The gesture couldn't have been more dramatic, nor the setting more grand: 78-year-old French writer and historian Dominique Venner chose the altar of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris to shoot himself in front of about 1,500 horrified visitors. Just before pulling the trigger, he had meticulously laid a letter on the altar for the police.
Venner, a former paratrooper and member of the Secret Army Organization (OAS), a group opposed to Algeria's independence and which waged a war of terror against Charles de Gaulle and his government in the early 1960s, was a theorist of the French Extreme Right.
Marine Le Pen, leader of the Extreme-Right National Front party, provoked controversy when immediately took to Twitter to salute Venner's "political gesture," concluding that he had tried "to wake France up."
"Venner's models were ancient Greece and ancient Rome, he was a pagan and an anti-Christian but chose a highly symbolic place of western civilization to kill himself, " commented Christophe Forcari in the French daily newspaper Libération
Venner's anger had focused on the same-sex
marriage bill which became law last Saturday, and the abrogation of which, he thought, the French should seek in mass street protests. He dreamt, in fact, of a reactionary insurrection, a "French Spring."
In a last post on his blog, he backed the anti-same-sex marriage march planned for this Sunday. He wrote that demonstrators were "right to shout their impatience and anger" and that laws could be overturned if the people shouted loudly enough. A xenophobe, he loathed multicultural France and called for radical and symbolic acts to "reawaken the memory of our origins."
By committing suicide in such a fashion, Venner certainly hoped to show the way to like-minded radical militants; he recently wrote: "sometimes words are not enough, they need to be substantiated by acts."
http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/23/opinion/opinion-poirier-same-sex-marriage-suicide/
Venner, a former paratrooper and member of the Secret Army Organization (OAS), a group opposed to Algeria's independence and which waged a war of terror against Charles de Gaulle and his government in the early 1960s, was a theorist of the French Extreme Right.
Marine Le Pen, leader of the Extreme-Right National Front party, provoked controversy when immediately took to Twitter to salute Venner's "political gesture," concluding that he had tried "to wake France up."
"Venner's models were ancient Greece and ancient Rome, he was a pagan and an anti-Christian but chose a highly symbolic place of western civilization to kill himself, " commented Christophe Forcari in the French daily newspaper Libération
Venner's anger had focused on the same-sex
marriage bill which became law last Saturday, and the abrogation of which, he thought, the French should seek in mass street protests. He dreamt, in fact, of a reactionary insurrection, a "French Spring."
In a last post on his blog, he backed the anti-same-sex marriage march planned for this Sunday. He wrote that demonstrators were "right to shout their impatience and anger" and that laws could be overturned if the people shouted loudly enough. A xenophobe, he loathed multicultural France and called for radical and symbolic acts to "reawaken the memory of our origins."
By committing suicide in such a fashion, Venner certainly hoped to show the way to like-minded radical militants; he recently wrote: "sometimes words are not enough, they need to be substantiated by acts."
http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/23/opinion/opinion-poirier-same-sex-marriage-suicide/