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” after the realization 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 on 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.
