This Monday, April 22, rue Saint-Guillaume in Paris, a welcoming committee is waiting firmly for Jean-Luc Mélenchon. During the European election campaign, the founder of La France insoumise (LFI) must hold a conference in front of Sciences Po students. Activists from the far-right collective Nemesis came to brandish signs “veil = submission” and chant with UNI, a radical right youth organization, “everyone hates Islamists”. Opposite, “rebellious” activists, equipped with purple flags, respond to them with “down with the fascists”. Sheltered from tensions, in the Boutmy amphitheater, the atmosphere is completely different. Nearly 800 students – a figure communicated by the “Jeunes insoumis de Sciences Po”, who organized the event – welcomed the three-time presidential candidate to thunderous applause.
The student association has been dreaming of welcoming their leader for months. A first meeting was scheduled for October 2023, before being canceled on the advice of the Paris prefecture, which had cited security risks. This time, prefect Laurent Nuñez considered that there was no need for a ban. Which did not prevent Jean-Luc Mélenchon from “thank the management of Sciences Po”, Who “did not give in to pressure”. A direct reference to the three conferences canceled at the universities of Bordeaux, Rennes, and especially Lille, Thursday April 18. It was on this occasion that the founder of LFI returned to excesses, comparing the president of the Lille faculty to the Nazi Adolf Eichmann, one of the main perpetrators of the Shoah.
An infamous parallel which caused turmoil in the political class. On BFM-TV, Monday April 22, the leader of the communists, Fabien Roussel, judged Mélenchon “indefensible”. “His excessive comments discredit everything else”, added the one who has, in the past, paid the price for dubious connections. In September 2023, the LFI MP for Paris Sophia Chikirou, a close friend of Mélenchon, compared him to the collaborationist Marcel Déat.
“Never back down, it’s no use”
At Sciences Po, Monday evening, the time was no longer for vociferations. In front of the students, Jean-Luc Mélenchon played the wise old man, adopting a calm, professorial tone, multiplying in this temple of the French elite references to Kant, the Stoics or Colette Audry, a French playwright and activist close to Simone de Beauvoir.
Surfing on a crest line, he did not withdraw his comments on Eichmann, but preferred to recontextualize them in the work of Hannah Arendt, who had followed and analyzed the trial of the war criminal, as if the evocation of the German philosopher and his work on “the banality of evil” erased the insulting comparison. “The enemy is not only the extreme right, but it is the immense chain of cowardice”, could not help but hammer the “rebel” in chief. To the students, he also gave advice that he himself follows scrupulously: “Never back down, it’s no use,” he said. In well-oiled rhetoric, he also insulted “the media caste” who accuses him of creating ” chaos “, and invited his one-night audience to conduct a “critical, moral reflection”.
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