crypteronia

The death of a neofascist on February 14 is getting the far-right and their centrist simps all excited

^{The late young man was part of a group of fascists armed with projectiles and rods who assaulted the antifascists (source: contre-attaque.net)}

This is an edited translation of a radio interview of Pierre, editor for French antifascist publication contre-attaque.net, on the Italian radio Radio Onda d’Urto, published on February 19. I’m choosing this interview because I think it does a good job of explaining the fresh new hell here in France to international comrades.

TL;DR: On 12 February 2026 in Lyon, an ambush initiated by armed fascists ended in several antifascists beating neonazi militant Quentin Deranque to death. He was immediately hailed as a martyr by the far right and the bourgeois press, who jumped to slander the entire antifa movement while also trying to connect his death with the radical left party France Unbowed. This broad coalition against antifascism results from the deep infiltration of far-right ideas in the public sphere through the mass media and influencers.

Pierre, with your collective Contre Attaque, you have conducted a proper counter-investigation which challenges the initial version spread by the public prosecutor and by certain media. You have made it apparent how, in reality, the fascist groups were the aggressors. Can you explain to us the dynamics that you were able to reconstruct and cite the sources that allowed you to turn the narrative around?

Sure. First of all, for our friends abroad, I need to give some context for what happened in Lyon on February 12. That day, there was a mobilization by far-right group Nemesis, who for years has been organising provocations and attacks on leftist meetings in all of France. This group calls itself feminist but actually weaponizes feminism to vilify Muslims, Islam and foreigners. They carry out well-oiled propaganda operations: they show up at leftist events to disrupt them, they provoke militants and then publish videos of any reactions, claiming the left assaulted them.

This has been going on for years. Nemesis have been using this MO during feminist demos such as those of March 8, for instance, showing up with racist signs and a security escort of armed men to try to penetrate the march. Of course there were clashes, but what their videos showed, and the media relayed, is that Nemesis were assaulted by leftist militants. It’s a continual manipulation game.

In Lyon Nemesis wanted to create this kind of agitprop attack during an event involving Rima Hassan, the French-Palestinian euro-MP for radical left party France Unbowed (La France Insoumise), who receives constant death threats from the far right. While the Nemesis members were standing in front of the venue of Rima Hassan’s conference, a security escort composed of violent militants from Lyon was waiting at a distance of a few hundred metres.

We began to receive information on the evening of February 12, and then mostly on February 13. At that point, Nemesis had started to publicize everywhere that one of their militants had been severely injured by antifascists and was currently between life and death. At that point, there was no footage or any proof of anything definitive, and yet this narrative was immediately and uncritically repeated by all the media.

The national media have reported on this story without offering any background on the collective’s ideology. Knowing the local context in Lyon (see 3rd question below), the story immediately sounded suspicious.

On February 14 we learned that this young fascist militant, Quentin, had died in the hospital. That same day, TF1, the most-viewed TV station in France belonging to construction billionaire Martin Bouygues, released a few seconds of a video recorded by a neighbour, showing far-right militants being beaten on the ground. This footage was shown everywhere and imposed on the population as the official version.

However, we know that the video was edited by TF1. The channel had received two films: one in which the fascists attacked a group of antifa and one showing the end of the fighting, where the fascists had lost the fight and were abandoning their comrades.

The premier news source of France chose to fool public opinion showing only a few seconds of the end of the confrontation. This is a very serious fact. We began our counter-investigation by first criticizing the lack of backbone of the French political establishment, especially on the left.

Many politicians immediately tweeted to pay homage to Quentin and denounce antifascist violence, accusing France Unbowed without definitive proof. Many of these reactions even came before the release of the TF1 video, directly echoing the far-right’s narrative. This is very bad, because once again, at that point, there was no evidence.

And yet the first thing we pointed out is that the far-right squad, the one involved in the clash, were not even with Nemesis, as I’ve said; they were several hundred metres away. And the clash did not even happen during Rima Hassan’s conference. It took place before the event with the euro-MP.

So we’ve tried to dismantle the connection manufactured by the media between the death of the young man and the political event. Rima Hassan was not even in the room at the time the fighting happened.

Then, we also reminded our readers who were the people involved and who they were connected to.

The victim, Quentin Deranque, was described as a “nonviolent catholic” and a math and tennis enthusiast, but no one in the media dared to say that he was a neonazi activist.

Thanks to our contacts in Lyon, we got in touch with a source whose name we cannot reveal in the current climate. Our source has sent us some footage in which it appears clearly that Quentin’s group was the one that launched the attack, wielding metal bars, pepper spray, a smoke stick used as a projectile, and concealing their faces. They were all dressed in black.

We published this footage on February 15, debunking the dominant media narrative. Our investigation involved a huge number of people. However, the mainstream media have yet to apologize for the lies they have spread. And what a large majority of people now remember, is that Quentin is the victim.

Later, more videos emerged confirming that the far-right group was waiting at a street corner to ambush a group of the antifa collective La Jeune Garde (The Young Watch), never mind that they could have hurt anyone passing by. The fascists attacked with fighting gear while the antifas fought back with their bare hands. Therefore what happened in Lyon was a plain and simple ambush set up by the far right against leftist militants. Which is actually a common tactic of the far right against leftist activists.

Thank you for your reconstruction, Pierre. What do we know of the arrests of antifascists?

Before I answer about the repression, which has only just began, it needs to be pointed out that the French Parliament has conducted a minute of silence for Quentin, an honour usually reserved for the victims of terrorism. We’re at such a level of collective madness that all the parliamentary groups have agreed to a Republican tribute to a young man who had taken part in fascist marches in Paris. These are truly the creme de la creme of the most radical and violent fascists.

Quentin had also founded a neonazi collective near Lyon, called “Allobroges Bourgoin”, who trained for combat and promoted violence.

So, the deeper you dig, the more you find that this was someone directly involved in violent attacks, clearly committed to a neonazi ideology. And the more evidence piles up, the further untethered from reality the dominant narrative appears, with its minute of silence, the mournful tributes everywhere, the left having fully lost the plot, unsure how to react, and so on.

Now in terms of the repression, on Tuesday, February 17, 11 people were arrested [4 have since been released], including members of La Jeune Garde. La Jeune Garde is a group from Lyon founded in self-defence against the attacks of the far right, and, unlike Contre Attaque, they have chosen to participate in institutional politics and associate with France Unbowed.

This is not an ultraviolent group, they are comparable to the self-defence groups that left-wing parties used to have in France in the 1920’s and 30’s. Back then, the main left-wing parties such as the Communist Party and the Socialist Party used to organise self-defence groups to protect their events from far-right attacks. So what La Jeune Garde are doing now is by no means a novelty in France. They are depicted as being exceptionally violent. But actually, self-defence groups affiliated to left-wing parties have always existed. La Jeune Garde, currently in hot waters after several of its members were arrested, is just one of those.

Allegedly, some of the individuals arrested in connection with Deranque’s death are linked to the France Unbowed MP Raphaël Arnault, himself the founder of La Jeune Garde. Now the public prosecutor has opened an investigation for voluntary manslaughter, which would imply an intent to kill, something which is completely at odds with the reality of a badly ended brawl after an ambush by armed fascists. So yes, it ended badly as we know, but the antifas were actually responding to an unprovoked, armed attack.

Also contentious is the charge of criminal association (“association de malfaiteurs”), a very worrisome charge because under it, French law allows for the prosecution of anyone with any sort of link to the accused, be it material or ideological. This legal device could allow for the repression of the whole of La Jeune Garde, but it might even lead to incriminating the France Unbowed party too.

So setting aside the arrests of those directly charged with the events of February 12, whose eventual trial will take place in a long time, there’s also a powerful dynamic of political repression targetting France Unbowed, painting the entire movement as responsible for the death of Deranque. We’re seeing the terminal phase of a strategy, led by the Macronist bourgeoisie in alliance with the far right, of seeking to destroy the last remaining radical leftwing party in France with its 20% voting block.

I’d like to conclude by taking us to Nantes, where yesterday a far-right demonstration for Quentin took place. There was supposed to be a small antifascist counter-demo but it was declared illegal. The police surrounded the antifa demonstrators and beat them while insulting them. So we’ve seen the police act as direct auxiliaries of the far-right, cracking down on any public expression of antifascism while allowing the far right to assemble. This is what is happening in France at the moment.

In your article you write that in Lyon, far-right violence has been occurring with impunity for years. Can you describe the situation in that city and in the rest of the country?

Lyon is the third largest city in France, it’s the French capital of the radical far right because the authorities, at both the city and state level, have allowed the opening of radical far-right spaces such as boxing gyms and bars where these groups can assemble and organise. The city also has a long history of fascist presence. It’s where we had Klaus Barbie, the infamous head of the local Gestapo. Collaboration with the nazi occupyers was very strong there, although so was the resistance. Part of the university was in the hands of the far right.

In the last 15 years in Lyon, the situation has been dire. We’ve listed 102 far-right assaults of extreme violence, with victims ending up in the hospital and with sometimes permanent injuries. There have been attacks with knife, hammer and bats against Arabs, during Pride events, against anarchist or leftist bookshops, against the offices of trade unions or political parties. Of these dozens of attacks, 70% were never prosecuted. Not only were they not punished, their perpetrators were never even identified or charged. These assaults are not covered by the media, unfortunately, aside for the local and specialised press, so most of the population have never heard of these attacks.

So what we have to explain to the public is that antifascism in Lyon is a reaction to that situation. Antifa groups were created for protection from frequent attacks by the far right, who have headquarters, training gyms, and who impose their rule.

So indeed, Lyon is the capital of the far right, but the far right is active throughout the country. Since 2022, we’ve listed at least 12 murders that were either racially motivated or perpetrated by far right militants. Actually, we know this list is incomplete, for instance we’ve recently found out about a Roma woman, a pregnant mother of two, killed by a far-right hunter in 2024. Once more, the national media barely mentioned it.

Lately the western part of France, where Contre Attaque is based, though historically less welcoming of the far right, is also getting contaminated. The far right is now active in Brittany and in the city of Nantes.

For instance in the village of Saint-Brévin, near Nantes, the far right agitated for two years against the opening of a centre for asylum seekers, escalating from insults and assaults to eventually setting fire to the centre-right mayor’s house. Not a far-left mayor, not a member of France Unbowed or anything. The fascists set his house on fire in the middle of the night, and he almost burned alive. You would think that would have raised outrage nationally. Nope. The media barely talked about it and the perpetrators were never found. The Minister of the Interior didn’t speak about it. The government didn’t condemn the attack. So this centre-right mayor resigned from his mandate in protest, saying: “The State doesn’t protect me, I’m risking my life for accepting a refugee accommodation centre, I’m resigning.” This is a serious issue, you see, much more serious than the death of some fascist in Lyon. But it’s never discussed.

Has your investigation been relayed by larger outlets? What role does the mass media, more generally, play in all of this?

The French media is dominated by billionaires such as Vincent Bolloré, who is openly on the far right, and who’s acquired numerous TV channels, newspapers, publishing houses with the avowed aim of, and I quote, “waging a war of civilization to impose far-right ideas in France.” And he’s good at it. He’s overhauled entire newsrooms, fired journalists and imposed his minions. But Bolloré is just the tip of the iceberg. The left tends to focus on him, but the problem is much deeper.

Indeed, the other private outlets are also under the control of billionaires with ties to political elites. Martin Bouygues, for instance, who is friends with ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy, or Patrick Drahi, who owns the channel BFMTV, a French-Israeli businessman who spread a constant stream of genocidal propaganda after October 7, 2023.

As for the public media channels, they have been undergoing purges to get them to fall in line with Macron, as the government is in charge of naming the directors. So the main news outlets such as France Inter or France Culture have been cutting the more critical programmes, the ones doing satire, or speaking truth to power to the slightest extent, and firing their editors. In their place, they hire journalists who have been on Bolloré’s payroll.

What all this means is that the programmes that play in almost every house in France have aligned themselves with the talking points of the far right, at best on Macron’s, which frankly today is almost the same thing. And in this way France Unbowed is demonized literally every day. They can no longer express any position on Palestine, on the police, on the social situation without being instantly accused of the most outrageous things. In this way, the entire bourgeoisie has banded together to destroy the only left-wing party in electoral politics.

The truth comes out thanks to independent media and thanks to the social media. In this case, we were the first to put out footage of the brawl in Lyon, then Canard Enchaîné, a venerable satirical weekly, published another video. Thankfully, their version was then relayed by some of the mainstream media. But in some cases, on TV, they reversed the roles, labelling the antifascists as fascists and vice versa. This is an operation of deep disinformation, of destruction of the real and of the truth, led by the mass media in spite of the video evidence.

What is the role of far-right social media influencers in creating “Quentin the martyr”, and in what way do they incite to violence, contributing to the climate you’ve described?

In France, as in the rest of the West, there is a whole galaxy of far-right influencers on Youtube, Tiktok and Instagram producing a huge quantity of far-right content. There’s lifestyle content but also videos about training for combat and commentary on current events. They also get involved in arguments about art and so on. They’re creating a whole neofascist counter-culture.

Now, how have they contributed to creating a martyr figure out of Quentin? I want to be very clear: it wasn’t them. They didn’t even need to, because as I’ve said, the mass media had already turned him into a martyr, and the Parliament had already paid a tribute to him. So these influencers didn’t even need to create a martyr. They’re going further. They’re putting up posters with Quentin’s face everywhere in France, they’re calling for demos. They are calling for violence against the left. They want to capitalize on their advantage.

On the other hand these same influencers could be said to be the ones responsible for the death of Quentin, because for years and years they have been calling for armed violence. Their videos are really high quality, by the way, very well edited and enjoying wide diffusion, on Youtube for instance. These are people who pose with rifles while they do firearm practice. One of them, a very famous influencer in France called Papacito, used a life-sized mannequin with the logo of France Unbowed on it and filmed himself shooting at it with a real firearm. Then he cut its throat with a knife. This video, for instance, was viewed hundreds of thousands of times. The party filed a complaint for incitement to murder, but the Youtuber was acquitted. So, this is a single example, but this is going on non-stop.

So there are millions of people in France, mainly young men, who watch masculinist content, incitation to hatred against vulnerable people, against LGBTQ people, against the left. They even started a campaign, a few years ago, calling on people to create a group in every city to go and beat the antifas.

So all this is going on and there is no State repression of it at all.

Quentin is a young man who followed these accounts, who took their videos seriously, who decided “I’ll do it, I’ll start my own squad, I’ll go attack antifa” and it ended badly for him. Alice Cordier, the leader of Nemesis, who is currently going on all the TV stations crying, literally crying for “her friend Quentin”, she can be seen on social media posing with an assault rifle. Once more, no-one is reporting on this in the mass media.

In this distressing atmosphere, is there still a space for antifascists? How can antifa fight back?

That’s a good question. We believe all of it needs to be rebuilt, not only the antifascist movement but also the antiwar movement. Indeed the far-right onslaught, together with Macronist neoliberalism, has caused the left in France, as in the whole of the West, to lose a huge amount of ground. Many positions that were common sense ten years ago no longer are. Opposition to racism and the welcoming of undocumented migrants for instance, no longer goes without saying for most of the left.

On militarism, a few collectives like ours are struggling to rekindle an antiwar movement. Antimilitarism used to be a mainstay on the left, ever since the Internationale, but today most of the left are warmongering and support rearmament, military service and so on. The current situation is so dire that even antifascism, which historically used to be the smallest common denominator for the left, even among groups that disagree on everything else, but now even antifascism no longer unites the left.

Now, the picture is not entirely grim of course, there are still effective independent media in France such as ours, and there’s clear demand for our kind of reporting, since Contre Attaque has never been more popular as the last few days. There are many collectives organising thoughout France.

But, in our analysis, the main threat to the movement for social justice isn’t so much the far right — though of course it is extremely dangerous — but the authorities. The “real” far right, which threatens and opposes us, is the one who wears a uniform. It’s the French police, who has crushed the environmental movement, who has crushed the 2023 protests against pushing back the age of retirement, who has crushed the 2023 urban revolts after the police murder of Nahel Merzouk, who has been so effective and brutal that the social movement to block the country last September was literally killed in the egg.

When we compare it to Italy’s “Blocchiamo Tutto” (block everything) movement for Palestine, where marches could occupy an entire four-lane highway, in France this was made impossible by the extreme police presence: 100,000 officers were deployed to prevent the movement. And they charged and gassed and beat us as soon as we assembled. So the government could then declare, “See? There is no movement.”

So the current attack following the death of Deranque is one more step in this “fascisation” process.

I’m sorry to be painting such a grim picture, but with Antonio Gramsci I believe in “the pessimism of reason and the optimism of action”.

We have a lot of work to do to rebuild a powerful social movement, and we’ll have to try to be united, even with the electoral left-wing such as France Unbowed because it’s plain to see that the offensive against them is actually an offensive against the entire social justice movement. The duty facing us now and for the coming years, is that of building up a revolutionary internationale. Because the choice is between revolution and barbarity.