Tens of thousands of people attended the “great civic march” from the Quai d’Orsay, on Paris’s Left Bank to the Luxembourg gardens in central Paris on Sunday, protesting the surge in antisemitism in France, amid Israel's ongoing war against Hamas in Gaza.
French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, that she would be marching along with the people in the fight against antisemitism. Borne, whose Jewish father was deported during WWII, said that this “combat is vital for our national cohesion.”
Representatives of several parties on the left as well as the far-right leader Marine Le Pen also attended Sunday's march in the French capital. Security was tight. Paris authorities deployed 3,000 police troops along the route of the protest.
French President Emmanuel Macron did not attend the march but expressed his support for the protest and called on citizens to rise up against "the unbearable resurgence of unbridled antisemitism."
Since the start of Israel's war against Hamas after the militant group’s massacre of civilians in southern Israel Oct. 7, the Interior Ministry has reported 1,247 antisemitic acts, nearly three times as many as in the whole of 2022.
The march is shaking up French politics as Marine Le Pen’s far right party, an ultra-nationalist party that during WWII turned against the Jews, among other minorities, attended the march.
“Le Pen regards a prime electoral opportunity in pledging to protect the country’s fearful Jewish community,” according to Politico.
Marine Le Pen, daughter of the ultra-nationalist party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was convicted repeatedly of antisemitic hate speech and played down the scope of the Holocaust, has worked to scrub the party's image, kicking her father out and changing the party’s name from National Front to National Rally.
On the other hand, the leader of the far-left France Unbowed party, Jean-Luc Melenchon, stayed away from the march, saying last week on X, formerly Twitter, that the march would be a meeting of "friends of unconditional support for the massacre" in Gaza. Mechelon’s Far-Left party has declined to call Hamas a terrorist group.
France has the largest Jewish population in Europe.
