Far-Left Activists, Illegal Migrants Storm Basilica Holding the Tombs of French Kings

Far-left activists and illegal migrants invaded the Basilica of Saint-Denis on Sunday to protest the French government’s new asylum law before they were forcibly removed by police, resulting in evening mass being cancelled.

Around 80 illegal migrants and far-left activists from the group Coordination des Sans-Papiers (CSP 75) protested the new law holding up banners, Le Parisien reports.

After around an hour of occupying the Basilica, police were called and arrived to remove the protestors and illegal immigrants. The area was cleared by around 5:30 pm but evening mass was cancelled in case the protestors returned.

{snip}

Mr. Dupont-Aignan, who supported anti-mass migration Rassemblement National (RN) leader Marine Le Pen for president last year, called the incident a “Scandalous occupation by illegals of the Basilica of Saint-Denis with the shameful complicity of militants and elected representatives of the far left.”

{snip}

Marine Le Pen also took to Twitter to condemn the incident, writing: “By calling migrants to desecrate the Basilica of St. Denis, Necropolis of our Kings, ‘la France Insoumise’ and the far-left show that, in their immigrationist madness, they are ready to trample our civilisation and desecrate a place of historical worship.”

La France Insoumise (“Unsubmissive France”) is the party of far-left former presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon and one of the party’s MPs, Eric Coquerel, who was present at the Basilica during the incident. Mélenchon was noted during last year’s presidential campaign for his hard-left populist platform which included a 90 per cent tax rate on anyone making more than €400,000 a year.

French politician Karim Ouchikh, who converted from Islam to Roman Catholicism, compared the incident to a protest done in Poitiers by the Generation Identitaire (GI) movement which unfurled a banner on the roof of a mosque being built in the city in 2012.

Last year, several GI activists were convicted of inciting racial hatred in relation to the action.

“I’m talking to the prosecutor. You have not hesitated to condemn some identitarian activists for a peaceful presence on the site of the Mosque of Poitiers. Are you going to prosecute the migrants and the leftists who violently desecrated the Basilica of Saint-Denis?” Ouchikh wrote.

{snip}