Arriving on site Monday morning, the students and staff of Savoie Mont Blanc University had the chilling surprise of discovering portraits of Marshal Pétain on the walls of the establishment.
A whole series of xenophobic posters glorifying the head of the Vichy regime and collaboration with Nazi Germany were stuck on the Jacob-Bellecombette campus of this faculty in Chambéry, several local media reported. .
The portraits of the marshal displayed as a caption a quote from the leader from his speech on June 20, 1940, during which he announced that he had asked Nazi Germany to cease “hostilities”: “I have been with you in the glorious days, I stay with you in the dark days.
» In several photos of the posters stuck on the walls of the university, we also see visuals glorifying the French militia, a paramilitary organization founded by the Vichy government, to lend a hand to the Gestapo.
Stickers from the royalist and far-right Action Française movement, calling to say “stop immigration”, were also discovered.
All the posters had been removed and the inscriptions cleaned Monday evening, according to France Bleu.
“Incitement to hatred”
The date of these collages seems to owe nothing to chance, with the commemoration this week of the 80th anniversary of the fighting on the Glières plateau, not far from Annecy, a stronghold of the Resistance in Haute-Savoie, recalls Le Dauphiné Libéré .
The Vichy regime and German forces launched a violent offensive against the resistance on March 26, 1944, which cost the lives of around 150 of them.
The university management “condemns with the greatest vigor such incitement to hatred”, it reacted to France Bleu.
She also announced that she wanted to file a complaint.
The posters also triggered the anger of the Europe Écologie-les Verts party, which reacted strongly in a press release, cited in particular by France 3. “These foul ideas have no place in the Republic, and even less in places of culture , emancipation and scientific research that are our Universities”, indicated the party, calling for “a start to find a republican discourse”.
“Savoie has been, is, and will remain a land of resistance to the ideas of the extreme right,” insist the elected environmentalists.
“The Militia, Vichy France, selected French citizens, sent citizens to deportation, to death for their religion, their political ideas or their sexual orientation.
The militiamen were in the first ranks to attack the resistance fighters,” also recalled regional councilor Alexandra Caron-Cusey, quoted by Le Dauphiné Libéré.
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This is not the first time that the university has been the subject of wild far-right displays.
Nationalist tags and neo-Nazi inscriptions had already been discovered on the walls of buildings in April 2023. The city of Chambéry also has a small neo-Nazi group, according to Le Dauphiné Libéré.