Just before Christmas in the Loiret, at a quiet farmhouse by the edge of the woods about a two-hour drive southwest of Paris, there was a break-in at the country home of Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
The police said that the December 16 intrusion was organized by several individuals, reported Europe 1 the morning after the incident. They made it into the house by cutting through a fence and breaking a window before “exposing their literary talents on my walls,” Mélenchon joked at a France Insoumise rally the Thursday afterward. According to Europe 1, the house was empty, and the people who broke in tagged the walls with graffiti.
Their ”literary talents” included slogans like “Fuck Arabs,” “long live Marine [Le Pen],” “you’re rotting the country,” and “we found you,” Mélenchon reported in a blog post a few days later. Some of the slogans were full of misspellings and grammatical errors, and Mélenchon wryly remarked at the rally that “the defense of the country isn’t the same thing as the defense of French grammar.” There was also at least one Nazi swastika.
“I fear for my books,” Mélenchon joked on Twitter after learning about the break-in.
A local court confirmed to Jacobin that a preliminary investigation is underway. As of December 23, no arrests had been made, and there have been no public developments in the case since then.
At ten o’clock on the morning after the break-in, Mélenchon was on a Paris metro train headed to the National Assembly when he opened his phone and saw messages of condolence and support pouring in, he wrote in the blog post reacting to the incident. The texts were the first he was hearing about the news. He hadn’t been contacted by any local authorities, the gendarmerie, or the…
Auteur: Marlon Ettinger
