On May 9, French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin asked the prefects throughout France to ban all events and protests organized by “the far right or the ultra-right.” In Paris alone, the police prefecture banned six such events last weekend, including a symposium organized by the Iliade Institute.
The symposium that was to take place on Sunday aimed to honor the memory of Dominique Venner, a historian who took his life exactly 10 years ago in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris as a “sacrifice” to “break with the lethargy that is overwhelming us,” to “awaken slumbering consciences.”
“I rebel against fate. I protest against poisons of the soul and the desires of invasive individuals to destroy the anchors of our identity, including the family, the intimate basis of our multi-millennial civilization,” he said in a message read after his death.
In one of the six decisions taken by the police prefect in Paris last weekend to comply with the order of Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne’s government, an administrative court overturned the ban against a conference and a march organized by the royalist organization Action Française to commemorate Joan of Arc. It was thus allowed to proceed and did so without disrupting public order, just like in previous years.