On July 28, the President of the Republic lodged a complaint against the poster-maker Michel-Ange Flori for "
public insult to the person of the President of the Republic
".
A poster caricaturing Emmanuel Macron as Adolf Hitler on a billboard with the slogan “
Obey!
Get vaccinated!
”And the swastika hijacked in LREM had created controversy.
Read also: Representation of Emmanuel Macron as Hitler: the head of state files a complaint against the author
The health pass associated with Pétain
This Thursday, August 12, the Toulonnais questioned recurrence, this time against the sanitary pass by resuming the figure of Marshal Pétain.
On a black background, with a QR code and the slogan "
There is only one Pass to cross
" and the busts of Marshal Pétain and Macron in Pétain side by side.
The author denounces "
Macronist militiamen
" "
anxious to please their master
" in a tweet broadcasting the image.
To read also: Macron in Hitler on posters: open investigation for "public insult"
A week earlier, he had published another poster, still on a billboard.
This time, the President of the Republic was represented in Louis XVI with the slogan “
Macon 1er, this is not a montage
”.
In a tweet, Michelangelo Flori said to be one of his "
subjects
", prosecuted for "
blasphemy
".
Note that the man, who presents himself on Twitter as a "
free spirit who seeks to move the lines with a little glue and paper
", is not his first attempt.
Colleur for twenty years and condemned in 2019
His first collages date from 1999 according to our colleagues from LCI.
At the time, he was targeting Jean-Pierre Chevènement (Minister of the Interior) on the huts affair in Corsica: “
Corsica: presumed guilty.
Prefect: presumed innocent.
Chevènement: selective innocence
”, which had earned him 36 hours in police custody.
In 2019, BFMTV had obtained its conviction by the Tribunal de Grande Instance of Marseille for a poster with the slogan
"The police talk to you every day on BFMTV".
On Twitter, he has been communicating his posters since 2019, always against the policy of the government or the President of the Republic.
The only exceptions are a few montages devoted to Marine le Pen and Nicolas Sarkozy's legal affairs.
What the law says ?
If the offense of insulting the President of the Republic was repealed in 2013, the Head of State, like any citizen, can file a complaint for public insult and defamation within one year after the fact. As the website of the Ministry of the Interior says, the offense is punishable by a fine of 12,000 euros. A penalty which can increase to one year of imprisonment and 45,000 euros in the event of an insult of a "
racist, sexist, homophobic or handiphobic
" nature.
These notions of insult and defamation are defined in articles 29 to 33 of the law of July 29, 1881 which defines insult as "
any outrageous expression, terms of contempt or invective which does not include the attribution of any fact
" and defamation as "
any allegation or imputation of an act which harms the honor or the consideration of the person or body to which the act is imputed
". Articles 31 and 33 also specify that are punished "
with the same penalty, defamation (...) against the President of the Republic
" and "
the insult committed by the same means against the bodies or persons designated by the articles 30 and 31
”(therefore the Head of State).
It will now be up to justice to decide what it is, while an investigation by the Toulon prosecutor's office is open and ongoing. On social networks, it had triggered a wave of cartoons in response to this decision under the hashtag "CaricatureTonMacron".
