, in Paris, Thaïs Descufon, media muse of the movement.
LP / Olivier Corsan
Jean Messiha, president of the far-right think tank Institut Apollon, created to "prepare for the great alternation" of 2022, and very present on the channels of the Canal + group, has occasionally qualified Génération Identitaire as "Greenpeace of the identity ”.
The publicity stunt thus offered by Cyril Hanouna served the purpose of the group, specialist in "agit-prop" (for agitation and propaganda), which compensates for its small number of members by the visibility of its media operations.
"Identity generation incites discrimination, hatred and violence"
March 3, the day we meet, is for them a day of mourning.
That same morning, the Council of Ministers declared the movement to be dissolved.
In a tweet, Gérald Darmanin, the Minister of the Interior, commented on this decision: “Identity generation incites discrimination, hatred and violence.
"
About twenty of its members wanted, in a final gesture of protest, to deploy a banner in front of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris.
The police stopped them from moving forward, checked their identities.
“We didn't understand.
What were the agents doing to control a peaceful movement when they are away from the dangerous suburbs?
is astonished Clément Martin, 34, for whom this relentlessness is also a recognition.
Generation Identity was the most imaginative far-right movement.
We are victims of our success.
"
Thaïs Descufon's eyes betray the same incomprehension, but a glance at the building on the corner of rue du Temple and place de la République is enough to reinvigorate it.
This is where the movement carried out, on June 13, 2020, one of its most publicized actions: the deployment on the roof of a banner calling for "justice for the victims of anti-white racism", during the demonstration against racism and police violence organized by the Adama Traoré committee.
On June 13, 2020, in Paris, members of Generation Identity deployed a banner on the sidelines of a demonstration against racism and police violence.
LP / Olivier Corsan
Thaïs Descufon, whose Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts were censored, was the star.
Perched on a fireplace and handing out a smoke in a gesture taken for a Nazi salute, then, all smiles, making a selfie in the police van who were taking her to the station with her comrades, she had struck the observers.
This memory remains for her flamboyant: “The camaraderie, the risk-taking, it was galvanizing.
“Action, solidarity, the happiness of being together… Elements that the members of Génération Identitaire put forward to justify their commitment.
“Today, my close friends are all activists of the movement,” assures Corentin Rochefort, 27, a Toulouse resident too.
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Thaïs Descufon was a member of this group for three years, which she discovered thanks to a friend.
She met her members, found them "nice", recognized herself in their fears.
She then began her “militant training”: circle of readers, press releases, response to journalists, rediscovery of European heroes, Joan of Arc or Isabelle the Catholic… And participated in her first actions.
Now a student in Toulouse, she no longer goes to class for “security” reasons and receives death threats.
" I do not care.
After going to Hanouna, I had 500 contact requests on WhatsApp, ”she says.
Her family supports her.
Clément Martin, he joined the group in 2012, after the occupation of the Poitiers mosque site, to protest against its construction.
“I found it courageous, it was a new form of action.
"
At 14, Etienne Cormier, who is 23 today, wanted to get involved.
His parents encouraged him to do so.
A period of residence in Switzerland, in Geneva, a very cosmopolitan city where he saw "a lot of problems with the Turks" and the rise of a crime of which he says, without expanding, to have been a victim, pushes him to join Génération identity.
“I saw the districts of Paris change.
With this movement, I entered into something motivating, bigger than me, almost transcendent.
»Tracting, posters and demonstrations have become his daily life.
“I want the public authorities to take hold of our themes.
We are whistleblowers, ”he insists.
Punch actions at the borders
Media blocking of a Franco-Italian border at the Col de l'Echelle, in the Alps, on April 21, 2018. YouTube / GenerationIdentitaire
Among the main feats of arms of the movement: a demonstration on the roofs of the headquarters of the Socialist Party in 2013 against marriage for all, “anti-scum” patrols in 2014, the blocking of roads to the Calais refugee camp in 2016, the occupation, in 2018, of the premises of the SOS Méditerranée association, which organizes operations at sea to save migrants aboard sinking ships ...
But the two punch actions of Génération Identitaire, those which led to their dissolution, are the border blockades.
The first takes place in April 2018, at the Col de l'Echelle, in the Alps, where illegal immigrants from Italy pass.
A blockbuster with helicopters and drones, 800 kilos of equipment, 30,000 euros budget.
The action is funded by donations (55 euros per participant), including those, highly publicized, in the amount of 2200 euros paid in 2017 by the Australian terrorist Brenton Tarrant - his attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand , killed 51 people in March 2019.
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Ultradroite: immersed in an explosive movement
Dressed in “Defend Europe” anoraks, stretching out along the border in tight ranks, the militants “block” a well-chosen place of passage, because that day no one will attempt to enter France. .
The filmed images are immediately broadcast on social networks.
No fight takes place.
These young people still loot a batch of blankets and cans intended for those who "invade" the country.
The militants come back down at the end of the day.
On January 19, they started again in the Pyrenees and invested at 30 the Col du Portillon, east of Bagnères-de-Luchon (Haute-Garonne).
Banners display their will to "watch the border".
A preliminary investigation for "public provocation to racial hatred" is then entrusted to the research brigade of the gendarmerie of Saint-Gaudens.
"We feel at home in Spain, but not Porte de la Chapelle"
Their ideas, the main one of which is "remigration", the sending home of immigrants, all today affirm them as "majority".
Where do they come from?
“I grew up in Val-de-Marne,” says Clément Martin.
I saw in it the failure of multicultural society, the disconnect between multi-ethnic discourse and the nightmare of reality.
Anti-white racism is massive.
I wanted to stop suffering, to become an actor in political life.
"
Thaïs Descufon abounds: “I feel like a foreigner at home.
There are a lot of immigrants and Islamists in college.
I am often the only white person in the metro.
»Corentin Rochefort, creator of a micro-enterprise of text correction - born in a family voting Mélenchon but who accepted his commitment without necessarily understanding it -, feeds his reflection with many readings: the novelists Jean Raspail and Sylvain Tesson, the Quebec sovereignist essayist Mathieu Bock-Côté, the “ethnicist” thinker Guillaume Faye, the founding essayist of the French extreme right Dominique Venner… “I joined the movement in 2017. I was already politicized, in a self-taught way , but I was frustrated with doing nothing.
On the issue of immigration, I was saddened to see that everyone was out of touch with reality.
"
The members of the small group, a few hundred activists, advocate "remigration", the return home of immigrants.
Abaca / Raphaël Lafargue
Defenders of a “pure” Europe, the members of GI aim beyond France and differentiate themselves from Eric Zemmour, whose “courage” they praise without ever raising his multiple approximations.
“We have mourned the republican assimilation, an idea with programmed obsolescence, says Corentin Rochefort.
We believe in the concept of homeland, but for Europeans.
It is undoubtedly a question of generation.
Many of us have known Erasmus: they feel at home in Spain, but not at Porte de la Chapelle.
"" Our fight is not for bullshit like selective sorting, continues Etienne Cormier, but to defend European civilization.
"
Anti-Semitism replaced by anti-Islam
This fight goes back a long way.
For historian Serge Berstein, Identity Generation is part of an old tradition: “The one that started in French nationalism at the end of the 19th century, and sees the foreigner (yesterday the German, today the migrant) threaten the continuity of France.
Writers and politicians Paul Déroulède, who founded the League of Patriots, or Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras embodied these ideas, each with their own particularities.
Today, a small minority takes up this heritage and adds to it the absolute rejection of immigration.
Anti-Semitism is replaced by anti-Islam, a religion which is not part of the French identity.
Its activists assert a dream identity which ignores the reality of the country's constitution, vitalized by immigration since the 19th century.
They have the idea of a national culture inherited, not granted.
French people of foreign origin have no place in their world.
"
To be born in France and to have the nationality is not enough, according to them, to be a “true French”, as affirmed in 2016 to the BBC Romain Espino, a spokesperson of the movement.
“You have young people from outside Europe who have been there for two or three generations and who do not feel French (…).
They are French people of paper.
Their site, now closed, posted: "White, straight, for them, you are too much", or "kebabs, veils and mosques have nothing to do here".
We credit Identity Generation with a few hundred activists, mainly young people.
They claim 4000, "in great progress for six months", says Clément Martin.
To attack them, the Ministry of the Interior relied in particular on paragraph 2 of Article L212-1 of the Internal Security Code, targeting associations "which present, by their military form and organization, character of combat groups or private militias ”.
"Violence is not necessarily physical but it exists"
Among their lawyers, the most publicized is Me Gilles-William Goldnadel, columnist on the channels of the Canal + group.
"There is no judicial justification for this dissolution," he says.
Darmanin needed to please the left which he had displeased by dissolving Baraka City and the CCIF, two organizations close to the Islamists.
We talked about militias because they all wear the same anorak: it's ridiculous.
We talk about hatred: but what is hatred?
Unless the criticism of immigration is considered illegal, there is no legal reason for this dissolution.
"
What about violence?
“It is not necessarily physical, continues historian Serge Berstein, but it does exist: going to borders, waving banners… Violent action, even if it does not attack people, is essential for them, because it transforms a minority into a group capable of acting.
"In a documentary by the Al Jazeera channel entitled" Generation hate ", broadcast in 2018, we saw customers of the Lille bar La Citadelle, a meeting place for members of Generation Identity, filmed on a hidden camera, making racist remarks and bragging about themselves. violent acts against “dirty bougnoules”.
We even saw a man assaulting a 14-year-old North African girl in the middle of the street.
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After the report aired, those responsible for the violence were given suspended prison sentences of three to eight months, but their connection to GI was never proven.
If the organization as such has always been released by the courts, both for the invasion of the site of the Poitiers mosque and for the deployment of banners against immigration at the Franco-Italian border (during a trial on appeal), several of its members were however sentenced: 19, to fines for the deployment of a banner on the roof of the Socialist Party headquarters in 2013;
two, to prison terms for stabbing assaults in 2014;
three, in 2016, for fighting with police officers during an illegal demonstration in Calais.
An appeal to the Council of State
On Saturday March 20, some 50 hooded militants demolished the window of an anarchist bookseller in Lyon, "La plume noire".
Witnesses recognized identity slogans.
Clément Martin denies the movement's participation in the aggression: “Our activism is peaceful.
Members of the anti-fascist organization The Young Guard claimed to have recognized, despite their balaclavas, former GI executives on the videos.
On March 3, Clément Martin, spokesperson for the movement, contested its dissolution during a rally in Paris.
DR
The group will take legal action.
The first is an appeal before the Council of State to contest its dissolution.
“In a state of law, I would go whistling.
There, I do not know ”, worries Me Goldnadel.
Before, there will be a summary to suspend the ban on movement and the filing before the Constitutional Council of two priority questions of constitutionality.
After that, there will be the European Court of Human Rights.
For now, they swear that there will be no Identity Generation 2. Should we believe them?
Will they end up in the ranks of the National Rally (RN), as some officials of the Bloc Identitaire, also dissolved, did before them?
“The RN is assimilationist, analyzes Etienne Cormier.
We don't.
For years, the Generation Identity summer universities have been held in lodges in Isère in the Chartreuse, at Lac des Estives in Cantal, or in Savoie.
To be accepted there, they did not hesitate to lie, presenting themselves as an association to help the homeless or an Occitan cultural association.
This summer, we will have to find something else.