France: Jean-Marie Le Pen released in the "batch" case
Former FN president Jean-Marie Le Pen, pictured at his home in Saint-Cloud in January 2021. AFP - JOEL SAGET
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2 min
Tried for provocation to racial hatred, the former leader of the French Front National party, which subsequently became National Rally under the leadership of his daughter Marine, was released this Friday, October 29 by the French courts.
A case that dates back to comments that Jean-Marie Le Pen had made in 2014, in a video.
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“
Listen, we'll do a batch next time.
This is how Jean-Marie Le Pen had responded to his interlocutor, when the latter had mentioned the name of Patrick Bruel when discussing the artists engaged against the FN.
It was seven years ago, a small provocation slipped into a video published on the site of the far-right party by the one who was still, at the time, honorary president.
►
See also The European Parliament lifts the immunity of Jean-Marie Le Pen
His words, the criminal court recognizes, were aimed at the Jewish community, the word used in a smile referring to "
the image, even though symbolic, of the process of systematic extermination of the Jews of Europe
", explained his president.
The court ruled, however, that it was not a call for discrimination and violence, but a "
jubilation to make a good word in front of an audience acquired
" to Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Hence the relaxation.
“
A good word
” that his own daughter Marine Le Pen, president of the National Front since 2011, had nevertheless qualified as a “
political mistake
” at the time.
The following summer, she had also obtained the exclusion of her father from the party he had co-founded, before he was stripped of his honorary presidency in 2018.
In the past, Jean-Marie Le Pen has been condemned several times by the courts, in particular for contesting a crime against Humanity, when he described the gas chambers as "a
point of detail in the history of the Second World War
”.
► To reread: Jean-Marie Le Pen settles his accounts in volume II of his “Memoirs”
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Jean-Marie Le Pen
France
Justice