Seven people accused of being members of an ultra-leftist group are in court on terrorism charges for allegedly organising attacks against the French police and military. While the Interior Minister has blamed violence during social protests on "ultra leftists", it is difficult to define them as a group, and terrorism charges have failed in court before.
The trial comes out of a report from the French DGSI intelligence agency that identified what it said was a group of ultra leftists lead by Florian D, an anarchist activist who went to Syria in 2017 to fight with Kurdish forces against the Islamic State armed group.
Florian and six other people – five men and one woman – are accused of criminal terrorist association linked to planned attacks in France. Three are also on trial for not handing over the codes of their encrypted devices to police investigators.
The case
Upon his return to France in 2018, Florian, who was trained as a sniper during his time in Syria, was placed under surveillance.
Investigators said they found evidence that he was trying to recruit people to perpetrate violent acts against police or military officers in France, and that the group had been experimenting with explosives.
After several months of surveillance and phone taps, on 8 December 2020, police arrested Florian and Camille B, a woman he was romantically involved with, as well as two friends and three other people Florian had met in 2014 at the Sivens ZAD in the south of France
It is the site of a protest against the construction of a dam on the Tarn river.
The seven were suspected of having participated in shooting exercises while playing the Airsoft tactical game with air rifles, and testing explosives. Police found products that could be used to make explosives when they searched the defendants' homes.
The seven have denied accusations that they intended to attack state institutions.
A lawyer who represents Florian, Raphaël Kempf, told FranceInfo radio that the explosives were being used to make firecrackers for fun, and that it is the DGSI's "fictionalised reading" of the situation that would make it seem as though his client and the other defendants wanted to attack symbols of the state.
Defining the 'ultra left'
The accused's lawyers have denounced the trial as a political act against people whose world views the government disagrees with, and will argue in court that no target or timeframe for any allegedly planned attack was ever identified.
Interior Minister Gerard Darmanin has repeatedly condemned groups that he has identified as “ultra leftist”, including environmental activists protesting against the construction of agricultural water reservoirs in Sainte-Soline, in western France.
He had previously blamed the ultra left for violence during demonstrations against the government pension reform.
Environmental groups have also been targeted, with the government in June dissolving a climate activist group that it said instigated violence and vandalism at demonstrations.
But defining the ultra left as a single entity is nearly impossible, as the term encompasses many different people and groups with a wide array of anti-establishment views.
The ultra-left label, which first appeared at the turn of the 20th century to describe anti-Lenin leftist Marxists, has now been used to describe anyone from black bloc protesters to environmental activists.
This makes prosecutions difficult. The last antiterrorist trial of ultra-leftists in France ended with charges being dropped.
Difficult prosecutions
Widely described as a farce or fiasco for the anti-terroism police, what is known as the Tarnac affair involved nine people allegedly members of an anarchist cell who were arrested in 2008, accused of sabotaging electrical lines on high-speed TGV lines in and around the town of Tarnac, in south-western France.
After years of legal wrangling, the nine were acquitted in 2018 of the most serious charges, including sabotage and conspiracy.
The last successful terrorism prosecution of ultra-leftists was in 1995, with the conviction of several members of Lyon branch of the militant leftist group Action directe, a small far-left armed group along the lines of Italy's Red Brigades.
The militants were convicted of terrorism for bombings and attacks in the Paris region during the 1980s, and sentenced to 30 years in prison.
The current trial, which started Wednesday, is expected to run through 27 October, with the defendants facing up to 10 years in prison.
