Emmanuel Macron chose to file a complaint after being represented as Adolf Hitler on panels installed in La Seyne-sur-Mer and at the entrance to Toulon, in the Var. This Thursday, a man is heard by the police on this subject in Toulon. The suspected display is used to controversial campaigns on the two panels that he has reserved to comment on the news in his own way.
The President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, decided to file a complaint after being represented as Adolf Hitler on two large billboards in the Var.
In this case, a man is heard this Thursday by the police in Toulon.
The Toulon prosecutor's office opened on Tuesday an investigation for "public insult" against the Var display at the origin of this case which aimed to denounce the anti-Covid vaccine constraint.
"I seized the departmental security of the Toulon police station as part of a preliminary investigation", indicated to the prosecutor of Toulon, Bernard Marchal, specifying that the qualification retained could evolve.
INFO JDD.
Macron dressed as Hitler on posters: The Republic on the march lodges a complaint https://t.co/bC844vbhoWpic.twitter.com/UUfdL04x16
- The JDD (@leJDD) July 28, 2021
The acronym of LREM diverted into a swastika
If the former offense of "insulting the President of the Republic" was repealed in 2013 after a judgment of the European Court of Human Rights condemning France, the Head of State is protected from injury and public defamation like any ordinary citizen, even if prosecutions, sometimes perceived as an attack on freedom of expression, are extremely rare.
"Obey, get vaccinated", proclaims the incriminated poster which represents President Emmanuel Macron in the uniform of the Nazi leader Hitler, with a small mustache, a wick on his forehead and the logo of the presidential movement LREM hijacked as a swastika .
The message was posted in recent days on two large advertising panels of four meters by three meters located on a four lane in La-Seyne-sur-Mer and at the entrance to Toulon where a shocked person had tagged the word "Shame" .
Its author, Michel-Ange Flori, is a Var poster owner of 400 panels between Bandol and Hyères, accustomed to controversial campaigns on the two panels that he reserved to comment on the news in his own way.
He was committed alongside the "yellow vests".
"You see Hitler, but you can see Stalin there, or I see Charlie Chaplin in The Dictator," he said.
These posters aim to question "this democracy where decisions are taken without discussion during a health council," he explained.
Sentenced in 2019
In 1999, his first poster at the time of the straw huts in Corsica titled: "Corsica: presumed guilty. Prefect: presumed innocent. Chevènement: selective innocence", had earned him 36 hours in police custody. In 2019, the channel BFMTV obtained its conviction for a poster titled: "The police talk to you every day on BFMTV." At the hearing, the display had pleaded "the right to parody and freedom of expression".