Is the extreme right seeking to infiltrate France's leading mainstream conservative party, the UMP? That is the question raised after a Mediapart investigation exposed the far-right links of a parliamentary assistant working for a prominent UMP Member of Parliament who helped lead the fight against the same-sex marriage law.
The background of one such parliamentary assistant, Guillaume de Thieulloy, who works for Jean-Claude Gaudin, UMP vice-president, senator and the mayor of Marseille, is already a matter of public record. Thieulloy is the founder of the Family Marriage Collective (CFM), a splinter group of the ultra-conservative Action Française movement; he also publishes several websites and magazines stamped with the far-right seal; Nouvelles de France, Les 4 Verités and Riposte Catholique. By his own admission, he is “Catholic”, “French born and bred” and “conservative”.
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Now comes the more worrying story of Jeanne Pavard, parliamentary assistant to Hervé Mariton, the UMP MP for the Drôme départment in south-east France and the man who led the parliamentary opposition to the same-sex marriage bill. According to investigations by Mediapart, Jeanne Pavard moves in the same circles as some of the most radical of extreme right-wing groups. In 2006 she was a candidate for the Rassemblement Etudiant de Droite (RED), an ultra-conservative group that emerged from the ashes of the Groupe Union Défense (GUD), a far-right student group set up in 1968 and which is regularly banned only to reappear again under a new guise.
Recruited by Mariton in February 2011 from within the ranks of the economically ultra-liberal Contribuables Associés - Associated Taxpayers - the 29-year old Pavard is a fan of the ultra-right-wing essayist Dominique Venner. She was one of the first to call for a gathering in homage to Venner after he committed suicide on 21st May 2013 inside Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, one of the great Catholic monuments of France. He was a bitter opponent of the same-sex marriage law.
Her comment on Facebook (see above) reads: “It is by making decisions oneself, by really accepting one's destiny that we can vanquish the void. And there is no escape from this requirement because we only have this life, in which it is up to us to be entirely ourselves or to be nothing.” RIP Dominique Venner.
That evening several dozen extreme-right activists gathered in the forecourt of Notre Dame, among them former members of the GUD who are now in or close to the entourage of Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Front national (FN). These include Frédéric Chatillon, Le Pen's official advisor; Axel Loustau, responsible for security at the FN; the head of the FN youth group, Julien Rochedy; and former FN MP Jacques Bompard, now leader of the Ligue du Sud or Southern League, a party of former FN members concentrated in the Vaucluse département in the south of France.
The profile banner on Jeanne Pavard's Facebook page (see below) sets the tone, quoting Venner: “Nature as a foundation, excellence as a goal and beauty on the horizon.” Dominique Venner 1935-2013.
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“I knew Dominique Venner through Radio Courtoisie [editor's note, a right-wing radio station broadcast in several French towns], on which I appeared several times,” she said when contacted by Mediapart. “I find him very interesting, I'm open to his ideas on [national] identity, roots, the 'Great Replacement' [editor's note, meaning of the French population]. I also read Renaud Camus,” she said, referring to the man who developed that theory in his book 'The Great Replacement'.
Mariton's parliamentary assistant is not only “open” to Dominique Venner's ideas, as can be seen from her Facebook page – or at least could be, before it was cleaned up following Mediapart's initial phone call to her. Among her 'friends' on Facebook one finds Frédéric Pichon, former head of the GUD and a lawyer for the extreme right including Printemps Français ('French Spring'), a movement that emerged during the protests against the same-sex marriage bill. Other friends include Bruno Larebière, former editor of the right-wing weekly Minute.
This interest in the extreme right is confirmed by her 'likes' (see the entire list saved here) on Facebook. These include: FN MP Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, Jacques Bompard, Florian Philippot, the FN vice-president, former FN MP Jean-Yves Le Gallou, le Renouveau Français or 'French Renewal', a nationalist, Catholic, anti-Semitic and Vichyist splinter group, Dieudonné, a comic who supports the FN, Égalité et Réconciliation, a group founded by ultra-conservative essayist Alain Soral, Infosyrie.fr, a pro-Bachar al-Assad website sponsored by former GUD leader Frédéric Chatillon, the 'Love Your Race' campaign run by US white separatists the National Alliance, Rebeyne, a group of nationalists in Lyon, Philippe Vardon, co-founder of the far-right Bloc Identitaire, a nationalist group, Manif pour tous, the anti-gay marriage movement, and its radical fringe movement, Printemps Français, The Antigones, an anti-Femen group, Cigales Médias, which publishes a free magazine founded by a former GUD member who is close to Marine Le Pen, writer and far-right ideologue Jean Raspail, and even The Voice of Russia, the official Russian world service radio.
Apart from homages to Dominique Venner, Pavard uses her Facebook page to pass on information from Paris Fierté - 'Paris Pride' - an association close to Bloc Identitaire which promotes “Parisian culture and identity”; approve the homophobic comments of conservative politician Christian Vanneste - whom she knows from Associated Taxpayers - and hail the Swiss vote to ban minarets:
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“It's a way of keeping up with the news. There's an output of interesting ideas that are not found at the UMP,” Pavard said of her interest in such groups on Facebook. Renouveau Français - French Renewal - “is interesting because they stand for Catholic values, even if they do it in a peculiar manner that is hard to support,” she added. As for the Infosyrie.com website that is pro-regime and linked to the controversial Frédéric Chatillon, “it's a way of getting information that's not found in other newspapers. One gets a point of view that is different from what we hear all day long in the media,” Pavard insisted.
Candidate for extreme right-wing group while a student
But Jeanne Pavard does more than monitor all of these splinter groups. Mediapart has discovered that she ran as a student delegate for the board of the Paris Crous, a regional administration responsible for student welfare, housing, food services and so on, in December 2006 on the ticket of the Rassemblement Etudiants de Droite (Rally for Right-wing Students or RED). This was created out of the ashes of the now banned GUD. Close to the FN, very well established at the University of Paris II-Assas campus - historically a hotbed of the radical right, including the GUD - RED disbanded in 2009 but a militant blog can still be found here.
RED called for “a complex-free Right” and planned to fight “against moral relativism among youth, against Marxism, against trade union domination and for the promotion of merit in universities”. Well-versed in hard-hitting operations, in 2006 it led several violent reprisals against people protesting against changes in employment contracts that were proposed – and later withdrawn - by the UMP-led government of then-president Jacques Chirac.
Pavard denies any links with RED. “Absolutely no [link], no, I don't even know what it is. No, I wasn't involved in anything when I did my studies in Paris,” she said. Yet Mediapart has found the ballot paper on which she is listed seventh:
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She is also close to a number of former figures in the GUD, of which her partner Lancelot Galey was a member. He was present during an annual gathering of the extreme radical right in Paris on 9 May 2010:
Galey provides services for Cigales Médias a firm linked to former GUD members. He can also be found on photos of violent actions that occurred on the fringe of the anti-gay marriage demonstration at Les Invalides, in Paris, on 16th April 2013, alongside GUD leaders such as Axel Loustau:
“Yes, he has friends at the GUD, but he himself was not in the GUD, or if he was he didn't tell me,” insisted Jeanne Pavard, before explaining later that “he must have passed through it”. For herself she accepts that: “I have met Frédéric Chatillon.” But she denies any “active involvement”. She says: “I have never been a card-carrying member of any party, I am not an activist.”
The affair is likely to be embarrassing for Hervé Mariton. Parliamentary assistants are among an MP's closest work colleagues and it is a position of trust. When contacted Hervé Mariton said that he was “absolutely unaware of” Jeanne Pavard's “political profile” and “activities” when he recruited her. “I don't investigate my assistants, which is doubtless naïve of me,” he said. “She was at Contribuables associés, an association which sometimes has some over-the-top positions on the subjects on which it speaks about but which doesn't cause me any difficulty. I received her CV, she was quite smart, I was told she worked reasonably well.”
The MP accepts that he “saw her in the pictures of the homage to Dominique Venner”. He said: “I reproached her. Later someone told me that her Facebook page posed a problem. But not being friends with her on Facebook I didn't have access to it.” The MP, looking visibly surprised, added: “I had no idea about all that...I am quite distraught about all that. If I had known the rest of her background I wouldn't have recruited her. She had told me about her wish to leave [editor's note, before the story broke] and I'm not sorry about that....It's quite impossible for me to work with someone who has ideas like that, which I condemn.”
After Dominique Venner's suicide, Hervé Mariton had himself surprised people with his comments about the essayist on RMC radio. “I don't agree with all” of his final message, “there are some points on which I can agree and others with which I am in disagreement”, he said. Speaking later the MP clarified his view: “When [Venner] says that he's not in favour of the loi Taubira [editor's note, the official name for the same-sex marriage legislation] I can agree with that. He professed extreme opinions on other subjects, there I do not agree.”
His assistant's profile could meanwhile explain incidents that took place at the National Assembly during the formal vote on the loi Taubira on 23rd April 2013. Anti same-sex marriage protesters unfurled a banner from the visitors' gallery with the word 'Referendum' written in large red and black letters on it, reflecting their demand that the issue be put to a national popular vote. In the jostling that followed an Assembly official was hurt. According to Le Monde those responsible had been invited by Hervé Mariton and another MP, Jacques Bompard.
“I told my assistant that I didn’t appreciate that incident,” says Mariton. “She told me that she had allocated some tickets to some people from Manif pour tous [editor's note, the name of the anti same-sex marriage protest, meaning “Demonstration for everyone”], it was believable.” Jeanne Pavard still stands by the same version of events. “You give tickets to some people from Manif pour tous that you don't really know, perhaps there's some passing on of tickets,” she said.
Since Mediapart's story was initially published, in French, the parliamentary assistant has taken some care to get rid of all trace from Facebook of her ties with the extreme right. Meanwhile, and again immediately after the publication of the story, Hervé Mariton told Dauphiné Libéré newspaper and then France Bleu that he had “discovered today, in particular through Mediapart's investigations, some political commitments that are totally incompatible with working for me, and this person is ending their work [for me]”. He added: “I am dismayed by the results of Mediapart's investigation.”
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English version by Patricia Brett
Editing by Michael Streeter