The Nîmes Court of Appeal confirmed on Tuesday the acquittal pronounced in Avignon of a graffiti artist who represented the economist Jacques Attali as a puppeteer manipulating President Emmanuel Macron-Pinocchio, ruling out the anti-Semitic nature of which the work was accused.
The artist known as Lekto was being sued for “public insult and provocation of discrimination” following the production of a fresco created in June 2022 at the entrance to Avignon. The graffiti artist had represented Emmanuel Macron as a puppet of Pinocchio, manipulated by the economist Jacques Attali represented as Gepetto.
The Nîmes Court of Appeal confirmed this Tuesday, May 7, the acquittal pronounced in first instance on November 23 by the Avignon criminal court, ruling out the anti-Semitic nature of which the street art fresco was accused.
Relax against which the prosecution, which had requested a fine of 6,000 euros, appealed. Lhe painting by the thirty-year-old graffiti artist took up the anti-Semitic iconography of the interwar period, according to several anti-racist associations, including Licra and SOS Racisme, which filed a civil suit.
At first instance, he explained that he liked “to deride those who have power” and denied any anti-Semitic intention, claiming to have been unaware that Jacques Attali was Jewish. The criminal court acquitted him across the board, believing that“no element (…) allows us to assert with a absolute certainty that the use (by the defendant) of an image of a string puppet, the use of which goes far beyond the sole use for racist purposes, was driven by anti-Semitic sentiment.
The judge also affirmed that the fresco “contained no appeal or exhortation, even implicitly formulated, to discrimination, hatred or violence. The SOS-Racisme lawyer had at the time regretted that the court had not looked “as a whole” the iconographic elements, while the “debate was specifically about” on “the accumulation of symbols of an insidiously anti-Semitic nature”.
The mural was erased 72 hours later, at the initiative of the prefecture and the urban community. At the same place, Lekto had signed a new portrait of President Macron disguised as Adolf Hitler, with a “49.3” mustache, denouncing the use of this article to pass pension reform.
