Lille (AFP)
A bust of General de Gaulle was vandalized in the town of Hautmont (North), the head covered with orange fluorescent paint and the pedestal tagged on the back of a "slave" also listed in orange, we learned Monday to the mayor.
They were elected municipal councilors who were alerted in the morning, reported to AFP Joël Wilmotte, mayor and candidate for his succession in the second round of municipal elections, on June 28. The town hall's technical services have since cleaned up the statue, which has been on this site for "twenty years".
"It is completely scandalous", reacted Mr. Wilmotte, denouncing an "inadmissible behavior" and an "amalgam" within the framework of the "media debate" around racism and degraded statues. The town hall lodged a complaint.
"A few days before the commemorations of the call on June 18, at a time when we must remember that General de Gaulle made alive the flame of the Resistance, the vandalization of this statue in Hautmont is scandalous", tweeted the president of the Regional Council Xavier Bertrand (ex-LR). "This calls for strong sanctions!"
The deputy RN of the North Sébastien Chenu denounced, him, a "disrespect vis-à-vis one of the greatest men of the last century" "intolerable".
"The French, and even more the political leaders, must always remember that it is above all thanks to him that France was able to be liberated when everything seemed lost" during the Second World War, he wrote in a press release.
Since the death of George Floyd, a black American who died in the United States on May 25 under the knee of a white police officer during his arrest, anti-racist protests have given rise to the debunking or the degradation of several statues of controversial figures, such as the 15th century navigator Christopher Columbus.
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