The radical student group, created in 1968 in opposition to “leftism and communism”, is in the crosshairs of the Minister of the Interior for its violent racist and homophobic actions.
“White supremacist ideology” in the government’s sights. Gérald Darmanin announced on June 19 his intention to dissolve the Union Defense Group (GUD). “It’s a very friendly group with a lot of people from National gathering [RN] (…). These are people who think there is white supremacy and who make extremely serious anti-Semitic remarks,” notably attacked the tenant of Beauvau on BFMTV. Jordan Bardella followed suit to defuse any hypothesis of a link between the small group and the flame party, ensuring that there would be no « no form of tolerance towards those who engage in violence in our country” if he came to power. “Ultra-left and ultra-right organizations will be dissolved”including the GUD, he insisted.
Beatings, radicalism, homophobia and anti-Semitism: this far-right student organization has been in the crosshairs of the Minister of the Interior since “nine months”. Its members, who demonstrate in the French streets every May 9 to commemorate the death of an ultra-right activist, flanked by black flags decorated with the Celtic cross and black rats, have been beating the streets since 1968. The GUD is one of the oldest far-right student organizations.
Frontal opposition to the far left in universities
When the GUD was created, in December 1968 at the Assas law faculty in Paris, “French universities are going through a special period”, summarizes far-right specialist Jean-Yves Camus. At the time, students from various leftist groups and communists held the upper hand. The GUD is created “with the ambition of regaining ground in the faculties by directly opposing the extreme left”, specifies the political scientist. From its origins, the GUD has made systematic use of violence to make itself heard, “but the leftists are not left out”, would like to clarify Jean-Yves Camus. At that time, “student politics is violent in general”. Anti-communism is the driving force of the group and animates their actions until the fall of the Soviet empire and the gradual decline of communism in the 1990s.
“From then on, their ideological cursor moves”, analyzes the expert. If anti-leftism remains the cornerstone of their organization, it is coupled with anti-Semitism poorly disguised under the name of anti-Zionism. “As such, the GUD is the ugly duckling of the extreme right »underlines Jean-Yves Camus, “in that he still supports armed Palestinian resistance that would wipe Israel off the map.”
In the group viewfinder: “Jews, Freemasons, LGBT, leftists, immigrants”. In short, they defend “the idea of a white France, rid of what they consider to be “scum””, reveals the specialist. The number, difficult to estimate precisely, is estimated at “a few hundred, spread across the big cities”. The members of the small group, mainly male, come from increasingly diverse social classes: “we go from the son of a reactionary bourgeois who seeks to scare himself to the proletarian who wants revolution”explains Jean-Yves Camus.
The originality of the student group lies mainly in its total lack of doctrinal training effort. “The GUD is above all the historical myth of the fight against leftist influence at the university, of repeated beatings and sordid stories”, supports the specialist. Over the 2000s, the structure of the GUD took on the appearance of a disorganized urban strip. Violence remains the main matrix of their actions, making the GUD an eruptive movement, with governance “chaotic”, “essentially because when its members finish their studies, they leave the movement and invest elsewhere”. In background, “stories of money, drugs, weapons or acts of ultra-violence internal to the small group”comments Jean-Yves Camus again.
Murder and beatings
Legal disputes follow one after the other through ever more violent actions. Weakened by these affairs and the numerous internal differences, the GUD is «autodissous» in 2017. Two movements were immediately born from this separation: the revolutionary nationalist movement Bastion Social, and the small group Zouaves Paris, affiliated with the neofascist movement. The acts of ultraviolence committed by these “children of GUD” cascade. This is evidenced by the shooting death on March 19, 2022 of ex-rugby player Federico Martin Aramburu, whose alleged murderer and main suspect, Loïc Le Priol, campaigned for a long time in the GUD, or the violence committed by certain members of the Zouaves Paris in against SOS Racisme activists during an Éric Zemmour meeting in Villepinte on June 5, 2021.
In January 2022, Gérald Darmanin announced the dissolution of Zouaves Paris. A few months later, Marc de Cacqueray-Valménier, former head of Zouaves Paris, resurrected the GUD from its ashes. On December 14, 2022, the evening of the clash between France and Morocco as part of the Football World Cup, 40 people were arrested in the 17th arrondissement, as they were heading towards the Champs-Élysées. Among them, seven people linked to the ultra-right, including the leader of the GUD, who are currently being pursued on appeal by the courts for “participation in a group with a view to intentional violence”. And on June 12, 2024, four ultra-right activists, who assert paramilitary demands and affiliation with the GUD and the National Rally, were sentenced to sentences ranging from six months suspended prison sentence to seven months in prison for their participation in an attack. homophobic in Paris on June 9, while they “celebrated” the victory of the RN in the European elections.
“It is therefore for all of these actions that the GUD is today in the government’s sights”, points out Jean-Yves Camus. However, it remains to be seen what this dissolution will lead to. “In terms of objective, leader or method of action the GUD is nothing other than the continuity of Zouaves Paris, which had already been banned by the government”, explains the historian again. In reality, “these small dissolved groups always find a way to reinvent themselves under another name”.
