The shadow of the far-right RN hanging over terrorist cases in France

InIn 2018, a far-right ultra-nationalist group called Action des forces opérationnelles (AFO) was dismantled in an operation by French police. After a lengthy judge-led investigation, 16 AFO members were tried in June this year. On September 30th, the 16th chamber of the Paris criminal court found 12 of the defendants guilty of terrorist criminal conspiracy, delivering sentences ranging from two-year suspended prison terms to five-year jail terms with three years suspended. In handing down the sentences, the presiding judge observed that these men and women were driven by “xenophobic concerns” which had led them to “designate the Muslim community as the enemy”.

The plans of some of the group's members, who trained in the handling of home-made explosives, included “killing 200 radicalised imams”, throwing grenades into an “Arab car”, and poisoning halal food in supermarkets with cyanide or rat poison.

During the trial, the independent website Politis revealed the past links of several AFO members with the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party. Six months earlier, Mediapart had revealed the RN activism of three members of a neo-Nazi terror cell. And these are not isolated cases.

Since 2017, there have been 19 far-right terrorism-related cases that have either already gone to trial or which are still under investigation. Mediapart has had access to only ten of these legal cases: our list is therefore not exhaustive. But in those files we have already found nine former members of the RN (or its predecessor the Front National or FN): candidates in legislative, district or municipal elections, local officials or simple activists. Some have been placed under investigation, others have been convicted for terrorist criminal conspiracy.

Nine former right-wing activists out of the 79 people implicated in far-right terrorism cases represents a not-insignificant proportion. And it is unique, too; according to Mediapart's information, the only other example of links between a political party and such allegations concerns a former local official from the centrist MoDem party, later expelled, who has been placed under formal investigation over terrorism-related offences.

Asked daily since September 24th, Rassemblement National has not responded to Mediapart’s questions.

Ideas to justify their actions

The murder of Hichem Miraoui, a Tunisian shot dead on May 31st 2025 in Puget-sur-Argens in the south of France, showed how, behind the façade of respectability proffered by Marine Le Pen, the dissemination of the Rassemblement National’s ideology can inspire criminal acts. So much so that, for the first time, France's anti-terrorist prosecution unit, the Parquet National Antiterroriste (PNAT), took charge of prosecuting a racist killing of this type.

As Mediapart and other media have reported, the killer, Christophe Belgembe, urged people to vote for Rassemblement National. “If Marine or Jordan [editor's note, the party chair Jordan Bardella] don’t make it, lads… Wake up,” he said in a video posted just after his crime. Belgembe’s Facebook profile, retrieved by Le Monde, showed a man with no qualms about making Islamophobic remarks or showing his support for the RN. He claimed to be on the same ideological wavelength as Marine Le Pen and David Rachline, the RN mayor of the nearby town of Fréjus.

But the killer in this case was “only” a party sympathiser. So the RN MP for the constituency covering Puget-sur-Argens, Julie Lechanteux, was quick to portray him as unbalanced. “He’s not one of our members and I’ve never seen him in my circle. There's no link and no ideological coherence, he’s just an isolated individual,” she said. “We can’t be held responsible for the craziness of certain people who embrace our ideas with extremism.”

But what then of the terrorists, alleged or convicted, who were in the past endorsed by the far-right party? Of course, those who intend to take such action do not do so on the party’s orders. But their backgrounds do raise questions.

Several of these terrorists or alleged terrorists, questioned by officials from France's domestic intelligence agency the DGSI or by investigating judges, said they saw no difference between the discourse within the RN and within the terror cells they later joined. In a report written in the spring of 2023, the PNAT noted that the “rise in strength” of the terrorist threat was the “consequence of a shift in the political balance of power”, adding that the “prominence in public debate of ideas backed by the far-right tends to legitimise those promoted by the ultra-right....”

Elyamine Settoul, an assistant professor in political science at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers (Cnam) higher education institution, unpicks the drivers behind this radicalisation in his 190-page essay Suprémaciste. Anatomie d’un parcours d’ultradroite ('Supremacist. Anatomy of a Far-Right Journey') published by Université Paris-Cité éditions in 2025. “Among the different members of the terror cell I studied, there were several shared traits,” he told Mediapart.

“One of them is the fact they had grown up in families of staunch RN activists. There's a transmission, even if later they move away in the belief that the party will never manage to put in practice the measures it calls for. But these young people at least find in the RN’s political programme the ideas that will justify their actions,” he added.

Guy Sibra

Convicted in September 2025 and sentenced to five years in prison, three suspended, in the AFO case, he was a member of the Front National (FN) – the forerunner of the RN - campaign team in Charente-Maritime in south-west France during the 2015 regional elections.

A retired officer with the national police force, Guy Sibra, who uses the alias “Richelieu”, founded the AFO in October 2017. The man who described himself as the “national commander, chief of staff” of the small extremist group swears he was not aware of the attacks that some of his team were planning. In its judgement, the court found that he had “knowingly led the drift towards terrorism” of his small group.

Two years before founding AFO, Guy Sibra had signed up with the local branch of the Front National (FN) in Charente-Maritime and took part in the campaign team during the 2015 regional elections. He was then a polling-station assessor for the FN in the 2017 presidential and legislative elections. “Being an assessor is not being the representative of a party. If you want to represent a party, you are a member or a candidate,” said Marine Le Pen when questioned by Ouest-France newspaper.

Philippe Gensou

Convicted in September 2025 and sentenced to four years in prison, three of them suspended, in the AFO case, he was a Front National candidate in the 1994 district elections in France.

According to the testimony of another AFO member, during a training camp Philippe Gensou gave advice on combat and military tactics, and at one meeting suggested making an explosive device that could be detonated, remotely, in a couscous steamer. He also supplied airsoft grenades that were altered by an accomplice so they could be filled with TATP, the explosive used by the terrorists who attacked Paris on 13th November 2015 terrorists.

During searches, DGSI investigators noted there were many books “linked to the Third Reich and SS units” in Gensou's library and were surprised to find two cards “bearing the image of Marshal Pétain” - the head of the collaborating Vichy regime in France during its wartime occupation by the Nazis - in a patriotic songbook. “What interests me is not political history but military history,” he said in justification.

He swore he had no “political affinities”, merely conceding he was “somewhat to the Right”. In an investigation highlighting the RN past of several AFO members, the website Politis revealed that his name “cropped up on FN lists” in district elections.

When contacted, his lawyer Fabrice Delinde referred to simple “heated bar-room chats among ‘nutters’” and, concerning the Third Reich books and cards, said that his client “worked on Ubisoft games where one had to recreate the maritime and aerial dimension of this conflict”. He added: “Supporting documents were filed in the judicial proceedings.” (See the lawyer's full reply in the appendix).

Francis Maginot

Placed under investigation in the Opération Azur case in October 2021 – centred on a plot to stage a coup d’État in France - he was the Front National candidate for Madagascar in the 10th constituency for French nationals abroad in the May 2012 parliamentary elections.

Between 2020 and 2021, retired soldier Francis Maginot recruited and organised a conspiracist network that involved hierarchical clandestine cells in France. Its aim was a coup d’État (named Opération Azur) led from abroad by a former regional official from the centrist MoDem party, Rémy Daillet, with whom the former soldier eventually fell out. That did not stop the man whom other members nicknamed 'Colonel Quinze' from continuing to give his advice.

Among the objectives set by Maginot were: actions against vaccination centres (this was at the height of the Covid pandemic), which were to involve “two people on motorbikes, number plates removed, helmets, gloves, a Molotov cocktail in the window”; and also assaults on “hack” journalists. In particular, 'Colonel Quinze' encouraged one of his online correspondents to make explosives and incendiary devices.

Questioned about this by the investigating judge, the retired soldier said he did not see what he had done wrong. “Mr Judge, actually using that kind of crap never even crossed my mind. I'm in favour of love and peace,” he said in a deadpan manner. Though a book that had once been signed by Adolf Hitler, and another by Abbé Rioult, a “notorious anti-Semite”, were found at his home, the judge noted.

In writings recovered from his computer, Maginot called for violence. “People of France, this is the time to rise up […]. We must smash them […]. We must arm ourselves, we must find weapons and join together […] the enemy is freemasonry, the Jews.”

In a report on him, the DGSI noted the “political past” of the suspected terrorist, who had been a “Front National candidate in the parliamentary elections in Madagascar in May 2012”. “It was a party on the rise and I wanted to lend a hand, even if I never had any personal ambition,” Francis Maginot later told detectives when questioned in custody. He left the party three years later, after the press revealed posts by him on the Russian social network VK which contained racist and anti-Semitic drawings.

Contacted, his lawyer Emmanuel Touraille cited “client confidentiality” as the reason for not answering the questions Mediapart put to him and his client. Having not yet stood trial, Francis Maginot is presumed innocent.

Denis Lang

He was convicted in February 2025 and sentenced to a jail term of five years, 29 months of which were to be served behind bars and the rest suspended, in the Projet Alsace case, which included a plot to blow up a Masonic lodge in north-east France. He was also placed under investigation in the Opération Azur case in October 2021, and was a candidate on the Front National 'Haguenau Bleu Marine' list in north-east France at the 2014 municipal elections.

Eight members of a neo-Nazi cell were planning an attack on a Masonic lodge in north-east France, a plot called 'Projet Alsace'. At the February 2025 trial of those allegedly involved, the PNAT prosecutor stressed the “central role” played by Denis Lang in the terror plot.

Questioned in custody, he admitted being attracted by Nazism and his deep hatred of Freemasons, as well as the need for a “clear-out”, but explained that he was “too old to fight”. That did not stop Lang making thermite and seeking to buy C-4, a powerful plastic explosive. A .22 calibre rifle and a Luger pistol, plus a whole stash of ammunition, were found in a suitcase under his bed.

Before his involvement in the plot, Denis Lang was a long-standing FN activist in Alsace in north-east France. “I put up a lot of posters for Marine Le Pen,” he said under questioning in custody. Indeed, he was arrested by the police “because I was putting up posters outside of elections”. In 2014, he was on the Front National (FN) candidate list in Haguenau in north-east France, alongside his wife, his daughter and his son-in-law.

Yet this lifelong activist never hid his anti-Semitism. He declared: “France must never again be called the Republic, because the Republic is Jewish, and France is French. These tentacles must be eliminated, it’s a shame because one person tried to do it and he turned everyone against him, Adolf Hitler.”

The investigating judge asked him if that was why he had been pushed out by the FN's successor party Rassemblement National (RN), since under Marine Le Pen the far-right party had decided “as part of a de-demonization strategy to part company with extremist fringes”. Denis Lang shot back: “That’s got nothing to do with it. They no longer wanted me because of my drinking, I was doing all kinds of stuff.”

Thibaud Rufra

Sentenced in February 2025 to a jail term of five years, with 28 months to be served behind bars, in the Projet Alsace case, he was a candidate on a Front National list of candidates in north-east France at the 2014 municipal elections.

Thibaud Rufra is Denis Lang’s son-in-law. Like him, he was jailed for his part in a neo-Nazi cell that was plotting an attack on a Masonic lodge. Portrayed by the PNAT as being “at the heart of the operational preparation” of the attack, Thibaud Rufra had sought to obtain weapons. When contacted, his lawyer Marc Bailly disputed that his client was at the “heart” of any plan to attack a lodge (read his full reply in the appendix).

In custody, Rufra said he took no interest in any political party. That is not true. Like his father-in-law, in 2014 he was on the Front National candidates list – known as the 'Haguenau Bleu Marine' list - at Haguenau in north-east France for the municipal elections.

Thibaud Rufra used the Facebook alias “Thibaud Aryan” and posed bare-chested on his profile, showing a tattoo of an iron cross on the left of his chest. It was a Third Reich military decoration. On the inside of the cross are the letters “A” and “H”, standing for Adolf Hitler.

Asked by independent website Rue89 Strasbourg about the presence of the neo-Nazis Lang and Rufra on his 2014 municipal list, the lead candidate at the time Jean-Claude Altherr said he had done nothing wrong. “I know so many people in Haguenau. When I make a list, I don’t ask what people think,” he said.

Sébastien Dudognon

Convicted in February 2025 to a jail term of five years, three suspended, in the Projet Alsace case, he was head of the Front national de la jeunesse (FNJ) or FN youth wing in Corrèze in central France until 2017. Sébastien Dudognon had been well aware of the risks run in hatching a plan to attack a Masonic lodge. “If we get caught, we’ll get life,” he told an accomplice.

As the news magazine Marianne revealed, Sébastien Dudognon is a former secretary of the Front National youth wing or Front national de la jeunesse (FNJ) in the département of Corrèze in central France. Sporting a shaved head, and with SS symbols tattooed on his head, arms and thighs, Dudognon left the FNJ in 2017. For years he flaunted his fascination for the Third Reich on social media, and was happy to take photos of himself giving Nazi salutes or with his copy of Mein Kampf. None of this stopped him carrying out his duties within the far-right party.

Sébastien Dudognon told the investigating judge in the Projet Alsace case that he “left” the FN of his own accord in 2017, disappointed by Marine Le Pen’s showing in her television debate with Emmanuel Macron ahead of the second and decisive round of that year's presidential election. When asked in court whether the difference between the RN and the neo-Nazi groups in which he took refuge after 2017 was the issue of violence, Dudognon replied: “No. The only difference is that we speak plainly.”

Denis Collinet

After he was acquitted in February 2023 in the case involving the extremist group Les Barjols – which concerned an alleged plot to assassinate President Emmanuel Macron - prosecutors demanded on appeal that he be convicted and receive a seven-year prison sentence, with two years suspended. The Barjols case was then sent back to a judge for further investigation. He was a Front National activist until 2017.

Denis Collinet’s legal position is complicated. The founder of Les Barjols, a small extremist group suspected of having plotted in 2018 to assassinate Emmanuel Macron and Muslims, had been acquitted at first instance. When contacted, his lawyer Magali Woch answered Mediapart’s questions by posing another: “Do we not all feel some unease when 10 out of 13 are acquitted at a trial?”

At the appeal trial in May 2025, the chief prosecutor demanded a sentence of seven years in prison, two suspended, for Magali Woch's client. However, the Paris appeal court declared itself unable to hear the case, instead sending the file back to an investigating judge. Denis Collinet is therefore, at this stage, presumed innocent.

Having become the dominant group in the far-right movement, in 2018 Les Barjols trained in the handling of weapons on farmland in the Meuse in north-east France. At one of these meetings, around 15 Les Barjols members gathered and discussed the best ways to “launch attacks on migrants and on the president of the Republic”. According to one participant “their plan was to get as close as possible to the president of the Republic when he was in a crowd and to kill him. […] The talk was just about that, all evening, that’s all they talked about.” The attack never took place.

Denis Collinet nonetheless asked some members of Les Barjols to give him the formula for explosives. “I was really afraid something would happen,” Denis Collinet explained in court,  who said he feared that “a sort of Rwanda could happen.” He insisted the explosives were meant to mine his garden in case of invasion. He said they had nothing to do with remarks he is said to have made – and which were reported by others - about “blowing up a migrant camp” and “torching mosques”.

Questioned by the investigating judge, Denis Collinet explained that he had founded Les Barjols just after Emmanuel Macron’s election in 2017. “Before that I was in the Rassemblement National [editor's note, at the time the Front National] and I stopped right at the time of his election.” After leaving the RN he founded his own movement, but did not forget the party he had just left. “Who were ideal candidates to join Les Barjols?” the investigating judge asked him. “Well, those who were in Rassemblement National,” Denis Collinet replied. “They were taken straight away because we had the same beliefs.”

Logan Nisin

Sentenced in October 2021 to nine years in jail in the OAS case – concerning plans by that extremist group, which he founded, to carry out attacks - Nisin was also an activist and member of the Front National campaign team in the Bouches-du-Rhône département in southern France during the 2017 presidential and parliamentary elections.

At the end of 2016, Logan Nisin created a group called OAS (Organisation des armées sociales) whose aim was to carry out attacks targeting certain sections of the population (“jihadists, Arabs, blacks, drug dealers, scum”) as well as politicians. Less than a year later, the cell was dismantled at a time when its members had got hold of weapons and were considering taking action. Nine people were convicted at the end of 2021. Logan Nisin received the heaviest sentence: nine years in jail.

At the same time as he was leading his terror cell and trying to make TATP explosives, Logan Nisin, the grandson of an FN activist, had gone into politics. On the internet, he can be seen posing proudly alongside Marine Le Pen's niece Marion Maréchal, who was then the FN MP for Vaucluse in the south of France. He was part of the campaign team for the presidential and then parliamentary elections of 2017 in the 12th constituency of the Bouches-du-Rhône département in southern France. In his local town of Vitrolles, where he was an assessor at a polling station, he refused to greet voters of North African origin. This caused a scandal, as Le Monde reported.

Geoffrey Hanot

Convicted in October 2021 and sentenced to four-year suspended jail term in the OAS case. Activist and candidate in 11th place on the FN list of candidates at Rosny-sous-Bois in the east of Paris for the 2014 municipal elections.

Geoffrey Hanot was made head of the Paris section of the OAS. In police custody, he refused to go to the shower accompanied by a black officer, proclaiming: “If there’s a negro, I’m not showering.” Asked about this incident during his trial, he replied: “It wasn’t violent: it’s ethno-differentialism.”

The son of a gendarme, Hanot defines himself as a nationalist royalist and counter-revolutionary, sympathetic towards social Catholicism. As Politis later reported, he drew close to the Front National to the point where in 2014 he stood with his brother on a FN-supporting list of candidates at the municipal elections in Rosny-sous-Bois in the eastern suburbs of Paris.

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• The original French version of this article can be found here.

English version by Michael Streeter