Communiqué of the NPA-Revolutionaries

We share the press release of our comrades of the Revolutionary NPA, originally published on their website ¹

Quentin Deranque, an extreme right-wing militant, racist and fundamentalist Catholic, died on Saturday, February 14. He did not manage to recover from his serious injuries. Quentin was not a saint, but he died as a martyr of the extreme right and of a government that is half in mourning and half happy to take the opportunity to denounce “the violence of the extreme left”.

A fabricated martyr

On Thursday, February 12, Quentin Deranque was part of the order service of his friends of Nemesis, who went to provoke and disrupt a conference of Rima Hassan, deputy of the Insubmissive France and pro-Palestinian activist, at the University of Lyon. Nemesis is an identity group that instrumentalizes feminism out of pure racism. They are regulars of the coups d’effect against the workers’ movement, they who sneak into the demonstrations of March 8, international day of the struggle for women’s rights, under police escort. And it is not the first time that they attack a conference of the Franco-Palestinian jurist on the genocide in Gaza, which, let us remember, all the more so in a context in which everyone is urged to mourn the dead, has caused 70,000 victims according to the most optimistic hypotheses.

Deranque was part of a group of fascist trainees, positioned about ten meters away from this provocative action, ready to intervene. According to Mediapart, the police were informed in advance but chose not to intervene. Nemesis is often protected by the police and never restrained. What happened next remains unclear to this day.

Solidarity government of the extreme right

Even before the facts have been clarified, the Minister of the Interior, Nunez, and the Minister of Justice, Darmanin, affirm that the culprits are members of what they call “the ultra-left”. These ministers, like the whole of the Macronist presidential camp, exploit this event to point the finger at the left and the extreme left. Making the Le Pen, Bardella and other Zemmour happy.

Their indignation has a double yardstick: they have never been heard to speak of the eleven people killed by the extreme right since 2022. Nothing has been heard about Ismaël Aali, killed for being of Maghrebi origin on January 6 last in the south of Lyon. Identical silence for the high school student of Décines-Charpieu, in the eastern district of the city, whose face was lacerated on January 19, under a torrent of racist insults. Not a word for El Hacen Diarra, a migrant worker killed by the police in Paris during the night of January 14-15. Silence complicit also after the direct action against the Kurds in Paris in February 2025, when about thirty extreme right-wing thugs attacked a meeting and wounded a CGT militant with a knife. Finally, the acquittal ruled in favor of the gendarmes implicated in the death of Adama Traoré also demonstrates the side chosen by justice.

The shabby political maneuver of classifying France Insubmise as an “extreme left” movement is being used to impute the responsibility of “political violence” to Mélenchon’s movement. This is a double slander, since the revolutionary extreme left, to which we belong, is the bearer of collective and emancipatory struggles against the violence generated by this capitalist society. The political, verbal or physical, racist and anti-poor violence that makes the atmosphere unbreathable comes from the extreme right. The government adds fuel to the fire by calling anti-Semitic all those who show solidarity with the Palestinian people, as Macron did again, on Radio J, last Sunday. Macron makes respectable the French extreme right for whom, despite their hypocritical speeches, the hatred of Jews is only matched by their hatred of Muslims or those who supposedly are. By taking up all or a large part of Le Pen’s program against immigrants and against the left, the government encourages the RN’s violent satellite groups.

In the face of the intimidation and violence of the extreme right, we need the union of workers and a class response.

No wonder that with so much leniency, fascist gangs are emboldened. Since Thursday, they have been attacking the headquarters of Insubmissive France or trade unions in Paris, Lyon, Lille, Metz, Rouen, Castres, Bordeaux, Toulouse and also Montpellier. We show our full support to the comrades of the FI who are suffering a torrent of insults and slander from the government as well as an escalation of violence from the extreme right. The goal remains intimidation for now, but the violent groups could go even further. This must not be allowed. The headquarters and public meetings organized by the left-wing parties and trade unions must be protected in a united manner. The militants of the NPA-R will participate in all the frameworks that allow them to defend themselves against the brown plague. The extreme right thrives in the breeding ground of the bosses’ offensive that takes a nationalist and militarist turn. The extreme right also thrives on 40 years of anti-social policies, carried out by governments of both the right and the left. A response from the world of labor could make it retreat in a lasting way: racist demagogy and racist groups are nothing against workers in struggle, against their numbers, their determination and their collective organization.

1. NPA Revolutionaries press release, February 16, 2026 : https://npa-revolutionnaires.org/communique-face-aux-intimidations-et-aux-violences-de-lextreme-droite-union-des-travailleurs-et-reponse-de-classe/ ↩︎