He was allowed to answer questions from the court while remaining seated, his emaciated face betraying his physical difficulties. Emmanuel Abayisenga, 42, was sentenced Wednesday evening to four years in prison for having deliberately started the fire in Nantes Cathedral on July 18, 2020. The damage had been very significant, the building has still not reopened to the public, the restoration work, estimated at 40 million euros, to continue for at least another year.
This Rwandan by nationality, who is also indicted for another serious case, that of the assassination of priest Olivier Maire in August 2021 in Vendée, was not very talkative at the hearing but admitted having set fire to the cathedral three times, starting with the great organ. A volunteer for the diocese of Nantes, he had the keys to the building and had entered it in the early morning “to pray”.
“I lost control,” he says, justifying his actions by remembering an assault he suffered at the cathedral a year and a half earlier (December 31, 2018), an assault that left him with physical and psychological. “I regret what happened. I wanted to give my contribution to the country that welcomed me but it didn’t happen like that, ”says the forty-year-old, who also asked for “sorry”.
“A vast anger and a sense of revenge”
Arriving in France in 2012 after fleeing his native country, Emmanuel Abayisenga worked as a volunteer for Christian associations. Despite the support of the diocese, his various asylum applications had been rejected. He had been under an obligation to leave French territory since 2019. On July 18, a few hours before starting the fire in the cathedral, he had sent an email to his French entourage in which he showed himself to be affected by this obligation to leave France and by the aggression suffered on December 31, 2018.
“It is indeed a vast anger and a feeling of revenge linked to his administrative situation which is at the origin of this conscious and methodical firing”, estimates the prosecutor Véronique Wester-Ouisse. In its judgment, the criminal court finally retained this Wednesday evening an alteration of the discernment of the defendant.
After confessing to being the author of the fire, Emmanuel Abayisenga had been indicted on July 26, 2020. He had spent ten months in pre-trial detention, then had been released, under judicial supervision, pending his trial. Hospitalized for a time in La Roche-sur-Yon, he then joined the congregation of the Montfort Missionaries, in Saint-Laurent-sur-Sèvre (Vendée). It was there, on August 9, 2021, that Father Olivier Maire was murdered.
The fire in Nantes Cathedral notably destroyed the great organ and a painting by Hippolyte Flandrin from the 19th century