French President Emmanuel Macron led a nationwide outrage on Saturday when an ultra-conservative magazine portrayed a black lawmaker as a slave.
The French Presidency said Macron called Danielle Obono from the distant party France Unboiled and “explicitly condemned any form of racism”.
The magazine, Valerus Actuelles, which caters to readers on the right and far right, shows Obono in chains with an iron collar on her neck to illustrate the seven-page fictional story.
Prime Minister Jean Castex said it was a “rebel publication that calls for explicit condemnation” and told Obono that he had the government’s support.
“I share the outrage of the legalist Obono,” he said.
Justice Eric Dupond-Moretti said, “One is free to write a novel within the limits fixed by law. One is free to hate it. I hate it.”
Obono tweeted: “Extreme right – Ojusky, silly and cruel. In short, viz.”
The anti-racist organization SOS Rascim rejected the growing profanity against African and Arab politicians and said it is incontestable what legal measures can be taken to deal with it.
Although the magazine denied it was racist, the story in relation to Obono was “a work of fiction … but was never bad.”
The story was in “utterly bad taste”, said Valerand de Saint-Just, an official of France’s far-flung National Rally Party.
France saw several protests against racial injustice as well as colonial and police brutality in June and July, inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement at the knee of police in the United States and the death of George Floyd.
Macron, a centrist, who last year gave an interview to the Valers Actuelles, vowed to root out racism when he praised it as a “good magazine”.
But he also said that France would not take statues of figures associated with the colonial era or the slave trade, as has happened recently in other countries.❐
