On Thursday 12th February, with French-Palestinian MEP Rima Hassan due to speak at Lyon’s SciencesPo University, the self-styled far-right ‘feminist’ group Némésis organised a protest at the institution, seemingly motivated by Hassan’s mere presence. The group asked some male ‘friends’ to watch from nearby. They have not clarified their reasons for doing so. However, they have in the past contacted Lyon-based neo-fascist groups, offering to organise events in Lyon specifically to draw out anti-fascist counter-demonstrators and lure them into confrontation with those neo-fascists.
Significantly, the ‘friends’ who showed up on 12th February were themselves extreme right activists. One of them, Quentin Deranque, had been a past or present member of numerous extreme right, monarchist, or ‘traditionalist Catholic’ groups. Most recently, 23-year-old Deranque had joined the newly formed neo-fascist group Allobroges Bourgoin: a group which, in May 2025, sent a five-person delegation to a neo-Nazi march in Paris.
Under what remain unclear circumstances, a fight broke out that evening between the small group of far-right activists including Deranque and a larger group of anti-fascist counter-demonstrators. Two days later, video footage emerged appearing to show three men being separated and beaten by a much larger group, including kicks to the head after having been downed. One of those men is apparently Deranque, who died two days later as a result of the brain injuries he suffered during the confrontation.
I would normally hope that it would go without saying that I do not consider kicking downed opponents in the head, even if they survive, to be good leftist praxis. To avoid the kind of unnecessary distraction with which any attempt to critically discuss reactionary politics is typically met online, however, I want to make clear that I would not wish death on anyone, regardless of their politics. Killing political opponents is never justifiable.
All of that said, the reaction of the French political establishment to the events has been a case study in the double standards applied when discussing violence committed by leftists in comparison with that committed by the far right. In this piece, I focus on how Deranque’s death has been weaponised to discredit the political left, including but not only by figures of the far right. Figures from the leader of the far-right National Rally Jordan Bardella to former President François Hollande, of the Socialist Party (a party that would be better labelled as social democrats) have lined up to condemn anyone vaguely associated with ‘the left of the left’ as guilty by association. La France insoumise (France Unbowed, LFI), the nation’s largest left-wing party, has been subjected to particular criticism. This has partly been fuelled by the presence in the party of Raphaël Arnault, founder of the now-proscribed antifascist group La Jeune Garde, who now sits as an elected deputy in France’s National Assembly. While Deranque was still in a critical condition, Némésis accused members of La Jeune Garde of being behind his death. Of the seven individuals under investigation, and facing charges ranging from murder to criminal conspiracy, following Deranque’s death, one is Arnault’s parliamentary assistant.
That the investigation is unsurprisingly still at a very early stage (at the time of writing, Deranque died under two weeks ago) has not stopped right-wing politicians, or members of the centrist government, from condemning La Jeune Garde and LFI. On February 17th (before anyone had been arrested), Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin, apparently taking Némésis at their word as reliable interlocutors, thundered in the National Assembly that ‘La Jeune Garde Kill, and LFI must condemn this’. For the Justice Minister to comment in such a definitive fashion on an open case is, to say the least, unconventional. Former Minister of the Interior Bruno Retailleau (now leader of mainstream right Les Républicains) has called on voters to form a ‘cordon sanitaire’ against LFI in the upcoming municipal elections. Where the discourse of the ‘cordon sanitaire’ had previously been directed against the RN, Retailleau even specified that he does not consider the two parties to be equivalent in this respect, adding that ‘not one single vote’ should go to LFI candidates. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has demanded that the party must clean up their act. Raphaël Glucksmann of Place Publique, a man and a party that would (questionably) claim to be on the left, accused LFI’s leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon of ‘standing by’ the party’s supposed links to ‘violent people’.
While the investigation is ongoing, it seems that La Jeune Garde, LFI, and anyone vaguely associated with the left (or the left of the rightBardella has gone so far as to implicate Macron’s erstwhile centrists) has already been pre-emptively declared guilty. Although no link has been established between the party’s discourse and the attack, Darmanin has already accused the party of failing to recognise that ‘words kill’. The once left-wing, now right-wing nationalist magazine Marianne ran a cover labelling Mélenchon, Arnault, and Hassan, and by extension the antifascist movement, ‘the new fascists’. Marine Le Pen, meanwhile, described La Jeune Garde as an extreme-left milice (militia) associated with LFI: a particularly charged term in the French context, calling to mind the collaborationists under Nazi occupation who, in reality, founded Le Pen’s own party. As I will discuss further below, such comments must be understood as part of a broader pre-municipal election campaign to smear LFI as dangerous extremists.
The double standard between reactions to the killing of Deranque and those to killings carried out by far-right activists or sympathisers is striking. Since 2017, six people have been killed by far-right activists in France. To take only two examples, in 2025 Hichem Miraoui and Aboubakar Cissé were murdered in premeditated attacks. Both attackers were known to have far-right sympathies, and both appear to have deliberately targeted victims they perceived as Arab, Muslim, or both. Cissé was murdered in a mosque. Following neither attack did the chorus of condemnation reach anywhere approaching the scale of that now targeting LFI. Retailleau, who at the time was Minister of the Interior and who has on this occasion been so quick to speak up, took two days even to bother visiting the crime scene. While Hichem Miraoui’s murderer was a known Rassemblement national voter, no-one suggested that the RN needed to clean up its act on that basis. Although a minute’s silence was eventually held in the National Assembly for Cissé, this was despite the opposition of the Assembly’s President Yaël Braun Pivet. Following Deranque’s death there was no such hesitation: a minute’s silence was held at the National Assembly on 17th February. This came at the request of Éric Ciotti, the previous leader of Les Républicains who now leads the far-right Union des Droites pour la République (Union of the Rights for the Republic), and was accepted by other partliamentary groups.
It would be hard to find a clearer example of the ongoing demonisation of left-wing politics and concomitant mainstreaming of the far right. Deranque’s killers should not, of course, celebrated or even defended by anyone on the left. This kind of violence should not be normalised, and the fact that the fight broke out in the heat of the moment is no excuse. Whether the far right can be opposed on the street in an entirely non-violent fashion is open to debate. However, even if responding to violence with violence in self-defence may sometimes be necessary, self-defence does not extend to kicking downed opponents to death. The killing of Deranque cannot be excused as an act of self-defence and should not be condoned, no matter what we may think of his politics.
Nevertheless, that the murders of Cissé and Miraoui were premeditated does make these fundamentally different acts to the killing of Deranque. So too did the fact that, while Deranque’s killers attacked him for his actions (being a neo-fascist activist actively involved in street violence), the killers of Cissé and Miraoui killed them simply for being Arab or Muslim. If Darmanin is really so concerned that ‘words kill’, he should surely be more concerned still that those of the far right are leading its supporters to plan and carry out cold-blooded acts of racially-motivated murder on bystanders. While Deranque’s death should be unambiguously condemned, this level of planning is clearly absent.
This kind of hypocrisy from the far right, right, and reactionary centrists is not new. A quick Google search for ‘Trump hypocrisy’ (or ‘Farage hypocrisy’, ‘Le Pen hypocrisy’, ‘Macron hypocrisy’, ‘Starmer hypocrisy’, or so on) is enough to demonstrate that simply calling that hypocrisy out has never changed anything. I do not believe that it can do so when neither these movements nor their supporters have ever cared about consistency. Nevertheless, calling it out remains worthwhile.
Here, and particularly when it has come from the political centre, it must be understood as part of a longer campaign aiming to demonise LFI, and the so-called ‘left of the left’ more broadly, as dangerous extremists. Macron’s reactionary centrists have for some time been labelling the National Rally and LFI as equivalent ‘extremes’. Although most abandoned this posture in the 2024 legislative election campaign, negotiating vote-lending agreements to ensure that LFI candidates would win run-offs against National Rally opponents, they quickly returned to it thereafter. Despite the nation’s supreme administrative court having ruled that the party is not ‘far left’, but simply ‘left wing’, the Interior Ministry moved two days before Deranque’s death to classify it as ‘far left’ ahead of the upcoming municipal elections. The aim, transparently, is to discredit left-wing politics following the left-wing coalitions’s victory in the 2024 legislative elections. For the likes of Hollande or Glucksmann, this is presumably an attempt to win factional hegemony within the French left (the cast-iron certainty that they will be tarnished as extremists by association regardless seems not to have crossed their minds). For the likes of Darmanin or Lecornu, it is to enable themselves to posture as the only alternative to rising ‘extremes’.
One need not unconditionally support LFI or Mélenchon (I certainly have my own critiques of both) to see that doing so can only further normalise the far right. Presenting them as the innocent victims of far-left violence, while failing to pay the same attention to the violence they commit, even paints them as less of a threat than the left. This is despite the sociologist Isabelle Sommier having found that 90% of the 53 ideologically motivated murders recorded in France since 1986 were perpetrated by the extreme right. To be normalised in this way is exactly what the far right want, hence the glee with which Bardella has accused all and sundry of being complicit in Deranque’s death. As if deliberately aiming to highlight how this discourse normalises the far right, Jean-Michel Aulas, the centre-right candidate to be mayor of Lyon, has called for a portrait of Deranque (who should not have died but who, lest we forget, was an avowed neo-fascist) to be displayed at the city’s town hall. This rush to treat Deranque as some kind of martyr, ignoring the realities of his life, recalls the similar mass hysteria in the US and beyond following the murder of Charlie Kirk in 2025.
The reaction, from far right to centre left, to Deranque’s death has been nothing short of shameful, particularly at a time when the far right and fascism are increasingly powerful. Mere weeks before the upcoming municipal elections, it has contributed both to (further) normalising the far right and to delegitimising the party arguably best placed to challenge them (it is often forgotten that Mélenchon, following a stop-start campaign, took barely over 1% less of the vote than Marine Le Pen in the first round of the 2022 presidential election). In the ongoing saga of the mainstreaming of France’s far right, it represents yet another new low.
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Fraser McQueen is a lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Leeds, having previously held lectureships and postdoctoral positions at the Universities of Stirling, Edinburgh, and Bristol. He completed his PhD, entitled ‘Race, Religion, and Communities of Friendship: Contemporary French Islamophobia in Literature and Film’ in November 2021, with cross-institutional supervision from the Universities of Stirling and Aberdeen. His first monograph, which explores Islamophobia and community in contemporary France through a corpus of twelve literary and filmic texts, is currently under contract with Liverpool University Press. He is currently interested in the relationship between (reactionary) politics and culture, and particularly in how the French far right have used novels as part of their political project since the early twentieth century.