His crime can be summed up in four words, but forceful: “Macron on t’enmmerde” (“Macron, fuck you”). On Sunday, a patrol was walking through Saint-Agnan de Cernières, in the Eure department, in the north of the country, when it came across a banner with the aforementioned compliment addressed to the French president. The author is Claude, a retiree who, at 77, will have to go back to the classroom to take a citizenship course as a sanction.
The gendarmes went to his house to ask him to remove the banner and told him the penalty. “We had voted for him at the beginning, because we thought he could change things but we didn’t know he was going to screw us like that,” the retiree told BFM television.
A person who exercises public authority, in this case the President of the Republic, is charged with the crime of contempt: a fine of 15,000 euros and one year in prison. Claude should only take one course, although he hasn’t been summoned yet and he doesn’t know what it will consist of. He laughs it off. “It’s a good joke (…) It’s not my fault, but we’re going to have fun,” he told the chain.
Claude is one of the lucky Frenchmen to take retirement at an early age. With the crisis that has unleashed the controversial pension reform, which delays retirement at 64, President Macron has become the target of all kinds of insults and criticism.
The president lives an unprecedented unpopularity. They have been mounting casseroles for weeks on every trip he makes through France, in the demonstrations against the pension law most of the banners show him caricatured and with slogans similar to Claude’s and in many of these protests dolls with dolls have been burned and guillotined. your image.
In some cases the police have had to intervene, precisely to avoid the aforementioned crime of contempt. In Grenoble, a few weeks ago, the Prosecutor’s Office opened an investigation after several protesters set fire to a mannequin simulating the president in the middle of a saucepan. Slogans such as: “We beheaded Louis XVI. Macron, we will start again” were also displayed.
Another woman was also arrested at the end of March for calling the president trash. Also, as in the case of Claude, the agents appeared at her house to inform her that she was arrested. “At first I asked if it was a joke. It’s the first time I’ve been arrested,” Valérie told the newspaper La Voix du Nord.
He is accused of having placed a message from “Macron, garbage” in a container and also of having posted this message on Facebook: “The garbage will speak tomorrow at one o’clock”. The French will have the trial on June 20 for contempt of a person who exercises public authority. “The police told me that they rarely see a procedure of this type,” she told the aforementioned outlet.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
