French interior minister Gérald Darmanin has decided to ban the far-right Catholic movement Civitas after its leader said Jews were heretics unworthy of French citizenship.
“Anti-semitism has no place in our country. I firmly condemn these ignominious comments,” said Darmanin, announcing he would start legal proceedings to ban a party.
The group, which claims about 1,000 members, defends ultra-traditionalist views and stages headline-grabbing protests with militants mouthing prayers and threatening – and sometimes using – violence.
It qualified as a political party in 2016, which gave it certain tax breaks and increased its contacts with shunned far-right groups in France and other countries.
Darmanin acted after an aggressively anti-Semitic speech at a Civitas conference in late July. Essayist Pierre Hillard told the meeting that the naturalisation of Jews in 1791 opened the door to immigration, another favourite far-right target.
“Before 1789, a Jew, a Muslim, a Buddhist could not become French. Why? Because they were heretics,” he said. “We should perhaps go back to the situation before 1789.”
Darmanin’s move was based on Civitas’ overt anti-Semitism, but the group has alienated many people with several other of its positions. It sees the French Church as modernist, and the bishops keep their distance.
Founded in 1999 to “restore the social royalty of Our Lord Jesus Christ”, it was initially close to the Society of St Pius X (SSPX). Civitas came into public view about a decade later with protests against what it considered “Christianophobia”, same-sex marriage and gender theory.
As a political party, it has presented some candidates for election but failed to register with most voters.
More recently, Civitas has blocked several concerts held in churches with protests and threats of violence, on the grounds that it is blasphemous to hold anything but a liturgy in the buildings even if they are deconsecrated.
Swedish singer and organist Anna von Hausswolff had appeared in dozens of churches before Civitas accused her of being a satanist and locked the doors to a planned concert at a church in Nantes in 2021.
This year its members stopped a concert in Metz by Bilal Hassani, the 2019 French Eurovision singer. Hassani is gay, which drew the ire of the movement.
Civitas kept Kali Malone, a modernist US organist, from appearing in a church in Carnac also purporting that she was a satanist. One of her compositions, not on that night’s programme, had the Latin title Sacer Profanare (Profane the Sacred).
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