Nine months in prison under an electronic bracelet were required on Friday in Bobigny against Marc de Cacqueray, former alleged leader of the dissolved ultra-right group “Zouaves Paris”, at the trial of a brief “outburst of violence” suffered by activists of SOS-Racism during an Eric Zemmour meeting in 2021.
The criminal court will deliver its judgment on January 16.
Already convicted several times for violence, the 26-year-old man appeared free under judicial supervision, for violence in meetings, alongside a young man of 21 years. Both admitted their presence at the meeting but assured that they had not participated in the violence.
The prosecutor requested 18 months' imprisonment against Marc de Cacqueray-Valmenier, including nine months in prison which can be modified under an electronic bracelet and nine months suspended for two years. She notably requested an obligation of psychological care to reflect on violent acts.
Even if it only lasted one or two minutes, “we had a very high intensity of the blows,” declared Marie-Alix Thiébaut, referring to a “surge of violence”.
With shorn hair on the back of his neck and a very short beard, wrapped in a Barbour jacket, Mr. de Cacqueray-Valmenier presented himself at the bar as a business school graduate but currently holding a permanent contract in “interview property and security.
He admitted to having been employed “in Brittany” but having had to stop his work on this site due to “media coverage” – articles had claimed that he was employed as a guard of Vincent Bolloré's private island.
When President Jean-Baptiste Acchiardi presents him as “a recognized figure in the far-right movement”, the accused responds: “in spite of myself but I recognize him”. However, he denies having ever been the leader of the small ultranationalist group “Zouaves Paris”, “frequented only anecdotally”, without “driving role”.
The government dissolved this informal group in January 2022, accused of being at the origin of numerous “violent actions”, of “propagating an openly racist discourse” and of “regularly disseminating images using the symbols of Nazi ideology”.
– “Rain of blows” –
Young plaintiffs described the sudden “rain of blows” received on December 5, 2021, in Villepinte, during the first campaign meeting of presidential candidate Éric Zemmour.
A dozen SOS Racisme activists stood on chairs to each display a letter of the phrase “No to racism”, also chanted. They were then attacked with punches, kicks or furniture thrown at them by dozens of people.
An activist from SOS Racisme, who was granted six days of ITT following the violence, explained, moved, that they wanted to “carry the message 'no to racism' to the very place where racism is experienced”. “I just had time to shout once 'no to racism'” when the activist – black – next to me was “directly caught and lynched”, she said.
Several complainants identified Mr. de Cacqueray-Valmenier as one of the attackers whose lower face was hidden by a pulled-up black neck gaiter, which was strongly contested by his counsel, Me Clément Diakonoff, pleading for acquittal.
“Given the context and the number of people, there is no word, no reliable element which objectively allows in your file to identify my client,” added his other lawyer, Me Cyrille Dutheil de la Rochère.
Marc de Cacqueray-Valmenier even denies having been with people belonging to the Zouaves Paris during this meeting.
“There were 13,000 people and as Albert Camus would write, I was among them but I was nevertheless alone,” he quips. He claims to be the victim of his bad reputation as a neo-Nazi and a mass of “fake news”, since the “over-media coverage” of his profile in 2019.
He was notably sentenced, in January 2022 in Paris, to one year in prison with house arrest under electronic bracelet, for violence in meetings without incapacity, during an expedition to a bar of the anti-fascist movement in Paris.
The prosecutor requested a “warning sentence” of 10 months in prison, with a simple suspended sentence, against the second defendant, an apprentice, aged 18 at the time of the facts.
