Tags, degradations, public prayers... In recent days, numerous anti-abortion actions have taken place in France, while the freedom to resort to voluntary termination of pregnancy (IVG) entered the Constitution on Friday.
In Metz, on Saturday, the Lorraine Catholique collective called to invest the cathedral for a “rosary of reparation”, or prayers to “repair the offense” made to God.
The mobilization then degenerated into a brawl between the group and anti-fascist activists.
Three people were arrested.
In Vendée, in La Roche-sur-Yon, it was the royalist movement Action Française which claimed responsibility for the damage to a statue of Simone Veil on Wednesday.
Babies sprayed with red paint as well as a sign “The Constitution is killing our children” were placed in front of the bust of the politician behind the decriminalization of abortion in 1975. On her account ), the far-right movement has thus reaffirmed its opposition to abortion and “its massification”.
🔴 Abortion in the constitution 🔴
👉🏻 The sinister circus in which the political parties have indulged reflects the general emptiness of the government's thinking.
Our opposition to abortion and its massification remains full and complete.
🤝🏻 While the French suffer, he… pic.twitter.com/4Zlx5ollJY
— Action Française (@actionfrancaise) March 5, 2024
In Lille or Strasbourg, family planning was targeted by tags several times during the week.
“We are going to file a complaint, just as we have already done previously, this is not the first attack of this type unfortunately,” reacted Claire Riffel, family planning employee.
An investigation is underway to identify those responsible.
“Few in number but well organized”
These “strikes” operations are the hallmark of radical groups.
“They are for the most part small groups of the extreme right, sometimes related to royalist movements, or fundamentalist Catholics, which are few in number but well organized,” deciphers Lynda Gaudemard, philosopher and specialist in applied ethics within the laboratory of theory of law, from Aix-Marseille University.
They revolve around the heterogeneous anti-abortion movement, which brings together conservative family movements, radical Catholic activists and even groups linked to the extreme right, as Laurine Thizy, sociologist and co-author with Marie Mathieu of “ Sociology of abortion”, in Ouest-France.
Also read They pray and sing in the public square: who are these irreducible anti-abortion demonstrators in Yvelines?
“These small groups are driven by the same theory, namely that terminating a pregnancy is tantamount to killing a human being.
Even if it is not yet a human being, they believe that it is a potential human being, in the making, and therefore that if we resort to abortion, it is murder,” analyzes Lynda Gaudemard, who is the author of an encyclopedic article on abortion.
“All fundamentalist Catholics are not extreme right, but often in these movements there are people who are sympathizers of the extreme right and people who claim to belong to small fundamentalist Catholic groups,” she clarifies, citing the example of Civitas.
Although dissolved last October, this far-right fundamentalist organization is still active on social networks and on Friday described the French Republic as “Moloch”, named after a biblical deity to whom human victims were sacrificed by fire.
An “ideological fight” broader than abortion
Recent debates around abortion have relaunched the mobilization of those who call themselves “pro-life”, despite the massive support of public opinion for abortion.
According to an Ifop survey dated last year, 83% of French people judge its authorization by law positively.
“These actions are reactions, to mark their presence.
But in reality, these movements have always been active, recalls Lynda Gaudemard.
Legalization does not mean the end of these small groups: the question of abortion is for them an ideological battle.
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Also read: Ultra-right: “The movement is in the process of reorganizing itself into small groups”
“These are fairly isolated acts, carried out by extremist groups, which are often anti-migrant, anti-homosexuality…” adds the philosopher.
The Lorraine Catholique collective, for example, had already mobilized last year against a concert by the artist Bilal Hassani in an old church in Metz.
They denounced “a desecration” and the “pornographic” performances of an “LGBT+ proselytizing artist”.
Saturday morning, in front of the Saint-Étienne cathedral in Metz, local media recognized Cassandre Fristot, a teacher in her thirties, convicted of "provoking racial hatred" for having brandished a sign with an anti-Semitic inscription during of a demonstration against the health pass.
“This type of act still occurs today, because for these ultra-right groups that exist in France, we are living in an era of anthropological change and decadence,” summarized Jean-Yves Camus, director of the observatory of political radicalism at the Jean Jaurès foundation, regarding the attacks to which family planning is regularly subject.
“There is a link that is made between the rise of the far right everywhere, in France and in the European Union, and these anti-abortion, pro-life movements, which are gaining momentum.
They have more visibility and are gaining expansion,” concludes Lynda Gaudemard.
In July, Laurence Rossignol, former Minister of Families, Children and Women's Rights, already shared this observation in the Senate: "It is clear that the concomitance between the renewed activism of ultra-right movements and that of anti- IVG is neither totally fortuitous nor harmless.
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