Valerie couldn’t understand what the French police wanted when they knocked on her door.
“I asked them if it was a joke, I had never been arrested,” she said. “I am not public enemy number one,” she told La Voix du Nord, a regional newspaper that broke the story. “They want to make an example of me,” she added.
She didn’t think she had committed any crime by referring to French President Emmanuel Macron as “a piece of filth” on Facebook. French authorities thought otherwise.
Valerie, as the French press has identified her, was arrested, questioned, and released on March 25th. She now faces a trial on June 21st for the Facebook post in which she allegedly offended Macron.
She is charged with “insulting the president of the republic” and, if convicted, could be given a fine of up to €12,000, France24 reports.
Valerie is being prosecuted under a nineteenth-century law rarely invoked, but one that Macron has increasingly used to crack down on public opposition to his policies. The woman, in her 50s, supported the ‘Yellow Vest’ protests of 2018-2019, when a wave of demonstrations by the French working class threatened to topple Macron’s government.
