On the evening of June 21, in the middle of the Music Festival, the mayor of Toulouse Jean-Luc Moudenc, who was wandering the streets of his city, was attacked with four other elected officials by demonstrators on the sidelines of the rally for the collective Earth Uprisings. He returns for Le Point to this aggression which, according to him, is the act of black blocs and radicalized ecologists.
Le Point: What happened last night in Toulouse?
Jean-Luc Moudenc: I was walking with four elected officials from my municipal team in the streets of the city when we were stopped by a hundred demonstrators. I’m used to traveling unescorted, it always goes well. It happened to me before to be apostrophized, but I had never experienced this level of insults. They were obviously trying to provoke us, to provoke a reaction, by constantly filming us. One of my assistants suggested that we take refuge in her office, which was a little further away, but I refused. No question of running away.
When they saw that we were starting to leave the place without disassembling, some started emptying garbage cans and throwing the contents at our heads. One of my young assistants received a bottle on the back of the neck. She was taken to the hospital. Fortunately, the police intervened quickly, without us even having to call them.
You quickly implicated the “ultra-left”. Do you also endorse the term of Gérald Darmanin who denounces “eco-terrorists”?
I would say it was a mixture of black blocks and radicalized ecologists. Some of the protesters were half-masked. I spoke about it to the prefect who was not surprised. These are the same people who have been mingling with protesters to break street furniture for weeks in Toulouse. There has long been a breeding ground for the extreme left in this city. A small part of environmentalists has also swung into radicalism. We are witnessing a coalition of causes with a certain “eco-extremism”. There were demonstrations all over France to challenge the government’s dissolution of the Earth Uprisings. Last night was kind of a coincidence. What struck me was that the slogans were aimed only at me, not the government.
In Toulouse, “even the grannies like the castagne”, sang Nougaro. Do you still think of driving unescorted in the city?
Insults don’t bother me! The line not to be crossed is violence. Demonstrators chanted “Moudenc a la Garonne”. I saw this slogan three years ago on a billboard in my neighborhood. My wife was scared. I will think about the possibility of being accompanied from now on, not systematically, but only in certain circumstances, when there are crowds for example. I want to preserve my relationship with Toulouse. But I see that things are changing, the violence is rising.