No Country for French Boomers feat Anthony Mansuy (E284)
Self-exiled French conspiracy theorists attempt to set up a sovereign utopia in a desolate Bulgarian village called Mamarchevo. This turns into death threats, people getting scammed out of tens of thousands of euros, a plot to abduct a child, the flying of a Nazi flag, and lots and lots of alcohol. Our guest is journalist Anthony Mansuy, who you may remember from our exploration of French sovereign citizens and our two part investigation into the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The episode is based on an article he wrote for the French newspaper “Society”. He spent months chasing the story, and even traveled to Mamarchevo to interview those involved and experience their utopia first-hand. We also ask him about the general state of conspiracy theorizing in France and what the hell is happening with their recent political meltdown.
Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to podcast mini-series like Manclan, Trickle Down, Perverts and The Spectral Voyager: http://www.patreon.com/QAA
Anthony Mansuy: https://x.com/AnthonyMansuy
Society Magazine: https://www.society-magazine.fr/
Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe, Nick Sena & Jake Rockatansky. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com)
https://qaapodcast.com
QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
You've found a way to establish an internet connection.
Welcome to the QAA Podcast, episode 284, No Country for French Boomers.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rogatansky, Liv Egar, Julian Field, and Travis View.
Hello my darlings.
Today we're going to be exploring the bizarre story of a group of aging French conspiracists who, in search of a sovereign utopia, dreamt up on YouTube and Facebook, formed an exodus to Mamarchevo, a tiny desolate village in southeast Bulgaria, before turning on each other in a spectacular way.
The story involves death threats, people getting scammed out of tens of thousands of euros, a plot to abduct a child, the flying of a Nazi flag, and lots and lots of alcohol.
So just like a normal trip to Paris?
Yeah.
Our guest is journalist Antony Mansuit, who you may remember from our exploration of French sovereign citizens and our two-part investigation into the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
This episode is based on an article he wrote for the French newspaper Societe.
He spent months chasing the story and even traveled to Mamarchevo to interview those involved and experience their utopia firsthand.
We'll also be asking him about the general state of conspiracy theorizing in France and what the hell is happening with their recent political meltdown.
Welcome back to the show, Anthony!
Hello!
Hi everyone!
Is four episodes enough to be labeled a French correspondent?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
What do I have to do to get that?
I think so.
No, we don't have anyone else.
It can be you.
Yeah, you're our guy.
We have a French-shaped hole, so you can just stick right in there.
Cool, yeah.
Alright, let's jump right in.
Hiroshima, after the bomb fell.
A real rat hole.
This is how one former inhabitant describes Mamarcevo, once home to over 4,000 people before the Soviet Union fell.
The village, at its peak, housed mostly military conscripts and their families, strategically placed there due to the proximity of the Turkish border.
Then, the Red Army was disassembled, the youth moved out, and the old passed away.
Today, Mamarcevo houses only 330 souls, including a small but tumultuous group of French boomers.
They came to Bulgaria after growing convinced that their home country had become a totalitarian nightmare due in part to the now non-existent COVID restrictions.
Most of them left their families and jobs back in France.
When they left, some of their loved ones thought they were under the sway of a cult, which in some ways was true.
But each of them moved to Mamarchevo of their own will, and they can leave at any time.
For many of them, the only reason they haven't returned to France is material.
They just don't have the money to do so.
Despite the challenges of living in the Bulgarian village, others believe their home country would be a worse option.
And so they remain, in an atmosphere of increasing mutual resentment and isolation.
But how did things get this way?
It had all started so well.
The first to arrive was Éric Perrault, 65, and Laurent Morel, 53.
This duo is at the core of the Mamarchevo project.
The two had met in 2018, when they were both active in the Gilets Jaunes, or Yellow Vest, movement.
So I just wanted to stop here for a moment.
Anthony, can you briefly explain how the Gilets Jaunes got started and how the movement evolved and splintered?
Yes.
Basically, it was a popular rebellion against the carbon tax.
And it got out of hand really fast and lasted for weeks and weeks.
And I think what's interesting for us here is the digital aspect of it, because it was born online after a clicktivism sort of campaign.
And it started people putting out their grievances online, so doing live videos on Facebook for their friends.
And some of them didn't turn on the privacy settings.
So basically the next morning, the videos had gone fucking viral
and they became celebrities recognized in the real life rallies.
And so as the movement grew, it grew around these people,
these five, 10 people, perhaps a hundred, but you have like five, 10 that were really famous
and basically maybe another hundred, 200 that got smaller and smaller followings.
You had the live streams during the week and then the rallies during the weekends.
And the IRL component was like people gathering, blocking the streets, comparing notes, trying to create solidarity.
So basically it became very hard to pin down.
It was really diverse.
You had in Paris the most violent happening.
One of the ministries was actually invaded.
But on the other parts of the country, you know, it was basically people talking to each other and trying to understand the situation and, like, building solidarity in ways that the elites weren't able to really understand.
And you mentioned the carbon tax, but this was also part of a broader resistance to austerity measures put in place by the neoliberal government under Macron?
Yes, definitely.
When you talk to people, they were like, yeah, we understand that we have to do things for the environment, but please also make this tax affect bigger people, not just the layperson.
So yeah, there was definitely an aspect of it.
After a year, year and a half of Macron saying he was going to be neither left nor right, he was very right.
Right-wing and all the people could project their social aspirations for change onto him to some extent, which was very quickly deflated.
And so the movement took about a year to die down.
It actually took COVID to kill it.
But what happened was this ecosystem that I mentioned earlier of influencers on Facebook mostly, but also on YouTube.
And on the other side, you had this hatred of Macron and the media on the other side.
Because the media was extremely against, when I say media, I mean the mainstream media and TV and radio stations mostly, which didn't understand the movement, didn't cover it with, you know, fairness and some talking heads actually like, you had calls to call on the army to extinguish the movements.
And during this period, there was a lot of police violence, right?
Yes, there was a lot of police violence, lots of videos about this. And it took a few weeks for
the media to pick up on it. And the ministries never acknowledged this. So basically, when
COVID actually killed the movement, because everybody had to stay inside, you had these
influencers that were there, that they were popular, and you had like, some parts of the
movement were never going to accept anything Macron and the media asked them to do. So it was
the perfect storm for French post yellow vest anti-vax movement to take hold. And it was all
predicated on the fact that they hated Macron, the government and the media.
So it doesn't mean that every gilets jaunes became an anti-vaxxer, but the mental and digital infrastructure was in place and it allowed many of them to jump the wagon.
So among these people were Éric Perrault and Laurent Morel, who, as we said, end up moving to Mamarchevo.
When Perrault and Morel met, they were both ready for something new.
Perrault was disenchanted with France and had just sold off all of his real estate.
Morel had voluntarily removed himself from the French public health insurance and was already living in his car.
The two traveled to Spain, Italy, and Greece before spotting Mamarchevo during a trip to Bulgaria, a small village nestled in a cul-de-sac and surrounded by forest hills.
Peru reasoned, France is a country of sissies.
I don't want to depopulate it, but maybe we need to regenerate ourselves a bit and return to our true values.
During the travels that eventually landed them in Momarchevo, Peru recorded dozens of YouTube videos which he uploaded for his 7,000 subscribers.
He had once had a channel with over 21,000 subscribers before it was banned.
Once the two men had settled on the village, some of Peru's online followers showed interest in moving there as well.
He offered them help with housing, explaining in one of his videos.
We will bill you for all of this.
Not a lot, but you've got to understand that we need to live.
We'll be able to offer you homes with extra land for 15,200 euros.
This is a little over $16,000.
One of Peru's followers was a 57-year-old woman called Brigitte Bossu, who in 2019 worked as a highway toll operator near the city of Lyon.
That was the year she first watched one of Peru's videos.
In her words, That was the year I discovered him on Facebook.
He had posted a video in which he told his life story.
It made me cry.
Bossu appreciated Beru's self-proclaimed rebellious side, and the fact that he too, quote, didn't recognize the France of his youth.
She watched his videos for a few months and grew more and more interested.
Brigitte was looking forward to retiring, but she knew she couldn't afford a little house in the French countryside.
Now, this is a very alien concept for Americans, someone approaching 60 and preparing to retire.
But I want you to imagine a country in which there are some socialist qualities, democratic socialist qualities, in which there's some safety net.
Yeah, but now people cannot afford a house when they want to retire.
Exactly.
So here's what she said.
When I saw that they had a house going for 17,000 euros, I told myself, why not Bulgaria?
She got in touch with Peru, who told her he wanted to be the founder of a small community based on mutual support.
After a brief visit to Mamarchevo in June of 2019, she decided to buy a small house in ruins just across from where Peru and Morel were living.
Her daughter and brother tried to warn her against the move, but she wouldn't listen.
Brigitte agreed to pay 40,000 euros to Peru and Morel for the purchase and renovation of the building, as well as the construction of a small garage.
The plan was to move there in 2022, when her retirement would become official.
So, I just want to take a moment here, Anthony, you've been to Mamarchevo without telling us yet, because we'll get to it a bit later, too much about your experiences there.
What was your impression of just the physical location of Mamarchevo and the state of this village?
It basically, I couldn't write it in the article because it needs to like have the tours of actual journalism and civil discourse, but it actually looks like Borat's Village, you know the movie Borat?
Yes.
Yeah, if you remember the movie, that's basically what you should have in mind.
It's many houses, probably about 200.
Most of them are in ruins, falling down, and a little square and very few shops, like two or three shops maybe, that are never open, or some of them are open a few hours a day.
And you have like rusty fences that haven't been used, gardens that haven't been tended to in probably decades sometimes.
And yeah, it's basically falling apart, like many villages in Eastern Europe.
Meanwhile, Éric Péroud was making headway with French conspiracy theorists online.
One of his videos questioning whether the Notre-Dame Cathedral fire was really accidental garnered him 275,000 views, much more than his usual fare about the Mamarchevo project.
But the influx of viewers served him well.
The comments were filled with people expressing a desire to bail on France and come live in the Bulgarian village.
Peru and Morel charged each interested person 2,000 euros for their work as intermediaries, plus a down payment of 10% on the construction and renovation costs.
Some of these projects, like Brigitte's, involved the renovation of houses that were in total ruins.
And so, five more French people came to Mamarchevo in 2019.
Among them, Patricia, an aspiring novelist who saw Bulgaria as a stopping station to Russia, which would be her final destination, far from a totalitarian Western Europe on the verge of total collapse.
She set out from the south of France by car, but her motor caught fire in Serbia and she lost a portion of her belongings as well as her two cats, both escaped in the resulting panic.
Horrible story, honestly.
By the time she got to Marmarchevo, nearly all of her money was gone.
Soon after Patricia's arrival, another Frenchie got to Marmarchevo, Georges.
He was known in his northern French town of Montreuil-sur-Mer due to his calling for a quote, gathering of the racists of France.
Which is also just a gathering of Frenchmen.
Very insulting, very insulting to our beautiful France.
I'm sorry, I'll cut back the anti-French rhetoric.
Remember, other people were freaked out by this, okay?
He freaked out other locals by exhibiting a knife in his window and graffitiing his own home with racist messages.
Okay?
Other French people were not down.
He would also sometimes drive his convertible through town blasting Nazi military hymns through the sound system.
So... Alright.
Just the vision of that is so awesome.
Pérous sold him his own home in Mamarchevo for 20,000 euros, nearly three times the price he had originally paid for it.
I want to interject here because he sold him at this price because he actually got,
Peru himself got ripped off by the home agent who sold him the house.
'Cause the currency in Bulgaria is called lev, leva.
And so one euro is half leva.
And so what the home agent did was actually sell him the house in euros, not in leva.
So he paid two times the price.
And when he found out about this and the second guy came, George,
he decided to sell him at this price.
So, okay.
So he sold it for basically six times the original value because-
Exactly six times, yeah.
Yeah, so.
*laughter* Yeah, so he's doing some good math here already.
By 2020, the project received even more attention online when masculinist YouTuber Emmanuelle Ackermann promoted it in a video titled Mamarchevo, a Gallic village in Bulgaria.
Now, to understand the reference here, you have to understand Asterix, which is a comic book or bande dessinée in French, in which a small village of Gallic holdouts are basically beating the hell out of the Romans every time they come because they have like a magic potion.
So there was no magic potion, I don't think, in this village other than just hard liquor.
And I don't believe there were any Romans coming to try to invade them.
The Romans were woke.
Julian.
Yeah, it was like the imagination that the French, the French government was still oppressing them.
It's weird because it usually, you know, the masculinist Twitter users, I guess, in America, they romanticize the Romans, you know, this conquering empire.
But this instance, they're romanticizing the Gallic people who are conquered by the Romans.
The Romans are the state.
In France, you know, the success, the huge success of this comic is the most well-known comic in France.
Basically ingrained in people's mind that the Gallic people are the predecessors to France, which historically isn't accurate at all.
But now we all believe in this shit because, you know, we all know this comic.
Well, yes, the French highly refined intellectuals are getting their history from comic books.
Backed by epic music, Ackermann told his audience.
I dreamt of a village of 200 warriors with a library and a fitness center.
I think organizing a tribe will be useful in the years to come.
When I think of that comic, I think of like a Planet Fitness.
Yeah, who can forget the scenes in which Obelix works out, mostly by catching boar pigs and wild pigs and putting them on a spit and eating them whole.
He described the village as, deep in the asshole of Bulgaria.
Complimentary.
And extolled the virtues of its new residents.
Ackermann explained that one resident was "a recently awakened banker who loaded her
mattress into her Twingo, a small car, and came over from France."
He also appreciated the duo behind the project, calling Laurent Morel "a great DIY handyman
in the French tradition, a guy who promotes liberty."
And Éric Perroux "a humanist traveler in revolt."
In the video, the fact that Mamarchevo was mostly in ruins got sold as an opportunity to rebuild from scratch in total autonomy in a place where quote, no banks can take the roofs from over our heads.
The video received 13,000 views and interest in the Mamarchevo project continued to grow.
Also, I think one thing that needs to be said here, that got lost in the article because the Sovereign Citizen thing isn't really famous here, even though it got famous since the article was published for other reasons.
The YouTube handle of Laurent Morel is Lolo Bricolo Souverain, which means Lolo the Sovereign Handyman.
Yeah.
Because he was into the Sovereign Citizen bullshit and he spends a lot.
Handyman content does well on YouTube, I feel like.
Yeah.
I think some of the content that was being put out here shows that he's not maybe as much of a handyman as he claims.
This whole thing sort of reminds me of like Jonestown, but without the cult or the cult leader.
Like it just sort of like picking up and like being like, ah, like we're going to create a different America and like in like the South Africa or wherever, wherever they, they moved to in Jonestown.
Yeah, I feel like they used to go to the New World.
I feel like that used to be the move.
But now it's just like Soviet, ex-Soviet city that no one's been to anymore.
It's completely depopulated.
Yeah, Jonestown, except the Kool-Aid is pastis.
Then, in March of 2020, COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization.
Peru's videos began advertising Mamarchevo as an escape from France's, quote, health dictatorship.
Meanwhile, Morel published videos documenting their construction efforts.
Seven new people joined them in 2020.
Brigitte remembers the good vibes of those days.
It was a party.
We would be doing apéro in the evenings.
So for those who don't know the concept, French people love to drink in the early evening while eating charcuterie, pickles, cheese, and other snacks.
It's a great way to be totally fucking wasted before you even start dinner.
It's kind of like an in-between between drinking on an empty stomach and having a meal before you drink.
They realize they can get a little more, you know, bang for their buck if they just like snack a little bit while they drink heavily.
Sprinkle a little cheese and pickles in with their booze.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
It's great.
I wish Anglo-Canada learned from the French part and started doing that.
I know, the Anglos just have tea time.
It's like, well, yeah, caffeine's decent, I guess, but, like, I'm not eating a cucumber sandwich.
Do they do apéro in Quebec?
I think so, yeah.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
Yeah, yeah.
Other than the atmosphere, one of the most attractive things offered by Peru and Morel was the lack of bureaucracy.
One of the 2020 arrivals explained.
In a few days, we're able to sign on a house.
Formalities here are very simple, unlike in France.
But one of the reasons for the lack of formalities was that Moret and Perroux didn't form a company and thus weren't bound to any legal body.
All the construction was paid for under the table.
In July of 2020, Perroux explained in one of his videos.
We left France because we were sick and tired of the formalism.
of the fact that people didn't trust each other.
Peru drew up architectural plans in Photoshop with no qualification whatsoever,
and Morel had never run a construction crew before Mamachevo.
They hired locals from the Romani community with no experience,
employed no contracts, and had no accident insurance.
For the most part, the workers carried out their jobs with no supervision,
and Morel didn't speak a word of Bulgarian, nor did they know any French.
So, there's, uh, in your article, Anthony, you describe videos in which a worker is standing in his socks inside of
the liquid concrete that he's laying for one of the foundations, just like,
just standing in it as he's, uh, setting it up.
The locals now call the resulting buildings Peru Houses, with a note of disdain.
A good part of the owners feel like they were ripped off.
One woman over 70 years old bought a house for 4,000 euros.
Peru asked her for 35,000 more euros for its renovation.
The woman, whose name was Rachel, thought that was a tad expensive and asked him for an estimate.
He told her he didn't have a printer.
Well, I mean, who can't relate to that?
I mean, come on, who's got a printer nowadays?
And one that you know how to work?
Forget about it.
Yeah.
After Rachel decided to oversee the renovations without Peru as an intermediary, she claims he turned on her.
That's when he started telling everyone that I was a bad person, a profiteer, a witch.
Brigitte Brossus calls her home "the cardboard house."
Long cracks can be seen in all parts of it, inside and out.
One of the walls of the garage is starting to lean.
People who bought houses or hired Perout to do renovations now blame their situation on
incompetence, negligence, greed, or a mix of all three.
There were also more fundamental issues with the area.
The ground was often clay-like, the original building's foundations shaky, and the region was prone to earthquakes.
Most decent construction workers were long gone, and with them, the quality building materials.
The bottom line was that Peru and Morel didn't know anything about this part of Bulgaria before deciding it would be the perfect spot for their little community.
Locals tend to look at the newly arrived group of Frenchies with detached amusement.
One of these is Marcho Dobrev, who's been the mayor of Mamarchevo since the fall of the Soviet Union.
That's 34 years and going.
So... He has one employee left, and the two only use two small rooms of the damp municipal building with tall ceilings.
He's a farmer by trade, and when asked about the newcomers, he explained, we have no problem with the French.
But between them... Now that's another story.
To this day, his main interaction with them was in 2021, when Brigitte told him that she believed Laurent Morel was going to attack her with a shotgun.
The mayor explained, The mayor wasn't surprised that the construction was being done under the table, quote, Here, it's normal to do things among friends, without formalities.
Dobrev explained that people don't need a permit to renovate buildings.
He also underplayed the installation in 2019 of a Nazi flag in front of George's house.
Some people complained.
He removed it.
I don't think it was racist.
So Altony, you're interviewing this guy and he's telling you, yeah, I don't think the Nazi flag was that racist.
The problem is I, there was one guy who spoke like really weird English in the, in the, in the community.
And so he was doing the intermediary to, during the interviews, because I don't speak Bulgarian and Malko Dobrev doesn't speak any, any other language.
And so I had to ask him three times, is that racist?
Is that, did he think it was not racist or was it racist?
And every time the answer was no, no, not racist.
Meanwhile, he thought like, he probably thought you were like, do you, you support the Nazis?
These are good.
This is a good, he's like, no, no, no.
Not racist.
I like that he basically had the same reaction you would have if like someone installed a skeleton that was too big for Halloween.
I'm surprised at the idea of someone taking down a Nazi flag upon request.
It's like, well, I didn't think anyone would have a problem.
I mean, if you don't like it, well, fine.
It's coming right down.
Yeah.
Apparently the request came from the, because there's an English contingent in the village and the English didn't like it and they complained.
And that's why George decided to take it down.
Yeah, the British have a tendency not to love the Nazi Germany since it bombed their capital into like total ruins.
Yeah.
And those came for, they came from purely financial reasons.
So, you know, that's not like the Nazi component of the whole French community.
Yeah, the British, we'll get into them in a bit, but they're basically not conspiracy theorists, so they're just like shocked by this French brigade that arrives.
One local who wished to remain anonymous said that when Peru arrived, he expressed wanting to revive Mamarchevo, to create jobs for people.
The local, who happened to speak French, thought this was a positive development and decided to help the newcomers get set up.
Here's what he said.
said.
It was really amicable, warm, and festive.
Even I got carried away by the atmosphere.
When Peru wants to be funny, he's funny.
He would even sing at the table.
And rather well.
I love that like, anytime it's like, people did stuff together and it's always, sit at
a table and drink.
Meanwhile this whole thing is like, he's like, "Ah, I found a perfect piece of land on top
of a volcano."
Like everybody could...
It'll only cost you a couple thousand bucks.
Everybody, it's perfectly safe.
Come live here.
Yeah, just send me a hefty down payment.
I'll be taking care of all the construction with my friends who don't understand me.
He's like, the house has come as is, but if you want renovation, you could pay six times what you paid for the house.
But things took a turn.
I started to realize that they were drinking a lot of alcohol.
When we were at the table, Eric mentioned something about not being against what Hitler had done.
So it's like, hey, nice aperitif.
And then it's like, you know, that Hitler guy didn't do anything wrong, right?
Between songs.
He's like, I'm not totally against it.
I mean, it's, you know, up for debate, but not completely against, not 100% against, not 100% for, but not 100% against.
This is the Jim Caviezel approach.
But not 100% against.
This is the Jim Caviezel approach.
The Maoist line on Stalin, 70% good, 30% bad.
The locals soon felt overwhelmed.
They tried to get me mixed up with their drama, which became bizarre and toxic.
I quickly discovered the price of their houses was really high.
I told the buyers to contact the authorities, but none of them ended up doing it.
One day he told Peru, "You're turning my ancestor's village into an insane asylum."
It must really suck to be a local.
It's like, yeah, my village is pretty shitty, but at least it's mine.
And then these guys arrive.
The local, who appreciated French culture, now believes the new arrivals are much less well-behaved than the clusters of British immigrants in the region.
One of these immigrants, unrelated to Peru's project, was Gary Tall, which is a very funny name for a British person.
It's ridiculous.
Meet my wife, Barbara Fat.
Well, it's actually, it's even better because it's Gary Tall, which, you know, rhymes with very tall, so it's like, well, look at him, he's Gary Tall.
He's Gary Tall.
Yeah, and Bulgarian accent, it's the same thing.
You're Gary Tall.
Yeah.
He left Momarchevo because his wife was crying every day, asking him why he had brought her there.
Good question.
Yeah, Tal, come on.
What are you doing, man?
Tal used to think French people were, quote, the pinnacle of sophistication, and when they first arrived, he was happy about it.
That quickly changed.
One night, he and his wife were having a drink with Morel, Pérou, and Georges, quote, They started talking about Hitler, saying he hadn't killed six million Jews, and that Putin was a great leader.
Mmm.
I love this.
They just cannot have a couple of drinks without Hitler coming up.
It's just consistent.
They're like, you know, France was really oppressive.
And then you see them move out here and they're like, we're very free out here.
Anyways, as I was saying about Hitler before we left France.
It's like being an ex-smoker and having a couple beers and like looking at that pack of smokes and being like, well, can't really resist.
By 2021, the atmosphere was no longer festive within the small French community.
Brigitte, by that point, had forked over €101,000 to Peru.
She felt totally ripped off.
But instead of contacting the authorities, which, of course, a lot of these people are just against on a basic level, Brigitte and two others just started leaving comments on YouTube, warning people about Peru's shady business practices.
And so it, of course, becomes a war of content and posting.
She soon found herself on the outs with a group.
She now suspects that Peru bought the silence of other local victims that had started complaining with her.
The community grew divided and bitter.
People traded insults through videos, in YouTube comments, and sometimes even in the streets.
Perru claimed that Brigitte might show up to his place with a knife one day.
Brigitte feared that Perru was armed and might decide to shoot her.
This wasn't without cause.
In one of his videos, he said, That bitch over there has been mortarizing me for the last four years.
I'm gonna put a caliber shot in her.
Yeah, it might end that way.
He's like, yeah, I might kill her.
On YouTube.
Yeah, we don't know the end of this story yet, but I'm thinking I'm going to shoot her.
In an email, Georges called the group a quote, magnificent French community of frustrates and cuckolds, spineless and enraged.
I thought that was pretty cool.
I mean, I don't want to give it to a Nazi, but those are some pretty cool insults.
Brigitte's brother, who had tried to stop her from moving to Mamarchevo, explained that she had never talked about conspiracy theories before the pandemic started.
According to him, she got going with, quote, simple things that are understandable, like how the government is taking advantage of us.
Soon, Brigitte discovered the sovereign economist Charles Gave, who claims that the euro is on the verge of collapse.
She slowly emptied out her bank account.
I no longer trusted the banks at all, she explained.
The bank eventually closed her accounts.
She convinced herself that she had to flee the country, quote, before Macron closes the borders.
She was two years away from retirement, but decided to break her employment contract and send the 40,000 euros she was given directly to Éric Perrault, quote, it was to keep my money safe and finance the construction, she explained.
Of the 101,000 euros she sent Perrault, he hasn't reimbursed a penny.
It's impossible that my house and the construction are worth that much.
Now, she's broke, relying on the financial support of people close to her.
The strange thing is that Brigitte wasn't the only one to consider Éric Berroux a sort of emergency bank due to crank theories about money.
Two others did the same, including a man named Bernard, who ended up sending 109,000 euros to Berroux.
In 2020, Bernard was 73 and had just experienced the passing of his mother.
He wanted to change things up in his life, and that's when he found Éric Berroux on YouTube.
Quote, he told me he had a house that was nearly finished, and I, instead of asking for pictures, trusted him.
Bernard ended up paying 50,000 euros for the house, plus 35,000 for a small studio, and 24,000 euros more, for extras.
Quote, Peru would tell me, I can get you furniture, install a fridge, a cooker, and since I had every intention of moving there, I sent money.
Peru halted the construction from one day to the next when Bernard expressed doubts about the money over the phone.
He never made it to Mamarchevo.
Bernard developed lung cancer and was forced to remain in France.
Today, like Brigitte, he believes he was ripped off.
Quote, "Peru didn't even need to use artifice.
I was distraught by the death of my mother.
He ripped me off without even making an effort."
Despite their experiences, neither Brigitte nor Bernard have changed their opinions on
conspiracy theories related to money and COVID.
So can you tell us a little bit more about Eric Peru's background and how his beliefs
and social media presence developed?
So basically, the first element we have on him is that he was a youth organizer in the National Front in the 1970s.
So the National Front in the 1970s isn't the same thing as it is today, because at the time, the party still had actual former Waffen-SS in their ranks.
So it wasn't even neo-Nazi, it was actual Nazi.
So I was not able to get much more on him about his young adult life.
But what I know is he had several businesses throughout, you know, the rest of the century.
And in the 2000s, he joined a new centrist party called Modem, which was actually centrist, you know.
He also ran for mayor with this party to become the mayor of his small Southeastern France town.
And he got a very, very small percentage of the vote.
I think it was like 2.5%.
And at the time, you know, he was described to me by people who knew him as a very nice guy.
He also helped, you know, youth nonprofits, even with people from Algeria and Moroccan descent.
So what I understood was that the campaign took a real big toll on his finances.
He had to shut down his businesses.
And it seems like with the setback with his companies and the campaign, but also with the discovering the Internet and with retirement, he got back to his former beliefs.
So Eric Peru found a way to connect to the Internet.
Yes.
And so after that, he took to YouTube and he became a sort of neo-Nazi boomer influencer.
So we mentioned the Notre Dame Cathedral fire that got him somewhat famous.
And after that, he ended up joining a group of what I'd call a revolutionary cosplay group, which doesn't know it's cosplay because everyone except the guy running it think it's going to happen.
And this guy is called Remy Daillet, and he's basically a scammer.
And Peru joined him to start plotting a kidnapping of a little girl.
Because, you know, we also have QAnon here, but our own homebrewed QAnon is centered around the social services, which can remove your child from you if you're a bad parent.
This is very common in the United States as well among sovereign citizens who also tend to dip into QAnon.
So he's planning to basically kidnap the daughter of someone to get her back from social services.
Right. There's two there's two different things here. There's the first one,
which got a lot of traction in France at some point in 2021.
So it was a girl called Mia.
She was taken away from her mom and put in the custody of a grandmother. And basically,
Remy Daye, the scammer, created a commando crew to take her back to her mom. Eric Perroux knew
these guys. He was about to get involved but didn't. And the kid was actually abducted but
not harmed. And the police found her with her mom a few days later in Switzerland, actually.
And there's another plot which she got involved more heavily with, which began with him finding
a place for the mother to hide in Italy.
That's good.
You want them to just never do the crime.
The conviction itself was never conducted.
It was killed before it happened.
So they never actually did it.
So he kind of got off the hook for both plots.
That's good.
You want them to just never do the crime.
That's like the better outcome there.
And so where is the money?
That's the question a lot of people ask themselves in your article.
There's a theory that he might have given some of it to a thing called l'Alliance Humaine,
which stands for the Human Alliance, which is some sort of QAnon-like group.
Yeah, that's exactly that.
That's one of the main, if not the main QAnon group in France.
And I don't think this theory holds, because the theory comes from the fact that Laurent Morel, who I was never able to get in touch with, left Marmarchevo and organized a march.
So he basically said he would march from, I think it was Italy, to France, or I think maybe Serbia, I don't remember.
And he was doing this a bit like a Forrest Gump thing to raise money for the Human Alliance.
I think you actually raised like 150 euros, a very, very small amount.
And so this link, you know, made people think that the money could have gone to the Alliance Humaine, but I don't think so.
There's no definite, you know, final word on this.
I think it's much more mundane, you know, like the local suppliers and workers, they saw French boomers, so they kind of jacked up their prices.
I think Peru saw marks in his quote-unquote friends, so he jacked up his prices.
And the people who wanted to live there, actually, it was way cheaper for them to buy a house in Mamachevo than anywhere in France.
So, in the end, why not?
But the problem is, as you mentioned, is that they didn't know the quality would be way lower than anything they would have gotten in France.
So, for the reasons you've explained.
And so one of the, you know, big motivations here seems to be material conditions.
That a generation of boomers is essentially on the tail end of the financial conditions that allowed people to purchase a home when they retired.
They find that they can't actually afford a home.
And so they're attracted into conspiracy theories on YouTube and eventually something like the Mamarchevo Project.
Yeah, exactly.
It was very sad, actually, because, you know, there's this trend in conspiracy theory reporting and analysis of making fun and saying that if people believe shitty things, they deserve to have shitty, you know, like, destinies.
I do not think like that.
I think you guys don't too, even if we can make fun of them because it's funny.
But in the end, you see that these people have fallen into traps.
First of all, financial, and then they were basically like sold false paradises.
And the first false paradise that was sold to them recently was Macron.
He was saying that he was going to liberate the forces of the economy and it didn't happen and it got worse for them.
And then they fell for other false paradises, like the ones peddled by Eric Péroud.
And yeah, it's sad because people lost all their money and got them into really bad situations.
So how did you get into this topic in the first place?
And tell us a little bit about that and then how your visit to Mamarchevo took place.
So in France, there's a very anti-sociological approach to conspiracy theories.
And this is the mainstream of the struggle against conspiracy theories.
So you have commentators, so-called experts, who analyze what happens online.
And when I started getting interested in the subject, It left me a bit frustrated because that's not how I relate to things.
So I actually, like, I do underground reporting all the time.
I do not do online stuff, most of all.
Since 2020, I've been spending time with people to get broader pictures of what really conspiracism looks like on the ground.
And what happened, it was basically open season for me because not many people were doing this.
So I got contacts, I found out about people, they started trusting me, even though they hate journalists.
And so basically I have people tipping me about potential stories.
Not that much today, but at this time it was the case.
And so there was this guy, this other guy, not the Bernard we mentioned earlier, another Bernard, got in touch with me.
He was a former Yellow Vest as well.
And then it took me a year to start working on this because he basically sent me 20 links with 7-hour YouTube videos in them about Like, like, you know, the videos you mentioned about them bickering with one another, it's all on YouTube.
It's still all on YouTube.
And, uh, but it's like in some corner of YouTube with like 200 views.
And so, yeah, when I click on the seven hour videos with 200 views, I'm not going to watch it instantly.
So it took me a year to start, um, looking into this thing.
And, um, Yeah, it was not a useless rabbit hole that I thought.
So I started talking to Bernard and he's a very, very radical yellow vest.
I think he's the most radical I talked to because he actually said he liked it when the cops started using force, you know, because he likes to fight.
He just wanted to fight with the cops.
And after that, he became the enemy of many higher-ups in the movement because he just kept annoying them in their live streams.
So he was like in the comments, insulting them and trying to find dirt on like the biggest yellow vest influencers.
And you know, rebel rousers, he was scammed once in his life.
And so he says he will never accept anyone scamming anyone, especially if there are like political motivations or political movement behind it, because he loves the yellow vest.
And he basically like gave me the story.
The problem is he didn't want to be a source.
He wanted to do justice proactively.
So with Brigitte, they started when they knew I was going to come to Mamachevo.
It took me three months maybe to start like planning my trip there because I did the reporting first and then I went there.
And so they started organizing a town hall in the village.
Like what they had in mind was like a show on YouTube with me and Eric Peru.
And so they basically tried to see which place they could rent to do the interview live on stage on YouTube with an audience.
So first of all, they started talking about this and I was like, yeah, yeah, never mind.
Forget about this.
But a few days later, I saw they were really serious about this.
Everyone was talking about it.
Every time I was calling someone, they were talking about the town hall.
And I'm like, oh, no, guys, not going to happen, please.
I don't want to do this, which created a bit of tension with them, which I didn't want because they were my main sources.
But yeah, they accepted to not do it, understood my position, and it could happen after that.
So what happened with the Bulgarian authorities?
So I wrote to them because that's what you do.
You know, like if if you see a scam, you try to see if the authorities are looking into it and if there's an investigation underway.
And the thing is, there was not happening, which can be understandable.
Actually, the problem is when I got there, when I got in Mamachevo, I found out that the email I sent them had been translated.
They had never answered to this email actually, but they had been, they translated the email and gave it to Peru as they started launching the investigation.
So I arrived there and everybody was waving my printed email at me, like, oh yeah, you are biased, you are a French journalist.
So, which made it extremely uncomfortable for me when I got there because, you know, you don't want your sources to see the email you sent to the authorities because you don't speak the same language to a source than you do to the authorities, especially when they're conspiracy theorists.
And yeah, so yeah, that was very, very uncomfortable.
And the local police almost got me in trouble because of that.
How many drinks did you have to have with Peru before he trusted you?
None.
He wanted to speak with me because, you know, they love the attention.
He's 65 years old.
He lives in Bulgaria.
He knew he was never going to get in trouble for what happened to him, for what he did, sorry.
So, yeah, he wanted to speak with me and I think he loved the attention and he was very nice when I saw him.
But yeah, making some hints about me being like a Soros globalist and stuff, you know, like happens a lot, but it was pretty nice.
How long did you spend out there?
I was there for three days and I was happy I was there with a photographer because it's probably the most depressing place I've ever been to, actually.
I don't know how you can think it could be a paradise there.
And so this was a little while ago.
Can you tell us when this was and then how things have developed there since?
I started the investigation in December of 2023.
I went there in February, maybe the end of February.
And I don't know what's happening since then because, you know, I was in daily communications with Brigitte, especially when I was investigating.
And she recently sent me like this 12-minute voice message in WhatsApp, like with a never-ending stream of links.
And to be honest, after like almost four months of this, I needed some time off.
So I don't know what's happening.
I haven't just I just haven't looked into it.
And you know, like with the political situation in France, kind of moved on from from what we were doing earlier before that.
So yeah, I don't know.
In your article, you describe some of the consequences for Peru and Morel related to their scams.
Yeah, so this is the end of the article about people who want to start doing justice.
So I think there will be a development further down the line because people were rattled online about this.
This is a very, very, very small community of people very, very enraged by what's happening.
So when I said earlier about the videos with 200 views, those are very motivated 200 people, and about 5 or 6 of them actually are planning to go to Bulgaria to find justice.
So you have the children of one person who got ripped off, you have Bernard, the yellow vest I talked about earlier, but you also have a French cop, a former French cop, who lives in Bulgaria, who decided to Basically, do justice for Bernard, especially.
And so there was a call, Eric Péroud, Eric Péroud recorded the call on Skype, and he put it on YouTube.
So you can hear Philippe Jiménez threatening him with maybe violence, which Jiménez denies.
So there may be developments in the story soon because of these people trying to do justice.
And who is François Radical?
François Radical is the rebel rouser, the yellow vest I mentioned earlier, called Bernard.
That's his online handle.
I just started calling him Bernard because he allowed me.
But yeah, that's his name, François Radical, which means Radical François.
And François can also be a shorthand to French, also.
So yeah, that's his handle on YouTube.
He's been banned three or four times.
He has a Russian flag as his picture on YouTube.
And he says he's a Marxist, and that's why he got in touch with me, because he saw hints of Marxism in my interviews for the book I wrote.
But I talk about Marxism with him, which he doesn't seem to understand all that well.
Right.
And so eventually the Bulgarian police did visit Peru?
Yes, he did.
And they seem to have botched the investigation because they let him off the hook for everything.
And there's like Not going through the weeds of this, but there's clear, because they didn't set up a company, so there is clear fiscal problems with this.
The Bulgarian IRS, it's a slam dunk if they want to investigate this.
Not setting up a company and doing construction is illegal everywhere.
And so they didn't go as far as they should have, I think, because Basically, they sent me the report after the investigation was done and there's two people interviewed.
And from what I know, the people they interviewed are allies of Éric Perrault.
They didn't even interview Brigitte and Bernard and me.
They never got in touch with me or replied to me.
I could have happily got given them, you know, what I'm able and allowed to give them.
So yeah, no, never, you know, never a problem.
To be continued in the small Gallic village resisting the Bulgarian state that hopefully has a very powerful magic potion to make them strong and fight well.
So I wanted to ask you in general, what do you think the state of conspiracy theorizing is in France in this post-Gilets Jaunes world?
It's hard to say because the Post-Gilets Jaunes morphed into COVID conspiracies and COVID conspiracies morphed into anti-Ukraine communities in France and in many, many places.
So basically, just like, you know, like this, um, they have their own like CNN, you know, that they, it's a decentralized CNN, but they only have one subject for a few months and then they move on.
That's basically how it works here.
And after the Ukraine invasion, they didn't really move on to anything else.
They still talk about COVID.
There's nothing for them to hold on to anymore.
They still exist, but they are in their lane, most of them.
And so there's not like this wave and growing movement that we've seen since 2018, you know, with these different, like very, very intense and health shattering events that we've seen, you know.
And now, you know, with the parliamentary elections, they're basically like trying to peddle some conspiracy theories, but it doesn't work.
No traction.
Yeah, it's hard to conspiracy theorize actively when there's such interesting chaos happening in the actual news and among the actual parties.
So let's jump into that for a second.
What is going on in French politics?
So we had the European elections.
In early June, Macron's party was shattered, and the far right got like 37% of the vote combined.
And for the past two years, Macron didn't even have a majority in Congress, so it was very hard for him to govern.
So he did a gamble.
He said, let's dissolve the parliament, which means that we make new elections.
And the gamble is that the left wouldn't be united against him and the far right, and And maybe that also there would be a civic, people would stand the ground against the far right, you know, and for him.
And the gamble completely backfired because the left actually managed to unite, which was very hard because, you know, during the European elections, the main subject was Gaza.
And so you had the Social Democrats calling the radical left anti-Semites, and you had the radical left calling the Social Democrats Zionists.
And so the The Gamble was pretty smart!
You shouldn't see these two people, like, allying with one another.
But actually, these two parties, sorry.
Allying, but they did.
And now in the polls, it's 34% for the far right, 30% for the allied left, and 19% for Macron.
So it seems like it's going to be like the third force in the parliament very soon.
But it's like all bets are off because our parliamentary elections are very weird.
So you can never predict what's going to happen.
And so, yeah, now people are getting really, really crazy.
So now you have the old parties essentially are gone.
The Républicains became a huge mess.
The leader barricaded himself in his office after he was removed because he wanted to ally with the far right.
So the party turned into chaos.
So the Républicains are kind of a thing of the past.
The socialists are also. And these two old parties are gone now. Now we have
the far right, Front National, the allied left under the Front Populaire, and the centrist
Macron with essentially a minority in third place at this point.
That's it. Yeah. And, you know, if for people interested in conspiracy theories, and maybe
there's something to be talked about here is one thing I've noticed is that, and it's
very curious, that the staunchest anti-conspiracy people online, the most visible figures on
this issue, they're pushing a sort of neither nor rhetoric, like refusing to vote for either
the far right and what they call the far left.
And this is extremely concerning here because, you know, like we think or we would like to think that the struggle against conspiracy theories would be, you know, based on sociology and lefting.
And it's basically not happening there.
It's they prefer to vote to let the far right win than to vote for the left.
So isn't that just Macron's original message that seems to be failing?
I don't know.
Because, you know, they see, like, my interpretation is that they are centrists, but their guys are in power right now.
And they don't see the extremism in centrist politics, you know, in what it does in the economy and sometimes even in security issues.
And so they keep saying everyone else is an extremist.
This guy is an extremist because that's all they have left.
Their center is crumbling.
Fantastic.
Well, I think that was quite an exploration of France and of their new colony in Bulgaria that seems to be thriving.
How many people in total did this French community grow to?
Overall, I think 25 people made their way there.
Some people just went for a few days or weeks to visit and see how it was like, what it was like.
And now I think there's about like 12 or 15 people left.
So it's getting less and less people and they all hate each other.
Exactly.
Well, I mean, depending on how these elections go, you know, maybe you'll see, maybe you'll have more citizens in the future.
Yeah, we need to go start an American village in France.
Well, Altony has lit a cigarette.
This is the official French signal for the episode is coming to an end.
Anthony, where can people find your work and your online presence?
If they speak French, they can find me at Society Magazine.
It's a bi-weekly publication and we mostly do long-form investigations, reportages, profiles, and I'm on Twitter also, Anthony Mansuit.
All right, we'll have links to all of that in the description of the episode.
Thank you very much, Anto.
Thank you for coming to the QAA podcast.
Do you want to insult these three Ricans?
There's one who's Canadian, but if you want to insult them, they don't understand a thing.
No, they look good.
I'm not going to do that.
Even though they all chat in their own way in my country.
Thank you for listening to another episode of the QAA podcast.
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How do I translate this?
May the deep dish bless you and keep you.
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Gilets jaunes, or yellow vests, refers to the neon vests that all French drivers must keep in their vehicles for breakdown emergencies.
But now, it's come to symbolise a protest movement, frustrated with French President Emmanuel Macron, who they say is disconnected from the day-to-day economic difficulties suffered by workers and retirees like Robert Tichy.
The Gilets Jaunes represent the most serious threat yet to Macron's agenda and his presidency.
The movement started off in response to Macron's proposal to raise the fuel tax, but now its target is much broader.
Protesters are seeking to reverse Macron's repeal of much of the wealth tax, and many want the president to resign.
The grassroots Gilets Jaunes protest movement surfaced in October 2018, following President Macron's proposal to raise fuel taxes to reduce pollution.
It began in rural communities, where people depend on cars to make a living.
The Gilets Jaunes movement is strongest in small cities and towns outside of France's big metropolitan areas.
Wages there tend to be low.
And French taxes are high.
In fact, the OECD recently said that France is the most taxed economy out of all of its member countries.
By mid-November, more than a quarter of a million people took part in Gilets Jaunes protests.
And in Paris in December, such events had descended into rioting.
The movement, which mobilises through social media platforms, has largely rebuffed the government's appeals to negotiate, discouraging representatives from sitting down with officials.
Its appeal has now broadened too, becoming a rallying cry against the government and what protesters call a president of the rich.
The Gilets Jaunes call President Macron president of the rich for a number of reasons.
But the most important is his decision to repeal much of France's wealth tax.
It doesn't help that Macron, a former investment banker, is himself a wealthy man.
The Gilets Jaunes have already succeeded to some extent after President Macron delayed his proposed fuel tax hike.
