Premium Episode 144: French Sovereign Citizens feat Anthony Mansuy (Sample)
New Age and Hippie culture is giving way to a strange version of "sovereign citizenship" in France. We explore how this led to a mother kidnapping her own child with the help of several accomplices who impersonated social services. Our guest (and guest writer) this week is Anthony Mansuy, a reporter for Society Magazine in Paris. He attended a workshop with one of the main influencers in the scene and has brought us some original reporting on this weird on- and offline phenomenon. Numerology, rap, and butterfly masks are involved. We cover Guylaine Lanctôt, the godmother of the new age "sovereign" movement in France, and we also chat a bit about the rise of far-right pundit and would-be French Presidential candidate Eric Zemmour.
↓↓↓↓ SUBSCRIBE FOR $5 A MONTH SO YOU DON'T MISS THE SECOND WEEKLY EPISODE ↓↓↓↓
www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous
Follow Anthony Mansuy: http://twitter.com/anthonymansuy
Merch / Join the Discord Community / Find the Lost Episodes / Etc: http://qanonanonymous.com
Episode music by Episode music by Doom Chakra Tapes (http://doomchakratapes.bandcamp.com) & Pontus Berghe
Transcribed by https://otter.ai This week we're heading to France, a country that loves blue jeans, rock and roll, and forming government commissions to investigate what they call wokeism, which is wokeism, if you didn't understand it in the French accent.
Now, the French, despite their more solid welfare state and stunning cheeses, seem intent on shittily adapting the American culture wars, including the rise of so-called sovereign citizens, who believe they are not subject to certain government laws or even all of them, which is a state of mind they achieve through a combination of mental gymnastics and fraudulent legalese.
But can sovereign citizens exist in a functional country that doesn't have to waste hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on Guantanamo, the Iraq War, and the NSA?
Thanks to the internet, you bet they can.
A much more esoteric affair, French sovereign citizens draw mostly from New Age and hippie culture to generate such cultural products as rappers, numerologists, and even elaborate kidnapping schemes.
So this week we'll be exploring some of the influencers at the center of the movement with the help of our guest and guest writer, Anthony Mansuie, a reporter for Society Magazine in Paris.
Anthony, welcome to the show.
Thank you.
Big fan.
We met in Paris and had a fantastic night in the 19th Arrondissement, and one of the things that came up is this whole line of kind of French sovereign citizen style thinking, and we chatted quite a bit about it.
And so we're going to be getting into that because you actually spent some time with them doing a workshop specifically for three days.
But before we get to that, I wanted to chat to you a bit about the latest political rising star in France, and hopefully this guy will give us a bit of context as to where France is right now.
I'm talking, of course, of Éric Zemmour, who—the name, if you're French, you've heard your whole life.
He's one of those ghouls who just appears—he looks like a bush.
appointee and he just kind of appears like a demon on what they call plateau which is just like big like roundtables on French TV and lately he's become the center of a lot of conversation because he's you know considering a run for president so can you tell us a bit about where France is right now and who Eric Zemmour is?
So Eric Zemmour is a pundit.
He's worked for years at a right-wing daily newspaper, a very old institution called Le Figaro.
And he grew up to fame, I think it's around 2005, 2006, when he joined a Saturday night talk show.
Which was one of the most important shows of the decade.
So there you had high-profile politicians, actors, writers, basically a mix between lowbrow and highbrow culture.
And so Zemmour was there throughout, so you could see him interview a presidential candidate, and the next minute he's gonna trash a politically correct liberal comedian, for example.
And people really enjoyed that.
The effect it had basically was to give people license to behave like an Islamophobic intellectual renegade.
That's kind of how he sees himself and that's kind of his core constituency today.
You see very well-dressed young guys in their 20s thinking they're, you know, a punk rocker talking like Eric Zemmour.
Migrants, agriculture, euro, defense, GAFA, Iran, Russia, international trade.
Not one subject where Europe does not deploy its inability to keep its promises.
Europe blocked, Europe divided, Europe powerless.
It is no longer a simple crisis, but a crisis of the system.
And so, I mean, to be clear, he has basically said that Marine Le Pen, who is the candidate for the far right, the furthest right, and oldest standing French party on that side, you know, legendarily racist and awful, really like the people that people go out in the streets to make sure they don't get elected kind of thing in France, but he considers himself to the right of her, if anything, that she's soft.
Oh, he says she's far left, basically.
Jesus Christ!
And they've also come up with this amazing term, Islamogochism, which is Islamo-leftism.
Yeah, that's another conspiracy theory, but I think we should get first to the Great Replacement thing, because he's the Great Replacement candidate.
He actually believes in the Great Replacement, the hardcore version of the Great Replacement, like the conspiracy wing of the Great Replacement movement.
I mean, he comes from, his family comes from Algeria, the Blackfoot, you know, the Pieds-Noirs, the Jewish people who came back after the war.
He perhaps is the most anti-Semitic person in France right now, saying that the Vichy regime actually saved the French Jews.
He went back to the Dreyfus affair, saying that Dreyfus deserved it.
And actually, he can very well be described as a fascist.
I mean, if you look at Umberto Eco's 14 different characteristics of fascism, I actually looked yesterday into what he thinks and how it fits with Umberto Eco's characterization, and he fits on 7 of the 14 different characteristics, which is huge.
And to be clear, white replacement or the great replacement or white genocide, as it's often called here in the United States and elsewhere, is this theory essentially that, you know, that the white race is demographically under threat and that there's a takeover to essentially replace them and take, you know, I guess the reins of the world away from them.
So it's a deeply racist and deeply right-wing conspiracy theory, essentially.
Yeah it describes a reality which is that we've had a lot of immigration in France and that through time and with mixing of the populations of course you see more people of different colors in the country but describing this reality and then saying that it's a conspiracy between the countries in the Sahara region And different leftist organizations to repopulate and change the demographic typology of the country is another thing.
And that goes to what you described with Islamo-leftism, which is a fantasized alliance between far-left movements and the Muslim Brotherhood, basically, or Islamist forces, to implement far-left economic reform and the Sharia law.
Mm-hmm.
And so now that the country is being asked to choose between a liberal or a supposed kind of liberal centrist who actually is showing himself to be quite a bit more right-wing than we thought, and this guy who is essentially a complete psychopath, do you think that France is in a position almost like a 2015 in America position?
I think.
The latest poll came today and he went second.
He's second in the polls with 17 or 18 percent of the vote which would qualify him for the second round because we have this stupid system where you can get 25 percent of the vote but if you come third then you're not going to get any share of the parliament.
Because we have legislative elections after the presidential elections, which gives a huge boost to whoever won the presidential election.
That's why Macron was able to get a huge majority in Parliament with a six-month-old political party.
At the moment, the big question is, can we compare Eric Zemmour to Donald Trump?
Or can we compare 2021 France to 2015 America?
And I guess a lot of that comes from the fact that journalists don't want to make the same mistake that American journalists did in 2016, thinking there was no way he could win.
And my take on this is, he is the French Trump.
He's been speaking to the Islamophobic part of our subconscious for 15 years.
And he resonates the same way Trump does.
I mean, Trump's like a huge sponge-like figure, full of cholesterol, and Zemmour is a pseudo-intellectual with a very bad breath.
Yeah, it's a bit, he's got a Peterson vibe.
He thinks of himself almost as like, he's a combination of like a public intellectual and like one of these dark web like intellectual guys.
It's concerning.
With huge ears.
I mean you haven't seen ears like that.
Yeah, well, as a kid who got called Dumbo in the cours de récréation, I really resent you bringing that up.
Sorry, sorry for this.
No, I shouldn't say that.
It's fine.
They're my people.
It's kind of forbidden to like him, the same way it was forbidden to like Trump five years ago.
And it makes him all the more appealing.
So right now the question is, is he a bubble?
I mean, in every country you see campaigns like this becoming bubbles for a couple of months or a couple of weeks and then peter out and it doesn't do anything.
But I think he's not a new person in our country, he's not a new phenomenon.
He's been controversial for years and everybody's got their own opinion of him.
And now I guess the question is, can you like him and vote for him?
Is it going to translate into something in the ballot box?
I'm very pessimistic about it.
I think yes.
Alright, well, on that great note, let's jump right into it!
To understand the phenomenon of French sovereign citizens, I think it's useful to mention what journalist Anna Mollin calls the conspiracy singularity.
This is the idea that conspiracy theories and communities are merging with one another in the United States, forming, in Merlin's words, one gigantic mass of suspicion.
I'm bringing this up because it also appears to be happening in France, and because our sovereign citizens are not really single-issue conspiracy theorists.
They share the bottom of the French cultural barrel with QAnon, 5D consciousness and other conspirituality madness, all of which can be found mixed together in these social media circles.
A major character in this story is Alice Pazalmar, which means Peace at the Sea in Spanish.
She's a roving French hippie whose followers envision as a modern Louise Michel.
For those who don't know, Louise Michel was a 19th century feminist and anarchist icon, known for her role in the creation of the Paris Commune.
In contrast, Alice Pazalmar recently made waves by announcing a plan to buy a 750,000 euro Bastide, which is a term that refers to beautiful bougie properties typically located in the south of France.
Nice, this is the kind of cult that I'm into.
Get me some tapenade, I'll get some fucking melons, and we can just have one of these lovely, you know, to the sound of the cicadas, we can all become sovereign.
To raise money for the project, Pazalmar started a crowdfunding campaign, which reached 300,000 euros before the media realized that Alice Pazalmar was actually the same person who'd been linked to the kidnapping of a child back in April.
To find out more, I recently attended one of her three-day sovereignty workshops, which promised to help me cut all ties with the rest of society.
But before we get to Halis and her workshops, we have to rewind a little bit and travel to Quebec, Canada, a province that has acted as a major conveyor belt for French conspiracy theories, with bloggers and YouTubers soaking up North American paranoia and translating it for the French-speaking internet.
Nice.
Guylaine Longteau is probably the godmother of French sovereign citizens.
A former doctor and health entrepreneur, she has recently turned anti-vax activist and tax protester.
But there's more to her than ideology.
You have been listening to a sample of a premium episode of QAnon Anonymous.
We don't run any advertising on the show, and we'd like to keep it that way.
For five bucks a month, you'll get access to this episode, a new one each week, and our entire library of premium episodes.
So head on over to patreon.com slash QAnonAnonymous and subscribe.
