Relaxed at first instance, Alain Soral had appealed to the Court of Cassation after his conviction, on January 6, 2021, by the Colmar Court of Appeal for “public insult due to origin, ethnicity, nation, race or religion” following the posting on Twitter and on his website of a photo showing him making a “quenelle”, a sort of reverse Nazi salute, before the Colmar High Court, in the Haut -Rhine. The polemicist was definitively condemned for “public insult” after the rejection on Tuesday January 18 of his appeal, according to the judgment consulted by Agence France-Presse.
“Mr. Bonnet’s conviction [le vrai nom d’Alain Soral] of the count of racial public insult” is “definitive”, writes the Court of Cassation. Relaxed at first instance, he was ordered on appeal to pay “150 day-fine of a unit amount of 150 euros”, which means that in the event of total or partial non-payment, he will be imprisoned for a period corresponding to the number of unpaid day-fines.
The “quenelle” (arm stretched downwards and opposite hand placed on the shoulder) was popularized by the polemicist Dieudonné, condemned on several occasions for antisemitic statements, a gesture which he described as” anti-system “. He is however “notorious” that this gesture is “sometimes a false nose of antisemitism”, noted the Court of Appeal, recalling that Mr. Soral had been convicted for having done so in the middle of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, located in Berlin. She noted that, ”in the spirit“ of Mr. Soral, it therefore takes on a “antisemitic significance”. From then on, by broadcasting a photo of him making a “quenelle”, Mr. Soral intended “persist and sign in an antisemitic provocation”.
In its judgment, the Court of Cassation also declared “inadmissible” the civil action of the Israelite Consistory of Haut-Rhin, which had nevertheless obtained damages on appeal. According to the highest French court, Alain Soral will also have to pay 2,500 euros to each of the other two civil parties, the International League against Racism and Antisemitism (Licra) and SOS-Racisme.
Mr. Soral has already been convicted twenty times, mostly for offenses of incitement to hatred, defamation and antisemitic insult. In November, the Paris Court of Appeal confirmed his sentence to a day-fine for remarks attributing to the Jews the attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States.
