The Paris Court of Appeal confirmed a release and two convictions against the far-right essayist Alain Soral, retried in three separate cases for provocation to racial hatred.
The first issue concerns a photomontage with antisemitic hints, including Emmanuel Macron, broadcasted in February 2017 on Alain Soral’s “Equality and Reconciliation” website.
In this picture, Macron was pictured with arms raised in front of a globe, an arm surrounded by a Nazi-style armband adorned with a dollar instead of a swastika. The background of the picture contained American and Israeli flags and photos of Patrick Drahi, Jacob Rothschild and Jacques Attali, with the slogan “On the march towards global chaos”.
The appeal judges considered that while this photomontage could “legitimately shock”, it did not appear “sufficiently clear and unambiguous to aim at all Jews because of their origin or their religion”.
The court therefore confirmed the release of Alain Soral, whose real name is Alain Bonnet.
Condemned several times, including for provocation to racial hatred, he was retried for two drawings deemed antisemitic also published on his website, which earned him sentences of four months’ imprisonment by the Paris Criminal Court.
The court of appeal confirmed a first suspended sentence, but without the fine, for a drawing representing four presidential candidates of 2017 in the form of pawns, on a chessboard dominated by the personalities Bernard-Henri Lévy , Julien Dray and Jacques Attali, against the background of Star of David.
Another caricature published in July 2017 depicted various personalities in the form of crooked-hooked cockroaches, including Jacques Attali, designated “Chief Cockroach” and wearing a Star of David.
This drawing also contained “an exhortation” to anti-Jewish hatred because “it invites undoubtedly to eliminate these harmful insects”, the judges found, while confirming Soral’s four month suspended sentence and 5,000 euros fine.
