The announcement was made this Wednesday by Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin on his X account (formerly Twitter). The small ultra-right group Division Martel, which had notably planned to attack North African supporters on the sidelines of the 2022 football World Cup, was dissolved this Wednesday, December 6, in the Council of Ministers. “This small group incites violence and racial hatred. It has no place in our Republic,” the minister underlined on X.
According to the dissolution decree, the Martel Division, which was formed during the second half of 2022 to have around thirty members, advocates a fight through violence “against antifas and people of immigration or presumed Muslims” to “promote the advent of nationalist and xenophobic supremacy”.
“The group propagates ideas justifying discrimination and hatred towards foreign people or French people of immigrant background, in particular by their assimilation to delinquents or criminals,” indicates the decree. According to him, “this ideology translates into a permanent search for confrontation materializing through the organization of punitive operations against these people.”
A small group first called Legionnaires Paris
Gérald Darmanin announced on November 28 that he was proposing the dissolution of the Martel Division, as well as that of two other small ultra-right groups whose names have not been communicated and whose procedure is underway, said the Ministry of the Interior to the AFP.The Minister of the Interior had stressed to the AFP, at the time of his announcement, that “the services had been working for several months” on the Martel Division, of which a person “is suspected of having contributed to on-site coordination” of the violent demonstration in Romans-sur-Isère (Drôme).
On the night of November 25 to 26, ultra-right activists went to the Monnaie district in Romans-sur-Isère, with the aim of “fighting”, according to the authorities, with the young people of this district where several of those implicated in the death of Thomas, 16, stabbed on the sidelines of a ball in the village of Crépol come from.
First called “Legionnaires Paris”, the Martel Division, present mainly in Ile-de-France and made up among others of former members of the “Zouaves Paris”, had recently changed its name in reference to the battle of Poitiers in 732 in during which Charles Martel put an end to the Arab invasion, reports the decree.