Last autumn Adrien Quatennens, number two of the left-wing La France Unsubmissive party, was sentenced to four months in prison for having slapped his wife, Céline Quatennens, in “a moment of mutual aggression.” Today the Frenchman occupies his seat in the Assembly and, in addition, since Tuesday he is once again part of his parliamentary group, which has reinstated him.
The decision to accept him back into the ranks (47 deputies voted in favor, 15 against and two abstained) aggravates the crisis that Nupes is already experiencing, the left-wing coalition that was created after the legislative elections last June and that integrates to La Francia Unsubmisa, but also to ecologists, communists and socialists. These allies consider the decision “unacceptable” and “incompatible with the values defended by this coalition”, in the words of the Socialist Party.
The rebel deputies believe that Quatennens “meets the conditions for his reintegration” into the parliamentary group. Basically she is having completed a course on gender violence which, according to the party, will now help her “to continue the work of these last months to contribute to the fight against violence against women”.
There are no accusations against him, but a sentence of four months in prison and a fine of 2,000 euros for damages to his ex-partner. When the events occurred, which he himself acknowledged, the leader of La France Unsubmissive, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, praised the deputy’s “dignity and courage” for having admitted it.
These shocking statements have already opened a crack in the formation. Things got worse when, after the conviction, the deputy gave several interviews in which he tried to justify himself. He evoked, for example, “a difficult relationship in the last two years,” especially after his ex told him that she wanted a divorce, and contextualized the slap “within a dispute with reciprocal threats.” She denied this and accused him, instead, of “physical and moral violence for years.”
Quatennens then said “being the victim of a media lynching” and warned that when he completed his sentence he would return to his seat, although without joining a group. After four months of suspension, he returned to the Assembly last January, in full controversy over Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform. The uproar over this law made his return go relatively unnoticed, although he did get booed the first day he spoke.
To justify his return, France Unsubmissive has issued a statement in which it says that Quatennens “acknowledges that he made statements to the media after being sentenced in which, without his intention, he could have implied that he downplayed the seriousness of the events and reversed the guilt between the perpetrator and the victim of the violence”.
The allies of La Francia Insumisa have described his reinstatement as intolerable. “How are we going, from the Assembly, to fight against sexist violence when we have it present within?”, expressed the socialist leader, Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol, to the BFM chain. “It is a terrible signal that we send to all women who hope that the left and its alliance can put an end to patriarchy and its expressions, among which violence against women is the most terrible,” the Socialist Party said in a statement.
“It’s a shame! How can we be like this in 2023?” protested the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo. The scandal has united the Macron camp and that of her rival, Marine Le Pen, for the first time. “A man convicted of spousal violence is welcome within La France Insoumise and Las Nupes. Let the left look at him,” said Macron’s party deputy (Renaissance), Aurore Bergé.
This scandal aggravates the crisis of the formation, which dominates the Nupes left-wing coalition, but which has not yet found an alternative to Mélenchon and which, moreover, had made the feminist struggle one of its slogans. In France, in 2021, the Interior services registered 208,000 victims of violence committed at the hands of their partners or ex-partners, which represents an increase of 21% compared to the figures for the previous year.
He is not the only man in a position of power in France who, although he does not exactly have an impeccable record with women, is politically active. The Interior Minister himself, Gérald Darmanin, one of Macron’s strong men in the Government, is accused of abuse of power and rape by several women, although the courts have closed the cases. One of them accuses him of having blackmailed her, offering him help in exchange for sexual favors, when he was not yet a minister.
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