In mid-February, shortly after I sent off the last proofs of my book “The Yellow Vests and The Battle for Democracy: Taking to the Streets of Paris in the 21st Century,” which examines the “Yellow Vest” street protests that galvanized French politics in the early 2020s, a young man named Quentin Deranque died in the city of Lyon in southeastern France. Deranque was a 23-year-old far-right activist who was fatally injured in a street fight with a small antifascist group known as the Jeune Garde, or the “Young Guard,” which the media has associated with the left-wing political party La France Insoumise, or LFI. The Young Guards was formed in 2021 by an elected representative of the LFI but in the face of current events has been disbanded.
Every death from political violence, on the right or the left, is a human tragedy. But in this instance, the political fallout, which fell a few weeks before the municipal elections across France, has been particularly dramatic. Surprisingly, the LFI does not appear to have been badly damaged, and pulled through the first round of the municipal elections with strong results. But the mainstream center-left Socialist Party, among many other groups, have blamed the LFI for this violence, undermining possibilities for any left coalition in the second round of the municipal elections.
My book documents the rage of the Yellow Vest movement, which emerged in 2018, and the resulting vandalism and property damage that included breaking store windows and setting motorbikes and cars on fire. The Yellow Vests were an autonomous uprising, not supported by any unions or political parties. But the extreme-right leader Marine Le Pen expressed sympathy for the uprising almost right away, and the LFI did so from the left a few weeks later. Many union members were involved in the movement, although never in an official capacity.
Most of my book is devoted to trying to sort out this political enigma, and how the movement and its consequences might be understood. The Yellow Vests were mostly nonviolent and had little or no experience of mass mobilization. The protesters included many women and seniors who were eager to avoid police violence. Although the Yellow Vests often claimed they were forced to fight back against what they saw as police aggression, none of the protesters advocated violence against people.
With great trepidation, I began to search for French news articles about the death of Quentin Deranque. The fatal confrontation reportedly began with disturbances outside a conference at Sciences Po, the highly-regarded French political science institute. Rima Hassam, an LFI member elected to the European Parliament, was speaking. A French citizen of Palestinian origin who was born in a refugee camp, Hassam is a strong, outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights whom the journalist Harrison Stetler calls “one of the most controversial figures in French public life.” Writing in Jacobin, he notes that she was “the political establishment’s favorite straw man for the supposed excesses of new left-wing forces’ stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict.” Stetler draws a parallel between the French far-right’s attacks on Hassam with the charges leveled by Donald Trump’s government against Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder who was among the leaders of Palestine solidarity demonstrations at Columbia University.
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On the streets of Lyon, a far-right women’s group known as Nemesis was protesting Hassam’s talk. A brawl broke out between right-wing supporters of this group and the Jeune Garde. Le Monde describes Nemesis this way: “Named for the Greek goddess of retribution, the French group specializes in provocative protests and perpetually blames immigrants and Muslims for sexual violence. Since its creation in 2019, members have regularly infiltrated left-wing protests to shout their own slogans.”
Reporters for Le Monde viewed about 10 videos of the incident and concluded that the small Nemesis group of only five or six women was surrounded by a group of male far-right activists, including Deranque. After a fight broke out between those activists and the Jeune Garde, the Nemesis women left. Deranque was badly beaten and left lying on the ground. Although he got up under his own power, he died in hospital a few days later.
The satirical left newspaper Le Canard enchaîné, which has exposed many serious French scandals, published video footage of the fighting which suggests that the extreme-right group arrived on the scene armed with makeshift weapons and prepared to fight, ostensibly to protect the Nemesis group, who have previously acted as provocateurs during left demonstrations.
In spite of the obvious differences, I see this incident as parallel in many ways to the interventions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Minneapolis and elsewhere.
In spite of the obvious differences, I see this incident as parallel in many ways to the interventions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Minneapolis and elsewhere. In the U.S., supposed forces of order recruited and established by President Trump have become the agents provocateurs, dramatically arresting people in the streets and inflicting random violence, sometimes on U.S. citizens. When community activists have been injured or even killed, ICE and other federal agencies have tried to depict them as “domestic terrorists.”
This kind of escalating violence is not entirely new — it characterized the period leading up to fascism in Europe in the 1930s. But it is terrifying to realize that in our own times, similar attacks are taking place, and it’s difficult to resist the conclusion that we are now approaching the experiences that led to fascism before.
The political crises of the interwar years produced a cycle of fascist offensives and antifascist counter-mobilization across Europe. Fascist movements relied heavily on organized paramilitary violence directed against socialist parties, trade unions and working-class institutions. In Italy, Benito Mussolini’s fascist squads (squadristi or Blackshirts) systematically attacked socialist municipalities, labor unions, peasant leagues and cooperatives during the early 1920s, helping to break the power of the organized labor movement and paving the way for the fascist seizure of power. As Robert O. Paxton writes in “The Anatomy of Fascism,” fascist militants burned labor halls, destroyed socialist newspapers, and attacked trade union offices and cooperative societies. Historians widely interpret such violence as a counterrevolutionary response to the strength of socialist and labor movements after the First World War.
In “Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000,” Geoff Eley writes that fascist violence was directed first and foremost against the organized working class and its institutions. Similar patterns appeared in Germany during the final years of the Weimar Republic. Richard J. Evans, author of “The Coming of the Third Reich,” notes that the Nazi stormtroopers deliberately sought confrontation with Communists and Social Democrats in order to dominate the streets and intimidate their political opponents.
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In Spain, Francisco Franco, along with other right-wing generals, led an open military assault on the elected Republican government that launched the Spanish Civil War, a conflict that became understood as the central battlefield between fascism and antifascism in Europe. Franco’s forces drew support from fascist regimes while the Republicans mobilized broad antifascist solidarity across the left.
In France, clashes between far-right leagues and left-wing demonstrators reached a crisis during riots in 1934, when violent demonstrations by nationalist leagues near the National Assembly raised fears of a fascist coup and helped spur the formation of the Popular Front coalition in response.
Eric Hobsbawm argues in “The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century” that fascism’s central political function was the destruction of socialist and labor movements that had grown powerful after 1917 and the First World War. We have to understand fascist violence, in other words, as an attempt to prevent or crush the emergence of a strong left coalition. In 1930s France, the Popular Front was formed in reaction to fascist violence. Today, in France, the left has recently built a new popular front. In the United States, Trump’s regime is trying to fend off community activists and any broader left movement in the United States.
I observed the left parties and protesters in France working toward a broad coalition in civil society that might stem the tide of the far right. I envisioned such an historic bloc based on cultural changes and education that would counteract the ideologies of liberalism and illiberalism.
The crucial question for the left here is about strategy. During my research on the Yellow Vests, I observed the left parties and protesters in France working toward a broad coalition in civil society that might stem the tide of the far right. I envisioned such an historic bloc based on cultural changes and education that would counteract the ideologies of liberalism and illiberalism. As many analysts have noted, such a “war of position” cannot be won or sustained by violence. I agree with French philosopher Etienne Balibar, who cautioned that to confront violence with more violence becomes a death trap for the left. It alienates many in the society who are trying to work peacefully for change, and it isolates activist movements, making them uniquely vulnerable to state violence and right-wing attacks while unable to generate a counter-hegemonic bloc.
Since Donald Trump’s return to power, leftist protesters have evidently understood the danger of left-activist violence, including the fact that Trump is ready to call in the military at a moment’s notice. It would be an enormous mistake to give the so-called forces of order a “domestic terrorism” excuse for killing protesters or declaring martial law and other emergency measures.
But the question lingers: In forming an historic bloc to counteract fascism, at what point does violence become useful or necessary? This question is especially crucial considering the enormous difference in military power between the state and civil society. Both in the Spanish Civil War and in World War II, resistance movements resorted to armed struggle in which thousands of people were killed. But in advanced capitalist societies like the United States and France, where the state has immense lethal power on its side, violent resistance almost certainly remains a “death trap.” At least for now, a war of ideology and coalition-building in civil society is still possible.
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Hello, my name is Asma E Nur. I am a tech blogger.
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