“Work, family, homeland”, “Long live the marshal”. No, we are not back in 1940 but in front of the walls of the medical center of a commune of Côtes-d’Armor, in Brittany. An investigation was opened after the discovery on Saturday of far-right inscriptions on the town hall and a medical center in the new town of Guerlédan (formerly Mûr-de-Bretagne and Saint-Guen).
A Celtic cross as well as a rallying symbol of the extreme right were tagged, according to photos published by The Telegram. The commune’s medical center, a new building, was also tagged with slogans such as “Work, family, fatherland”, “Vive le marshal” or “European brotherhood”, according to other photos. also published by The Telegram. According to the organization’s website, it “was founded in 2014 by a group of European nationalists who care about the future of their land”.
A few days after a ceremony in memory of resistance fighters
On one of these graffiti, we can read: “support for Red Angers”, in reference to an extreme right-wing group (Rassemblement of right-wing students) established in Maine-et-Loire and of which four members appeared before the justice Thursday in Angers, three having been acquitted.
These degradations took place a few days after a ceremony in memory of resistance fighters and civilians killed in Mûr-de-Bretagne during the withdrawal of Hitler’s army in August 1944.
In a press release, the Secretary of State for the Sea, Hervé Berville, former deputy for Côtes-d’Armor, condemned “with the greatest firmness the abject neo-Nazi degradations committed” in Guerlédan. “Whether they take place on social networks, in places of memory or on public buildings, we must refuse to allow these repeated insults to the history that constitutes our republican identity to divide us and we must continue to condemn them without reservation,” continued Mr. Berville.
Antisemitic tags a month ago
The Secretary of State also notes that “these heinous acts come only a few weeks after the desecration with anti-Semitic tags of the Butte Rouge memorial located a few kilometers away”.
In mid-July, the Saint-Brieuc prosecutor’s office opened an investigation the day after the discovery of anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi inscriptions on this memorial located in Plœuc-l’Hermitage (Côtes-d’Armor) and dedicated to 55 people executed on this site by the Nazis in 1944.