The French government is considering banning a far-right group believed to be planning violence at a protest against the country’s new gay marriage laws on Sunday 26 May.
French Interior Minister Manuel Valls announced that he was considering outlawing the Pritemps Francais (French Spring) group after it released a statement threatening to target “the government and all its appendices, the collaborating political parties and lobbies where the ideological programmes are developed and the organs which spread it”.
“This is a call to violence,” Valls told radio station France Info, and said there had been a number of death threats, which he does not “take lightly”.
“Justice will have to act because it is intolerable that in the Republic there can be these messages of hate,” he continued. “There is no place for groups that challenge the Republic, democracy and which also attack individuals.”
The group gathers under its banner several extreme nationalist and fascist splinter groups. The historian Dominique Venner, 78, who committed suicide on Tuesday on the altar of Notre Dame cathedral, had ties with the organisation.
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