“I Am Not an Activist, I Am Engaged”

Denis Robert and the Trap of Rationality.

2 May 2026. Published by Benoît Labourdette.

17 min

On 14 April 2026, Denis Robert, founder of the independent media outlet Blast, was heard, alongside Ivan du Roy (Basta!) and Johan Weisz (StreetPress), by the French Senate’s information mission on the “grey zones of information”. He attempts to ground the singularity of his journalistic work on a distinction between commitment and activism. Drawing on Bourdieu, Habermas, Lévi-Strauss, Mucchielli and a few others, I propose a reading that is neither indulgent nor dismissive, but seeks to identify what, in a sincere and courageous discourse, weakens the very democratic values it intends to defend.

Examining a Rhetorical Gesture

There is a way, very widespread today, of presenting oneself as the bearer of rationality in a field where everyone claims that same quality. From a recent intervention by Denis Robert, I would like to examine this gesture more closely. Not in order to dismiss an engaged journalist whose many battles I otherwise admire, but to name a mechanism that seems to me, in the long run, ruinous to the very deliberative democracy it claims to serve.

This article is not a piece of journalistic criticism. It belongs to a body of work on media and information literacy, in a sociological and anthropological perspective on the public discourse that journalists hold about their own profession.

The Scene and Its Setting

On 14 April 2026, the French Senate held a hearing, in the framework of an information mission with the prerogatives of a commission of inquiry, with three heads of independent online media outlets: Denis Robert for Blast, Ivan du Roy for Basta!, and Johan Weisz for StreetPress. The mission, conducted by the committee on culture, education, communication and sport, has given itself the telling title “The Grey Zones of Information”. For the senators, it is a matter of identifying journalistic practices that would escape existing regulatory frameworks and of considering, where appropriate, “labelling” mechanisms intended to distinguish reliable sources from others. During a roughly ten-minute statement, Denis Robert explains why he considers such labelling impossible. He evokes the threat hanging over his media outlet, the need to hire a security guard at the door of the newsroom, and the assaults he has suffered in the street. He describes the far-right attacks, the accusatory inversion that Blast is subjected to, and the systematic violence that unfolded after an interview with Raphaël Arnault.

Nothing in this account is contestable, and above all nothing should be. In a country where an independent media outlet must pay for a security guard to do its work, it is essential that senators hear this. It is essential that this political violence — which Denis Robert is right to call far-right violence — be known and named. I will therefore not raise my pen against the substance of this alarm, which seems to me well-founded, nor against the courage required to voice it publicly in such an institutional setting.

At a precise moment in his intervention, perhaps the shortest and the least prepared, Denis Robert nevertheless makes the distinction on which his argument rests: the one that separates the journalist from the activist. “I do not feel like an activist at all. I feel engaged. I do journalism.” Then, a little further on: “They express opinions, they are activists. We are not. The three of us, we do journalism. We are concerned with facts.”

These are the few sentences I would like to examine. The “the three of us” refers to the three heads heard by the Senate, and by extension to the independent online media outlets they represent; but this plural extends, implicitly, to a whole category of journalistic practice that Denis Robert sets apart from another, that of “pseudo-journalists of the far right”. This fragility is not specific to Denis Robert. It runs through almost all of the contemporary French journalistic spectrum, from the Bolloré channels to the independent left-wing media, by way of the centrist newsrooms of public broadcasting. It is doubtless the most common epistemological trait of the profession, and it is precisely because it is so common that it deserves to be named.

Self-Designation as a Rhetorical Operator

The first observation is descriptive. In a media field saturated with conflict, each actor presents themselves as the one who exercises rationality, against others who would be biased. Pascal Praud says he is rational, against the dominant ideology. Mediapart says it is rigorous, against newsrooms beholden to power. Le Figaro says it is factual, against the excesses of the progressive press. Blast says it is journalistic, against far-right activists. CNews says it is free, against media outlets that toe the line.

All these positions occupy, formally, the same place. They claim a monopoly on rationality. They denounce the bias of the other side. They refuse to be qualified as engaged or as activist, not because they aren’t, but because they obscurely recognise that the qualification amounts to disqualification. To be an activist, in the French media space, is to be reduced to one’s ideological inscription, and as a consequence to have one’s discourse invalidated in advance. Everyone therefore tries to escape this designation by projecting it onto the other.

In On Television (1996), Pierre Bourdieu identified this mechanism with great acuity. He showed that the journalistic field functions according to an economy of symbolic capital in which the central stake is the conquest of the “monopoly on legitimate information” — that is, the capacity to impose one’s definition of what is true and serious. In this economy, designating one’s opponent as an activist, a partisan, or an ideologue is one of the most efficient moves, since it claims to stand outside the very battle it is waging with redoubled intensity. In his chapter on journalists during the Covid crisis (Defending Democracy: An Engaged Sociology, 2023), Laurent Mucchielli showed how this delegitimisation strategy was deployed against researchers labelled as “reassurists” or “conspiracists”, through a rhetoric that did not respond to arguments but turned its opponents into morally disqualified figures.

A recent example, at the other end of the media field, displays the same gesture with particular crudity. On 4 April 2026, on the sidelines of the anti-racist demonstration organised in Saint-Denis by Bally Bagayoko, the newly elected La France insoumise mayor, journalists from the far-right magazine Frontières came to interview the demonstrators. The video setup is geared toward a single objective: to show that left-wing activists have no arguments, that they contradict themselves, that they refuse to debate. The journalists ask their questions with studied calm, occupying the posture of the neutral third party who simply listens. When a demonstrator calls them fascists, they redirect the accusation back to its supposed argumentative weakness, feigning surprise: “Would you care to elaborate?” The political content of Frontières is at the opposite end of the spectrum from that of Blast. The grammar is the same. They would be activists; we, we would do journalism.

The point here is not that Denis Robert does the same thing as Frontières or Pascal Praud. Politically, they stand at opposite ends, and I myself stand much closer to Denis Robert. The point is that the form of the gesture is structurally identical: we would be rational, they would be activists. In a democratic space, this form produces effects independent of the contents it carries. It manufactures irreducible antagonism, because it forbids, by construction, the recognition of the adversary as a legitimate interlocutor. It makes dialogue impossible, not for political reasons (one can perfectly well dialogue across deep disagreements), but for epistemic ones: when each side claims the facts and accuses the other of opinion, no space remains for anything other than positional warfare.

“It Is a Fact”: On the Invocation of Gaza

To illustrate his position, Denis Robert takes an example: “Can one have an opinion on the genocide or not? For me, it is a fact.” The demonstration is skilful because it anchors itself in a case where the moral feeling of progressive readers immediately confirms the argument. Yes, many people, myself included, share this qualification and do not regard it as an “opinion” in the subjectivist sense of the word. Yes, UN reports, the work of specialists in international law, the materiality of events — all of this contributes to making this qualification solid.

And yet. The qualification of “genocide”, in international law, is not a brute observation, of the kind “the weather is fine” or “the car is red”. It is a juridical and political act that mobilises a normative framework, a conventional definition (that of the 1948 Convention), an appraisal of intention and methods. It is an informed, constructed, argued judgement, which can be held to be sound (I hold it to be sound) without ceasing to be a judgement. This distinction is not byzantine; it is at the heart of what honest intellectual work consists in: the ability to hold a position as the best one available in the current state of knowledge, without confusing it with a perceptual self-evidence.

By declaring “it is a fact” and “there is no discussion, there is no debate”, Denis Robert performs the very slippage he denounces in his adversaries. He transforms an argued position into a brute observation, and in advance withdraws from anyone who might disagree the right to debate it. By denying the qualification its status as a constructed judgement, one strips one’s own position of what gives it its strength: argumentation. It is reduced to an act of assertion, sustained only by its own intensity, calling forth the adverse assertion in mirror image.

The journalism of Blast has nevertheless spent years building a patient, detailed argument about what is at stake in Gaza. This argument is of high quality; it rests on sources, on reports, on a method, and it draws its strength from the fact that it does not merely affirm but demonstrates. To present it oneself as the simple recording of a “fact” not open to debate is to weaken its public reach. Those who do not share the conclusion no longer receive the argument; they receive an assertion that they can immediately oppose with their own, using the same rhetorical tools. One falls back into the very balance of forces one was seeking to overcome.

The Epistemology of the Overhead, or the Illusion of a Vantage Without a Viewpoint

Denis Robert sums up his approach in this formula: “I look at events. I read the reports. I inform myself.” The sequence describes, in the first person, what one might call the illusion of a vantage point without a viewpoint. It suggests a subject who could simply look at reality, as one might look through a window, without that gaze itself being oriented by a position, a history, a language, a professional culture. The whole of twentieth-century anthropology was built against this assumption.

In Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), Bronislaw Malinowski set out the contrary requirement: to recognise the position of the observer as constitutive of what is observed, and to take seriously the gap between the categories of the researcher and those of the people studied. In Tristes Tropiques (1955), Claude Lévi-Strauss extended this lesson by showing that the ethnographic encounter does not produce neutral knowledge, but a “distant viewpoint” that illuminates both the observer and the observed. In The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), Clifford Geertz finally theorised “thick description” as the only method that takes seriously the situated and interpretive character of every grasp of social reality.

This lesson is not confined to distant ethnography. In 1878, in Birka, Sweden, archaeologists unearthed the Bj 581 grave, considered for over a century to be a model burial of a high-ranking male Viking warrior: full equipment, two horses, abundant weapons. In 2017, Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson and her team published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology a DNA analysis establishing that the skeleton was that of a woman. Part of the archaeological community reacted with spectacular hostility: pages of online critiques, suspicions of sample contamination, hypotheses of mixed skeletons, and at times personal threats addressed to the female researchers. Heide Goettner-Abendroth, in Matriarchal Societies: Studies on Indigenous Cultures Across the Globe (Éditions Des femmes, 2019), inscribes this kind of discovery in a wider lineage: that of a historiography that has projected onto the past the patriarchal power structures of the present, presenting them as evidence of human nature. The researchers who have contested these supposed self-evidences have repeatedly run into a scientific community that was, in good faith, convinced of upholding rigour and objectivity. What guided them was not the awareness of their own situated position, but the illusion of occupying a vantage point of overhead.

A journalist who looks at events does so from somewhere, with categories, in a language, with a professional and intellectual history. They are not the general consciousness of a faceless humanity, hovering above the world to report on it. They are a situated being, with a body, a past, affects, dependencies, and it is precisely because they are situated that their gaze has any value. The value of a gaze lies in the lucid awareness of the viewpoint from which it is exercised. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in Phenomenology of Perception (1945), gave to this situated awareness a decisive formulation: our body is not an obstacle to knowing the world, it is the very condition of that knowledge.

To claim rationality against opinion is to wish to escape this embodied condition. It is to claim to stand in a place no one inhabits, and which in any case does not exist. The gesture is always somewhat melancholy, because it projects an epistemic nostalgia toward a nineteenth-century scientistic model that science itself has long since abandoned. Even in physics, since quantum mechanics, we know that the observer is inscribed in what they observe. How could journalism, which manipulates not particles or equations but human beings, societies, and conflicts, possibly claim to escape it?

It is on this impossible vantage point that Frontières plays in its Saint-Denis interviews. To a demonstrator who calls the outlet fascist, the journalist replies: “It’s the F for frontier — that’s our outlet.” When the demonstrator retorts, “Frontier — yeah, that’s fascist,” the journalist feigns polite stupefaction: “Really?” The setup is designed so that the journalist appears poised, measured, open to dialogue, while the interlocutor is left looking devoid of grounded argument. Further on, to another interlocutor who worries that their words might be misused, the journalist takes offence: “Have you seen me ask such questions?” The whole construct produces the journalist’s position as a place without a viewpoint, when in fact it is a strongly oriented viewpoint: the one that holds anti-racism to be incoherent and the concern for borders self-evident.

The same game, despite itself, is played by left-wing journalism when it claims rationality against opponents whom it labels activists. The form is identical. In each case, a subject presents themselves as devoid of viewpoint, while in fact occupying a strongly situated one that they do not name. And it is this dissimulation that ruins the very possibility of debate.

The Trap of the Balance of Forces

The most serious consequence of this self-designation as the bearer of rationality is, in my eyes, that it places democratic discussion within a regime of balance of forces. When two interlocutors recognise that they each occupy a position, that they each have reasons for thinking what they think, and that these reasons can be exposed and discussed, they are within an argumentative regime. This regime is always fragile, always threatened, always imperfect, but it has the merit of making possible what Jürgen Habermas, in his Theory of Communicative Action (1981), called “orientation towards understanding”. One does not seek to vanquish, one seeks to understand and, where appropriate, to be understood.

When, on the contrary, each party positions themselves as the bearer of rationality and qualifies the other as opinion, ideology, or activism, no space remains for the orientation towards understanding. Only the orientation towards success remains — that is, towards victory in the balance of forces. Arguments become weapons, interlocutors become targets, and the question “who is right?” is resolved, de facto, into “who speaks the loudest?”, “who is best placed in the media field?”, “who commands the most fearsome social sanctions?”. One has stepped out of deliberative democracy and into agonistic democracy, which some theorists embrace (Chantal Mouffe, for example) but which seems to me, for my part, structurally incompatible with what we ought to be trying to build.

It is precisely this agonistic regime that Denis Robert installs himself in, despite himself, when he says “they don’t do journalism, we do”. He adopts the discursive structure of his adversaries. He denies them, as they deny him, the quality of legitimate interlocutor. He returns them, as they return him, to their disqualifying ideological inscription. He places himself, as they place themselves, in the position of “we who know” against “they who believe”. The political content, the tone, and the sincerity differ widely; the discursive form is the same. And it is the form, far more than the content, that makes democracy.

I know the objection that will be raised, and that Denis Robert would likely raise himself. “But surely we cannot put Blast and the Bolloré media on the same level. There are considerable ethical, factual, and methodological differences.” That is true. These differences exist, they are real, they are important, and I defend them. But the question is not one of “putting on the same level” in terms of contents. The question is how to situate the difference. Either one situates it by saying “we are rational, they are not”, and one adopts their own weapon, with the consequences I have tried to describe. Or one situates it by saying “we adopt an argued, methodical, transparent position regarding our presuppositions, which is not theirs, and we will demonstrate why it is the better one”. This second gesture, infinitely more demanding, is also more powerful. It compels the adversary to take a position, and it allows the public to judge on the ground of arguments, not on that of insults.

Counter-Power and the Reproduction of the Dominant Epistemology

There is, in Denis Robert’s trajectory, a paradox that I find particularly poignant. This man has spent years fighting, with admirable energy, the monopoly on legitimate information held by the major mainstream media — in the Clearstream affair, in his work on tax havens, in the founding of Blast. He has himself been disqualified by these media, branded a conspiracist, accused of conspiracy theorising, attacked in the courts. He has experienced, in his professional flesh, what it means to have one’s right to legitimate speech revoked. And here, at the very moment he addresses the Senate mission, he reproduces, in turn, the very structure that oppressed him. He redraws a border between journalists and activists, and he places his own opponents on the wrong side of that border.

This reversal is not a personal betrayal. It is, it seems to me, the symptom of a structural difficulty that affects all counter-power media. In The Social Construction of Reality (1966), Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann identified the mechanism: when a dissenting group takes hold of an institution, it tends to reproduce the structures of legitimation it had fought, because those structures are the only ones available for it to exist within the field. Independent media outlets fighting for their survival against concentrated media have, in the short term, scarcely any other tool than the claim to rationality and objectivity. They cannot afford to say “we are just as subjective as you, but we are right”, because a public trained to expect rationality would condemn them to marginality. So they claim rationality, and they pour all their energy into it.

The problem is that this strategy, in the medium term, ruins its own object. It keeps the public expecting an objective information that does not exist and cannot exist. It feeds future disappointment when counter-power media will be, in their turn, criticised on the very grounds they had used against the dominant ones. It weakens the field as a whole, by preventing the establishment of a culture of situated, assumed, transparently presupposed argumentation.

There are, of course, media outlets attempting a different path. I think of Politis, of CQFD, of certain sections of Le Monde diplomatique, of certain interventions by Acrimed, which explicitly embrace their political position and do not hold it as a grievance against their adversaries. I think of journalists who, individually, write in their own name and from their own viewpoint, without claiming an impossible vantage point. This path exists. It is in the minority. It deserves to be defended and broadened.

What an Assumed Speech Can Do

Let us imagine, for a moment, the intervention Denis Robert could have made, substituting for the engaged/activist distinction another grammar. “We at Blast practise a politically situated journalism. We do not claim neutrality, because we believe it does not exist. We claim argumentative rigour, scrupulous source verification, transparency about our position, open debate with quality interlocutors. We carry a certain ethics, which we can spell out and defend before whomever wishes to hear it. On Gaza, we took a position, very early on, in favour of the qualification of genocide, and we have laid out the arguments that lead us to it. We can expose them, defend them, debate the objections. We do not say there is no debate. We say that, in the debate, our position seems to us the strongest, and we accept the burden of proof. Those who attack us are not to be disqualified as activists; they are to be defeated on the ground of arguments, which we are ready to do.”

Such an intervention would have, it seems to me, considerable strengths. First, it would have been true, which is no small thing. Second, it would have made possible, or at least imaginable, a dialogue with those who do not share Blast’s positions. It would have placed the controversy on argumentative ground, rather than on that of moral qualification. It would, finally, have made the senators interlocutors rather than judges, by inviting them to take their own positions in relation to the ones being put forward.

This grammar can sometimes be found in the most unexpected places. In the interviews Frontières conducts in Saint-Denis, one of the last demonstrators questioned offers, in his own way, an illustration of it. When the interviewer brings up a child called “chalk-face” in a school in order to suggest a symmetry with racism, the demonstrator accepts the fact without contesting it but places it back within his own framework: “It’s deplorable, yes, it’s deplorable. It must be denounced, but racism is a system.” His response does not get caught in the false symmetry the setup is meant to install. It does not deny the event; it assumes a theoretical position about what racism is and invites the other to debate that position. The demonstrator does not say “there is no debate”. He says: here is my framework, here is how I think — let’s discuss it. That is, in my view, the gesture that is missing in Denis Robert’s intervention.

The objection I anticipate is that, in the context of violent attacks he is facing, Denis Robert does not have the luxury of such subtlety. That he must defend his very existence, and that this defence requires a strong, decisive, unnuanced affirmation. I understand this argument, and I do not dismiss it. But I would suggest that this defensive strategy is itself in the process of turning against its own goals. By adopting the grammar of self-designation as rational against opponents qualified as activists, independent media outlets contribute, in spite of themselves, to a general climate in which everyone presents themselves as rational against their own activist opponents. And in such a general climate, those with the most powerful economic and symbolic means win out. Independent media do not have those means. They can win only on argumentative ground, and only if such ground still exists.

A Lesson for Media and Information Literacy

This intervention is precious for media and information literacy precisely because it is sincere and emanates from a professional whose integrity is not in question. It shows that the epistemological problem I am trying to name is not confined to cynical media outlets or to avowed propagandists. It runs through the whole profession, including its most courageous fringes. It is constitutive, structural, reproduced by journalism schools, by the economic conditions of the profession, by the public’s expectations, and by editorial routines.

In dialogue with my article Attestational Dramaturgy, which described the device by which journalism stages reality according to a pre-formed narrative, the present article describes a complementary gesture: the one by which the journalist, speaking publicly about their own work, reproduces the posture of authority that characterises the profession as a whole. Attestational dramaturgy concerns the manufacture of the news story; self-legitimation through rationality concerns the meta-discourse that journalism holds about itself. The two phenomena support and reinforce each other. The first produces images that present themselves as neutral testimonies; the second produces, alongside them, words that claim rationality against the opinion of the other side.

To return to a formulation I proposed in Media and Information Literacy: Rethinking the Role of Journalists, media literacy cannot be entrusted to journalists themselves — not because they are dishonest, but because their professional position structurally prevents them from naming what they do. A journalist who would publicly recognise that they exercise a situated, partial, constructed profession, and not a ministry of truth, would risk losing their authority within the field itself. Emma Vinzent, in the video I analysed in the article cited above, was able to allow herself this side-step because she had left the apparatus. Denis Robert, who is still inside it, cannot afford to. This is not a moral failing on his part; it merely sheds light on the structural position from which he speaks.

Going Beyond the Balance of Forces

To conclude, I would like to come back to what seems to me the true democratic urgency of our time, and which Denis Robert’s intervention, through its blind spots, helps to bring into focus. This urgency is that of stepping out of the balance of forces as the dominant modality of public debate. We live in a moment when, on roughly all the issues that divide societies (the management of the Covid crisis, immigration, secularism, Gaza, ecology, the relationship to authorities, identities, and so on), discourses are organised according to the same grammar: we are rational, they are activists. This grammar is unsustainable for everyone, because it condemns society as a whole to irreducible antagonism.

The way out is not in generalised relativism, which would consider that all positions are equivalent. They are not equivalent, and I assume that too. It lies in a displacement of another order, which I have tried to sketch in several of my earlier articles, and notably in Presence Against the Calm Crowd. This displacement consists in recognising that everyone speaks from a position, that this position has reasons, that those reasons can be exposed and discussed, and that the democratic stake is not to determine who is right before the debate, but to make possible a debate that is itself the site of a common, never-final, always-resumable elaboration. Habermas had given the principle: only an unconstrained communicative community can produce legitimate consensus, and any such consensus can never be anything other than provisional and revisable.

This displacement, journalists cannot achieve alone. They are caught in a field that constrains them. But citizens can demand it, and require it. They can learn to read information not by seeking who is telling the truth, but by mapping positions, identifying presuppositions, evaluating arguments, comparing sources. That is what is technically called critical thinking. That is what media literacy ought to teach, if it really existed. And that is, more broadly, what every institution still claiming to provide democratic formation should be teaching.

I do not blame Denis Robert for the intervention he gave before the Senate mission. In the context in which he found himself, it was coherent, defensive, and probably necessary in order to alert the senators to the violence his media outlet endures. I only wish that, in other contexts, another language could be found — a language that does not reproduce the grammar of his adversaries, a language that assumes what he does: a political journalism, situated, engaged, rigorous, and which draws its strength from its assumed situation rather than from the impossible pretension to a place of overhead. Such a language exists. It is written in the pages of a few media outlets and a few authors who refuse the trap of claimed rationality. It calls for being more widely spoken. It is, in my eyes, one of the conditions for the return of democracy as a mode of coexistence, before being a regime of decision.

Appendix 1: Partial Transcript of Denis Robert’s Intervention

Excerpt from the hearing of Denis Robert (Blast), Ivan du Roy (Basta!) and Johan Weisz (StreetPress) before the information mission on the grey zones of information, with the prerogatives of a commission of inquiry, of the committee on culture, education, communication and sport of the French Senate, Tuesday 14 April 2026. Minutes available on the Senate website. (The transcript below is translated from the original French.)

"If you’ll allow me — because I’m a bit frustrated at not having had the chance to reply — I can answer briefly on the labelling question. I’m against it. Or else we really need to discuss it. Because you’re stepping into a minefield.

I’d like to say something about the history of opinion and information. Because I think about it a lot, and at Blast we have a very rigorous editorial line. But do you think, for example, that what has happened in Gaza is an opinion? Can one have an opinion about the genocide or not? For me, it’s a fact. That is, the battle we have been fighting at Blast from the beginning is precisely that battle. I am neither pro-Israeli nor pro-Palestinian. I look at events. I read the reports. I inform myself. And at a certain point, I’m fighting alone. At Blast, we were the first and the only ones to say there is a genocide in Gaza. And there is no discussion. There is no debate. What has happened in France around this is dreadful.

And history, we can already see today — the UN, the various reports — will prove us right. And with what is happening in the Middle East, it is even more important to be a journalist down to one’s fingertips and to claim rationality. Not opinion.

Then, when I write an editorial, when I’m angry, for example, about what is happening in Gaza, or when I watch television and see a number of things, I express my opinion. But it is often a virulent critique of media or of politicians. And it’s why, by the way, we are attacked, sometimes censored. But I tell you, today is not the day I’m going to change. And I do not feel like an activist at all. I feel engaged. I do journalism.

Two weeks ago, we were the first to interview Raphaël Arnault, the man from La Jeune Garde. We did our own counter-investigation; we examined the fake news that came out around De Rynck’s death. I never thought, as the head of a media outlet, that following that interview — which lasts an hour, a journalistic interview, where we ask questions — we would be the target of such a backlash of hatred and violence that we, a media outlet, have had to pay a security guard at Blast’s door, install surveillance cameras, and go to the tenth district police station to file a complaint for repeated assaults.

Our address was leaked online, even though we are very discreet about Blast’s address. And then, because we receive messages of hatred and violence. I myself was assaulted, pushed in the street, because I was Blast. I never thought, in France, that we would reach this ultimate stage that clearly shows a violence in France that is far-right violence. And there is today a number of press outlets promoting it. And your role as politicians, when you talk about regulation, is also to protect us.

And this is not an opinion, because those people on the other side, those pseudo-journalists of the far right, they express opinions, they are activists promoted on all those channels. We are not. The three of us, we do journalism. We are concerned with facts. So we are caricatured. We are told, yes, you’re far-left. All that is rubbish. We are simply solid on our ground."

Appendix 2: Partial Transcript of Frontières Interviews

Excerpts from interviews conducted by journalists from the far-right magazine Frontières on the sidelines of the anti-racist demonstration organised in Saint-Denis on 4 April 2026 by the LFI mayor Bally Bagayoko. Several demonstrators are interviewed in turn. (J. designates the journalist from Frontières, D. the demonstrators.) (Translated from the original French.)

First exchange.

D. — Fascist.

J. — Pardon?

D. — That F you’ve got there — it means fascist.

J. — Are you insulting us, sir?

D. — Well, no, but that’s what people say.

J. — It’s the F for frontier — that’s our outlet.

D. — Frontier — yeah, that’s fascist.

J. — Really?

D. — Yes.

J. — Would you care to elaborate?

D. — I’m saying it’s fascist, because being against borders today and rejecting immigrants — yeah, but I don’t care.

J. — Are you trying to obstruct freedom of the press, sir? Thank you. That can be punished by law.

D. — No, but freedom of the press is also the freedom to say what one wants. And I have the right to call a guy from Frontières a fascist.

J. — I was simply wondering if you could elaborate or explain what fascism is in your view.

D. — Being against borders.

J. — Yes, yes. Pro-borders, rather, by the way.

Second exchange.

D. — But if you’re here, on top of that, it’s to take a swipe at, precisely, Africans, people coming from abroad, I assume.

J. — Have you seen me ask such questions?

D. — No, no, but I assume you’ll make some kind of use of it afterwards.

J. — I see that you are wearing, for example, a Palestinian keffiyeh. Do you also come for other causes?

D. — I’m absolutely for Palestine, yes. Because it’s a disgrace that the Palestinian people are being massacred — they who are on these lands and being driven from them. Since 1948, many people would do well to react and, precisely, to defend borders.

J. — You should do so — defend the Palestinians’ borders. They had borders too, didn’t they, which were called into question by Israel, it seems to me.

Third exchange.

J. — Since this is a march against racism, unfortunately, will it also address anti-white racism?

D. — Not at all. Because we completely reject anti-white racism. I don’t know — perhaps there are people here who believe in it. As for me, I don’t believe in it at all, no.

J. — When a child in a school is called “chalk-face”… For example, when a person is called “dirty bouer” — you know, that’s a…

D. — “Dirty bouer”?

J. — “Dirty bouer”, which means dirty white. So a person being called dirty white — that isn’t anti-white racism?

D. — It can happen. It’s deplorable, yes, it’s deplorable. It must be denounced, but racism is a system. Do you know what that is, or not?