To mark International Women’s Day on Saturday, March 8th, a large feminist demonstration, dominated by far-left and pro-Palestinian associations, was organised in Paris. The right-wing collective Némésis, which had come to defend the rights of French women attacked by migrants, was heckled by other demonstrators, expelled from the procession, and its members were violently attacked and needed police to protect them.
The Némésis collective, led by Alice Cordier, a well-known figure on the militant French right, has for several years been specialising in hard-hitting actions to denounce the decline in women’s rights resulting from the explosion in immigration to France. They point out that women are the first victims of judicial and migratory laxity, and that the French way of life, in which women have pride of place, is now being undermined by the massive arrival of migrants who do not adopt our social and cultural codes. They are calling for the strict application of the OQTF (obligation to leave French territory) and a serious policy to combat the lack of security that claims the lives of so many women every year—as the recent story of Philippine,which aroused great emotion in French public opinion, reminds us.
“We are faced with men from ultra-patriarchal societies who we come across in the public space, who are not at all assimilated, who do not have the same vision of women as our Western vision, and this is felt through sexual harassment, through sexual assaults,” Alice Cordier, the 27-year-old president and founder of the collective, said.
Cordier and several of the collective’s members attended the large demonstration organised in Paris on Saturday, March 8th, to mark International Women’s Rights Day, but the women were deliberately excluded from the procession by the other organising associations, on the grounds that the ideas they defend are ‘incompatible with the cause of women.’ Osez le féminisme spokeswoman Elsa Labouret explained the ostracism as follows: “Just because a group calls itself feminist doesn’t mean that it is, and it’s not by reusing the language of feminism that it can claim to be truly defending women,” she declared, in keeping with the Left’s habit of setting the rules of the game unilaterally and claiming a monopoly on activism.
The members of Némésis were not allowed to start marching until around 5:30 p.m., surrounded by police, several hundred metres behind the main procession. Waving placards reading “Libérez-nous de l’immigration” (“Free us from immigration”), the demonstrators were nevertheless able to get across their hard-hitting slogans, such as “French rapists in prison, foreign rapists on the plane” and “Leftists, accomplices.” MEP Sarah Knafo, a member of Éric Zemmour’s Reconquête party, joined them for the demonstration.
Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau, who a few weeks ago assured the Némésis collective of his support before retracting his statement, this time criticised the exclusion of Némésis on X. He condemned the sectarianism of the official demonstration and its “neo-totalitarian methods.”
The essayist Marguerite Stern, co-author with journalist Dora Moutot of a remarkable essay on the tyranny of the transgender lobby, noted the over-representation in the march of keffiyehs and Palestinian flags—a far cry from the march’s initial stated aim of defending women’s rights. Ahead of Saturday’s march, on Friday evening, activists for the Palestinian cause had gathered for a “radical feminist night march,” authorised at the last minute by the courts after initially being banned by the authorities. The politicisation of the march was also visible in the intervention of Femen, the far-left activists who march topless and who demonstrated to cries of “Heil Orbán” and “Heil Trump” to denounce an alleged ‘fascist’ threat to women.
Targeted by far-left activists, Alice Cordier received death threats, while slogans displayed at local demonstrations across France also included calls for the murder of members of her association. The young woman has lodged a complaint.
