FRANCE OPENS PROBE INTO POSTERS DEPICTING MACRON AS HITLER

French President Emmanuel Macron depicted as Nazi leader Adolf Hitler Photograph:(Twitter)

.Sat 20 May 2023:

France has launched an investigation into posters caricaturing President Emmanuel Macron as Adolf Hitler, according to local media reports on Thursday.

The 30 posters were reproductions of a mural of French President Emmanuel Macron painted by a local street artist named Lekto that was put up on an electrical transformer along a major road in Avignon in April. The posters were taken down at the time and now they are seen on prominent billboards close to the town hall, the prefecture, and the railroad station.

In 2022, Letko is alleged to have painted a mural, that has since been removed, which showed Macron as the puppet of the Jewish political consultant Jacques Attali. Authorities regarded it as being anti-Semitic. “How far will they go in the indignity and abjectness? It is high time to sanction in the most severe way possible those who engage in such odious campaigns,” tweeted the president of the Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur region, Renaud Muselier.

Avignon’s town hall announced that it will lodge a complaint and that the police had been called in to take down the posters. Whosoever has put up the posters, according to the prosecution, would face fines of €12,000 for insulting the president as well as two months in jail and €7,500 in fines for inciting rebellion.

France and Free speech

The case has turned into a test of where France draws the line between freedom of expression and being offensive.

Emmanuel Macron filed a lawsuit in 2021 against a wealthy billboard operator who erected posters picturing him as Adolf Hitler.

The posters, one of which appeared at the entrance to the Mediterranean town of Toulon – capital of the Var and home to an important naval base – showed Macron represented as the Nazi leader, with his toothbrush moustache, in full uniform and with the swastika armband altered to read LREM – La République En Marche – the president’s governing centre-right party. The accompanying slogan reads: “Obey. Get vaccinated.”

Michel-Ange Flori, who created and pasted the image on billboards, told the local newspaper he had been summoned by local police. “They confirmed that there had been a complaint from the Elysée,” Flori told Var-Matin. “I was surprised and shocked.”

Flori later tweeted: “In Macron-land, showing the Prophet’s rear is satire, making fun of Macron as a dictator is blasphemy,” referring to the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo’s controversial caricatures of the Prophet Muhammed.

“We will not give up on cartoons and drawings, even if others back down,” Macron said on Oct 21, 2020 in a speech to honour school teacher Samuel Paty, who was killed by a Chechen teenager who wanted to avenge Paty’s use of the cartoons in a class on freedom of expression.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

______________________________________________________________

FOLLOW INDEPENDENT PRESS:

TWITTER (CLICK HERE)
https://twitter.com/IpIndependent