Politique Investigation

The racist and homophobic writings of a far-right MP and key ally of Marine Le Pen

Caroline Parmentier is a Member of Parliament for the far-right Rassemblement National and a key strategist for that party's former presidential candidate Marine Le Pen. In particular, she has been one of the architects of Le Pen’s so-called “de-demonisation” strategy to soften the party's image and erase memories of its murky past. Yet an investigation by Mediapart has shown that over a period of 30 years Caroline Parmentier wrote racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic comments for a far-right publication. She also openly expressed her support for Marshal Philippe Pétain – who headed France's wartime Vichy government which collaborated with the Nazis - on Facebook as recently as 2018. Rassemblement National now faces growing embarrassment over these revelations about a woman who is a close friend of Marine Le Pen. Fabrice Arfi and Antton Rouget report.

Fabrice Arfi and Antton Rouget

20 June 2025 à 12h10

This article is freely available.

Caroline Parmentier is a Member of Parliament for the far-right Rassemblement National (RN), a close friend of its leading figure Marine Le Pen and a key strategist behind attempts to soften the party's murky reputation. But an investigation by Mediapart has catalogued Caroline Parmentier's racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic writings over thirty years for the now-defunct far-right newspaper Présent where she worked.

In its pages, she wrote of the “Jewish lobby”, blamed homosexuality for AIDS and praised Marshal Philippe Pétain, leader of the the wartime Vichy France regime which collaborated with the Nazis. Caroline Parmentier also mocked the much-respected Holocaust survivor, women's rights campaigner and politician Simone Veil as “fat” and railed against what she termed “baboon supporters” in football stadiums.

When approached by Mediapart, the RN MP made no attempt to distance herself from her writings in Présent. Caroline Parmentier simply stated that she has been successfully sued “just once in thirty-one years of working in journalism” for comments which, in her view, “would no longer fall foul of the law today”. She said: “I've never had a criminal record. None of my other articles has ever been the object of legal action by associations or the prosecution service.”

Asked on June 16th by the LCP parliamentary channel about Caroline Parmentier’s articles in Présent, RN vice-president Sébastien Chenu tried to brush off the controversy, claiming that “her comments are very old.” In truth, while some do date back to the 1990s, others were written in 2014.

“She’s moved on from that position,” the MP added, visibly ill at ease. A former member of the rightwing UMP - now Les Républicains - Sébastien Chenu, who is openly gay, had left that party in 2014 over its opposition to same-sex marriage. His stance is hard to square with Caroline Parmentier’s homophobic remarks which were made during the same period.

Caroline Parmentier and Marine Le Pen, centre, before the results of the first round of the presidential election in Paris, April 10th 2022. © Photo Joël Saget / AFP

Meanwhile Mediapart can reveal that Caroline Parmentier's hate was not only expressed in print but online, too. Indeed, not only has Caroline Parmentier never publicly disowned her writings in Présent, a scroll through her Facebook timeline in 2018 shows quite the opposite: praise for Marshal Pétain, homophobia, promotion of the 'Great Replacement' conspiracy theory, and tributes to racist and anti-Semitic authors.

These Facebook posts, like her published writings in Présent, now pose a political problem for Marine Le Pen, who has been a close friend of Parmentier for more than twenty years. According to Le Monde, the two women became “almost like sisters” after meeting at a Front National (FN) – later renamed Rassemblement National - party event in the late 1990s, when both were still in their 20s.

A newspaper that 'defended Marshal Pétain'

The tone of the comments published by Caroline Parmentier clearly did not prevent Marine Le Pen from getting her to join the RN in early January 2019 with a particular brief. Ironically, this was to help with the party’s media makeover.

Just months earlier, in November 2018, Caroline Parmentier had posted on Facebook a photomontage showing Emmanuel Macron between Alexandre Benalla – the current president's disgraced former bodyguard and security adviser - and Marshal Pétain. A reader responded in the comments: “Leave Marshal Pétain, the victor of Verdun [editor's note, the longest battle of World War I], in peace! A little respect for the man who led us to victory.” Parmentier responded, and took the opportunity to show her own admiration for the man who came to symbolise French collaboration with the Nazis. “You don’t need to teach me to respect him, believe me,” she stated.

The day after Mediapart’s first revelations about her writings in Présent, Caroline Parmentier gave the media false information in an attempt to defend herself. She accused Mediapart of a supposed misreading of her use of the phrase “baboon supporters”, which had been attributed to her.

She claimed that the phrase was not in fact her own, but “had been used to condemn the behaviour of racist supporters who, at the side of the pitch, mimicked monkey noises and threw banana skins at black players. By repeating the phrase, the aim was to denounce these racist acts, not support them.”

This is an outright lie. The Présent article in question, published under the byline of Caroline Parmentier on December 14th 2011, makes no mention whatsoever of “monkey noises”, “banana skins” or “racist behaviour”. Headlined “The thug mindset from the estates is spreading”, the piece was in fact about touchline violence at a women’s amateur football match.

The phrase “baboon supporters” was not quoted by anyone else. It came straight from the RN MP herself, who asked: “How could football not be steeped in violence and outright yobbery?” Then she answered her own question: “Baboon supporters, star players who are estate thugs with money rushing to their heads, the example comes from the top.” She then named, by way of condemnation, former French football stars Zinédine Zidane and Nicolas Anelka, the latter described as “from Trappes”, an outer suburb of Paris known for its gang violence and poverty and which has a large Muslim population.

To another reader concerned by the image, she said: “Buy our paper [editor's note, Présent] with the day's front page and see if we’ve sullied Pétain.” She added: “That doesn’t mean we can’t have a bit of fun.” And to a third who complained, she retorted: “Yesterday we ran the only front page in the entire press, plus our articles today […] that defended Marshal Pétain.”

The daily newspaper Présent was founded in 1981 by people nostalgic for the writings and philosophy of Charles Maurras, the founder of the far-right movement Action Française. In the 2010s Caroline Parmentier became editor-in-chief of this openly pro-Pétain publication. As Mediapart has already reported, the current MP herself wrote tributes to the marshal, who drafted the anti-Semitic laws during the Nazi collaboration, claiming the Vichy leader had been “smeared” and “demonised” by historians.

Marine Le Pen’s party bosses, who often gave interviews to Présent, were clearly aware of the paper’s stance. In a May 2011 interview with Louis Aliot, Caroline Parmentier said to the current RN vice-president: “Some people in ‘our circles’ criticise you for referencing de Gaulle or Gaullism.” Charles de Gaulle led the 'Free France' government of resistance in exile during World War II and refused to accept the legitimacy of the Vichy France regime.

On a completely different issue, Caroline Parmentier also used a Facebook post in 2018 to attack the verdict against skinheads convicted over the killing of antifascist activist Clément Méric five years earlier. She shared Présent's front cover with its headline “A political show trial” and added her own message, declaring: “We won’t abandon them.”

In November 2018 she mocked concerns about the far-right group Les Barjols, several of whose members were suspected of plotting to kill Emmanuel Macron and to carry out attacks on migrants and mosques. “Once again this ‘ultra-right’ that threatens France, the West and now Macron’s life,” she wrote ironically after the first arrests. “No weapons, no Koran, no plan, no criminal records,” she added.

Criticising 'gay tribalism'

Her clear homophobia, already revealed in her comments in print, was also on full display on her Facebook page. Under a photo of Emmanuel Macron between two men in the Antilles, she wrote in October 2018: “Macron’s white shirt: washed with Omo?” A common abbreviation for homosexual in French is homo.

The racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic writings of MP Caroline Parmentier are causing deep unease within the far-right party, writes Ellen Salvi. Caught between awkward silences and worrying shows of support, the entire 20-year plus strategy of seeking to make the party respectable has begun crumbling in a matter of days.

Asked about the issue by reporters, the party's former presidential candidate Marine Le Pen shot back: “Do you seriously think you’re telling me something new by saying that Présent had views that were opposed to mine? I hope that’s a joke – you’re too young to know the conflict I had with that paper, which waged political war on me.” Yet in 2013, the same Marine Le Pen had praised the “freedom” of the Pétainist daily in an interview conducted by her friend, Caroline Parmentier, whom she later hired for the party.

Far-right MPs have chosen to attack the press rather than address the substance of the claims, and have been swiftly backed in this by far-right social media circles, including the website Riposte laïque. Not one of them, however, has seen fit to comment on the fact that their colleague still openly backed Marshal Pétain as recently as 2018. For people who spend so much time swearing they have nothing to do with racism or anti-Semitism, it is a striking discrepancy.

Above all, it lays bare the lie of the far-right party’s so-called “dédiabolisation” or sanitisation strategy to improve its image, in which Caroline Parmentier has played a leading role since January 2019. She is no minor candidate or stand-in who forgot to “clean up” her online past: she is one of Marine Le Pen’s closest friends.

Faced with racist or anti-Semitic posts made by dozens of RN hopefuls ahead of the 2024 snap election, the current party president Jordan Bardella spoke of “four or five bad apples” - it turned out to be a whole orchard of them. At the time, as it does whenever one of its own is exposed for such remarks, the far-right party put on a show of reacting strongly, as when it expelled MP Daniel Grenon, who was recently found guilty of racist comments about dual-national North Africans.

These press stunts and token purges have never tackled the deeper rot. But until now they have helped RN retain the thin coat of “respectability” it has long sought. It is that veneer which the Caroline Parmentier affair now threatens to peel away. By standing firmly by her, despite the nature of her statements over the years – statements she has never once disowned – Marine Le Pen’s far right movement has itself highlighted the complete sham of the “clean-up” it claims to have carried out since she took charge of the party in 2011.

This is a truncated version of an article in French that can be found here.

A few weeks earlier, she had already taken to the platform to rage against the César film award for '120 Battements par minute' ('120 Beats per Minute'), French-Moroccan film-maker Robin Campillo’s work about the activist group Act Up. “Propaganda for gay marriage, praise for migrants, celebration of abortion, gay tribalism,” was Caroline Parmentier's verdict.

The MP representing the Pas-de-Calais département or county in northern France mostly used her Facebook account in 2018 to promote Présent, praising a number of its front pages. These included: “Who’s protecting the white farmers of South Africa?” in August; a promotion of the “European Great Replacement” and racist theorist Renaud Camus in April; and a front cover on a pro-Putin “patriotic vote” in March.

But she also used it to celebrate her favourite authors. For instance, in September 2017, she paid tribute to the journalist Serge de Beketch. This drew a warning, also on Facebook, from fellow RN MP Guillaume Bigot, who is clearly less extreme than Parmentier, and who commented: “Serge de Beketch was racist and anti-Semitic […] He was violently anti-Semitic and regretted that the Third Reich’s army didn’t win the war.”

When questioned by Mediapart, Caroline Parmentier did not dispute the content of her online writings. She only said that her Facebook account became “completely inactive” once she joined the RN in 2019. Meanwhile, as far-right politician Jean-Yves Le Gallou called on her, via social media, not to be “intimidated by the decrees of political correctness,” Parmentier now claimed that her writings for Présent came from a time when “political expression […] was more blunt.”

“I regret some of the pieces […] which say more about the editorial line of my paper than about me,” she added, appearing to forget that she spent thirty years at the far-right daily, eventually becoming its editor-in-chief. In other words, she was one of the leading voices shaping that very editorial line.

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This article combines two articles in French which can be found here and here.

English version by Michael Streeter

Fabrice Arfi and Antton Rouget

If you have information of public interest you would like to pass on to Mediapart for investigation you can contact us at this email address: enquete@mediapart.fr. If you wish to send us documents for our scrutiny via our secure platform SecureDrop please go to this page.

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