FN Militias, Darmanin v. Le Pen, mv *<> ~?
All things you can read about on the internet...
Howdy, and welcome to the fourth edition of the Footnotes Newsletter, where I check in with you every Friday to rundown my news (news I’m following, news I’m running away from, news about me) and point you in the direction of some worthy reads.
This week — The militia of the National Front, Mercenary operations, and a “debate” between the fascistic Marine Le Pen and the fascistic Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin. Plus, I actually learn Linux and use it for something useful?
Let’s get started.
Department for Protection & Security
In 1985 the Département protection sécurité (DPS) was created by the National Front. Its stated mission was to provide security for Jean Marie Le Pen and other National Front politicians and supporters at meetings that were often the site of clashes between fascists and anti-fascist protesters who wanted to shut down National Front activity. In addition to providing this security, they also functioned as the internal intelligence service for the party.
Bernard Courcelle was director of this service from the 1st of June, 1994 until the 6th of March, 1999. You might remember him from last week’s edition, where he was involved in an adventurous story of arms trafficking in Chechnya.
He denies all involvement in that. But, to mix a few metaphors, that picaresque tale is only the tip of the iceberg in the murky waters that Courcelle and the DPS were swimming in. So notorious were the DPS for their intimidation and violence, that in 1999 the French National Assembly formed a commission of investigation into the “actions, organisation, functioning, [and] objectives of the group…and the supporters which it benefits.”
The report the commission released listed 68 instances of violence, intimidation, and illegality linked to the group over 13 years; of those it noted that the DPS was explicitly involved in 61 of the cases. Firearms were present in 56% of the cases under review.
These incidents included the murder of Brahim Bouram, who was pushed into the Seine on the sidelines of a National Front march, the use of tear gas by the DPS against protesters at National Front events, incidences where the DPS posed as police and detained journalists and militants, and even the suspected murder of one of their own.
For example, in August of 1995 a journalist for Le Monde told the inquest that in Toulon the DPS searched not only her bags (despite already passing them through a metal detector), but her address book, which she says a member opened up and started going through..
In 1997, in Toulon again, Arthur Paecht, a deputy in the National Assembly for the UDI, and a member of the inquest commission, was stopped from entering a book fair the National Front was hosting. He claimed they refused him entry after comparing him to a picture they had on file, and told him “‘you can’t come in here, you have nothing to do here,’ adding several qualifications making allusions to my foreign origins.” When he was able to get in later with his wife they saw copies of Mein Kampf on sale, as well as movies like the 1940 Nazi propaganda film Jud Süß.
Courcelle was interviewed by the inquest, and he claimed that the entire investigation was a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing. He recounted his upright history as director of security for the musée d'Orsay, and made nothing of the fact that many of the people who worked for his (volunteer) security service were notorious fascists and Neo-Nazis.
“I don't care about Mr. Soulas' bookstore!” he spat out defensively of Gilles Soulas, a reserve in the Ile-de-France DPS whose store L'Aencre was a hub for Neo-Nazi literature. If you listened to Courcelle the whole thing was a volunteer service to protect little old ladies from Antifa thugs. Its black-bereted members did it out of the goodness of their hearts, with only the occasional reimbursement for gas and snacks. Where did that money come from and what was the budget? Courcelle didn’t know, and he found the line of questioning exasperating.
“I’m more a specialist in security than a National Front militant,” he said.
“Do you consider the National Front to be a party like the others?” came the follow-up.
“Yes,” he responded. “It acts like a legal party.”
Mercenaries and Informants
A couple of years after the inquest our old friend Claude Hermant of gun running fame spoke in a piece in Libération titled ‘Confessions of a Phantom.’ He was hardly as reticent as his old boss Courcelle was.
He told Libé about an elite paramilitary wing within the DPS that he was a member of. It consisted of 30-60 “phantoms,” and Hermant claimed it had been put in place by Courcelle.
Hermant was no longer with the DPS when the article was published, in 2001, though he had spent 6 years among its ranks. He’d left in 1999 with Courcelle split from the party as part of a schism, and was quickly been swept up in a mercenary operation in the Congo Courcelle launched. There, he was captured and detained by the government for seven months. He told some more of his story to the Congolese courts.
Courcelle, who had been captain of a parachute regiment in the infantry marine, had set up this secret paramilitary unit along the lines of the secret services, Hermant alleged. It was not only an elite combat unit, but it also served as an internal intelligence service that operated in the six military zones of France.
Before Hermant joined this elite unit in 1997 he was already part of elite “shock group” of the DPS. This unit was about 200 strong, and its members were outfitted with riot gear, acting essentially as a private riot squad for the National Front.
Though Courcelle claimed in his testimony to the National Assembly that the DPS provided no training to its members (“we choose people who’ve already obtained their first aid certificate,” he allowed innocently), Hermant had another story to tell.
He claimed that upon entry into secret group he underwent 90 days of intense training.
Libération was able to consult leaflets given to the trainees. The topics included espionage “goals and forms,” directives that “the names of the chiefs must not be divulged to unknown people,” as well as instructions in how to build bombs.
Hermant explained the lengths to which this secret service guarded its distance from the official DPS structure: “They were undetectable, because they functioned with false papers, furnished by Courcelle, and lots of cash.” Hermant estimated that the budget for this service was millions of francs a year (a millions francs is about 150,000 euros), which was covered by Courcelle himself. Courcelle raised the money from international mercenary operations as well as arms trafficking, like that in Chechnya. In 1998 the national police reported that they had found guns trace to Croatia in the possession of the DPS.
Hermant detailed some of these mercenary operations to the Congolese courts — apparently the missions were very well paid.
And they were right to be — these were no glorified safaris. They involved assassinations and putsches, and would often curiously line up with the geopolitical interests of the French state. In 2004 Le Monde Diplomatique reported on some of the details of French mercenary action on the African continent, and confirmed the participation of the DPS in clandestine operations in Zaire (1997 and 2001), Madagascar (2002), and the Ivory Coast (2001-2003).
This is the murky milieu from which both the guns used in the Charlie Hebdo attacks, and their perpetrators (who had also spent strange, unaccounted-for times in North Africa with opaque sources of funding which have never been fully ascertained) bubbled up.
In next week’s edition we’ll look at the DPS’ activities in the early quarter of the 21st Century. Did they reform themselves? Take a guess.
Dueling Fascists
Last night saw an erudite discussion between two leading intellectual figures on the publicly funded airwaves of France2 on the topic of separatism.
The spunky Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin faced off against National Rally president Marine Le Pen, who’s currently leading in the first round polls for the presidential contest in 2022.
Bruno Jeudy, the editor of Paris Match, tweeted after the debate that Darmanin “didn’t crush Marine Le Pen. Far from that. The head of the National Rally has made redoubtable progress since 2017. Her presidentialisation is spectacular.”
What does this all mean, and why was the debate held at all? Darmanin has gained a notorious reputation for his hard rhetorical stance since becoming Interior Minister last year, proposing that halal food sections be banned in supermarkets and cracking down on radical mosques. He’s also been a fastidious in his defense of the police in a year that’s seen protests against police violence in France.
"It's the police who protect women who are raped...beaten...the police who kill the terrorists who try to slaughter people," ranted Darmanin in the section of the program before his debate with Le Pen. "I'm sure that a very large majority of the French people have faith in the national police," he said, lamenting the "hate" of a small group against the police.
Darmanin, then, participated in this debate to prove his bona fides on security and Islamism. The way he went about it, essentially, was to try to prove that, actually his Interior Ministry under Macron is tougher already and will be tougher on Islamism than Le Pen’s. One of the most commented on remarks from the night was Darmanin telling Le Pen “I find you very soft.”
The pretext of the debate was the law to combat “separatism” which is going through the National Assembly at the moment. It includes measures to toughen enforcement against any “communatarianism” in the Republic, including by banning radical religious education and by rooting out any traces of the ideology in public institutions like sports teams (such as those who dare show solidarity with Palestine) and the civil service. In reality, the project of the law is against “Islamism,” something that Marine Le Pen identified as the real threat and criticized Darmanin for not naming over the course of the debate.
"You're limiting the liberty of everyone...to limit the liberty of Islamists," Le Pen told Darmanin. "It's not a problem of religion, Islamism, it's a problem of ideology."
Darmanin’s response to this line of argument was, actually no, we are naming Islamism, Islamism is the problem, I’ve named it over and over, more than you ever have, and this law is designed to bring forceful enforcement against it. In fact, Madame Le Pen, you are wrong about the project of the law. In fact, Madame Le Pen, the law does exactly what the National Rally wants it to do. It was clear the entire night that the terms of the debate have been set by Le Pen and the National Rally, something she was visibly thrilled about on multiple ocassions.
Darmanin provided a perfect example of this when Le Pen brought up birth right citizenship and called it “quasi-automatic.” Le Pen said this needs to be rethought. Rather than challenge the idea that birthright citizenship should be rethought, he instead disputed the idea that citizenship at birth is quasi-automatic at all.
Le Pen brought out Darmanin’s recent book titled Le séparatisme islamiste and quoted from it approvingly. She endorsed his description of how Islamism works, citing his description of taqiya, and congratulated him for calling it "the most terrible ideology of the modern world."
“I could have authored this book,” she said.
But, "what remains in the law of this...book?...Very little."
The first question Darmanin asked set the tone for the night: will you support the law?
Darmanin’s goal is to integrate the discourse and politics of the far right into government. Le Pen noted later in the night that the National Front had voted for the global security law.
“We are constructive,” she said, leaving the table open for negotiations with the Interior Minister.
And he is happy to negotiate.
Footnotes
While the Solons from RN and LREM duked it out on public TV, Jean-Luc Mélenchon went on C8’s rowdy roundtable debate show Balance ton post.
Mélenchon pushed back rousingly; on fiscal exiles who might leave the country if he was elected he said “the country doesn’t need parasites”; commenting on the debate on separatism between Le Pen and Darmanin he said “the real separatism, is that of the rich who make neighborhoods for themselves and sometimes cities also which exist with only 2% of social housing, which doesn’t respect the law. But that, that doesn’t disturb anybody!”
French president Emmanuel Macron has decided to wait a few more weeks before he announces an “adjustment of efforts” with Operation Barkhane, the French Army’s engagement in the Sahel. He says he wants more time to discuss the decision with partners in the Sahel and in Europe. The decision comes in the context of the growing unpopularity of the anti-insurgent military operation, which began under Macron’s predecessor François Hollande in 2014 after the collapse of the Libyan state, both in France and in West Africa.
The other day I finally got the hang of wildcards in Linux. My progress is officially upgraded from glacial to something more like molasses. I used the wildcards to organize a thumb drive I’ve thrown tons of random files on from at least two computers. It took me about fifteen minutes to get the whole thing squared away with a manageable file structure. Still not pretty, but definitely an improvement.
not terrible…
Ryan still hasn’t smoked but he might have an ear infection. The dangers of quitting…
A quick appeal - I’m locked out of my Twitter account because I got brigaded. Will probably take a few weeks to get that sorted by manual review because of the sanitary context. So because I can’t, please give this week’s post a share there, or anywhere. Once I get my account back I won’t ask again. Much appreciated, and thanks to all the new followers!
Until next week, share or get charged with a crime against the Republic.