Étienne Chouard (born 21 December 1956)Ariane Chemin
"Étienne Chouard, Don Quichotte du non" (paying archive)
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Le Monde ''Le Monde'' (; ) is a French daily afternoon newspaper. It is the main publication of Le Monde Group and reported an average circulation of 323,039 copies per issue in 2009, about 40,000 of which were sold abroad. It has had its own website si ...

'', 12 May 2005. is a French high school teacher, blogger, and political activist.

Biography

During the 2005 French referendum campaign on the

European Constitution The Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe (TCE; commonly referred to as the European Constitution or as the Constitutional Treaty) was an unratified international treaty intended to create a consolidated constitution for the European U ...

he gained public attention by advocating against it, notably for his discussion with

Dominique Strauss-Kahn Dominique Gaston André Strauss-Kahn (; born 25 April 1949), also known as DSK, is a French economist and politician who served as the tenth managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and was a member of the French Socialist P ...

. Since then Chouard – who defines himself as a "seeker of the original cause of social injustices" – has been working on different democratic systems and

constitution A constitution is the aggregate of fundamental principles or established precedents that constitute the legal basis of a polity, organisation or other type of Legal entity, entity and commonly determine how that entity is to be governed. When ...

s. He is a supporter of the idea of

sortition In governance, sortition (also known as selection by lottery, selection by lot, allotment, demarchy, stochocracy, aleatoric democracy, democratic lottery, and lottocracy) is the selection of political officials as a random sample from a larger ...

Jérôme Bouin
"Que devient Étienne Chouard ?"
''

Le Figaro ''Le Figaro'' () is a French daily morning newspaper founded in 1826. It is headquartered on Boulevard Haussmann in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. The oldest national newspaper in France, ''Le Figaro'' is one of three French newspapers of reco ...

'', 9 April 2007. which could also be applied to constitutional conventions.Mathieu Deslandes
"Etienne Chouard n’est pas mort, il soigne les orphelins du « non »"
''

Rue 89 Rue89 is a French news website started by former journalists from the newspaper ''Libération''. It was officially launched on 6 May 2007, on the day of the second round of the French presidential election. Its news editor is Pascal Riché, forme ...

'', 26 March 2012. In 2013, Chouard wrote and put on a play entitled "Debt Explained to My Banker". In 2018–2019, during the

Yellow vests movement The Yellow Vests Protests or Yellow Jackets Protests or Yellow Vests Revolution (french: Mouvement des gilets jaunes, ) are a series of populist, grassroots weekly protests in France that began on 17 November 2018. At first the protestors advoc ...

, Chouard was frequently mentioned at the roundabouts and became a genuine thought leader for many yellow vests. This increasing popularity led to a re-examination of his long advocacy for direct democracy, and also of positive statements he had made about several right-wing conspiracy theorists, such as

Alain Soral Alain Bonnet, known as Alain Soral (; born 2 October 1958), is a far-right Franco-Swiss ideologue, essayist, filmmaker and actor. Claiming to have been a member of the French Communist Party in the 1990s, Soral worked for the National Front b ...

, Antony Sutton,

Jacques Cheminade Jacques Cheminade (; born 20 August 1941) is a French-Argentinian political activist. He is the head of Solidarity and Progress, the French arm of the LaRouche movement, and has thrice run for President of France. Education and professional lif ...

Eustace Mullins Eustace Clarence Mullins Jr. (March 9, 1923 – February 2, 2010) was an American white supremacist, antisemitic conspiracy theorist, propagandist, Holocaust denier, and writer. A disciple of the poet Ezra Pound, * * * * * * * * * * * * ...

, or

Thierry Meyssan Thierry Meyssan () is a French journalist, conspiracy theorist and political activist. He is the author of investigations into the extreme right-wing, particularly France's National Front militias, as well as into the Catholic church. Meyssa ...

, and the relationship he has maintained with them.

Antisemitism

In 2011, Étienne Chouard declared that Rothschild, "the discreet master of bankers", would "objectively have a powerful personal interest in anti-Semitism being virulent, almost everywhere in the world", adding: "This need for anti-Semitism -like-armor-anti-criticism could explain (but then, if it is true, what cynicism!) the mountains of money put at the service of the policy (objectively detestable) of Israel. Conspiracy Watch calls these remarks "the most banal anti-Semitic rhetoric". In April 2019, he declared on

Sud Radio Sud Radio is a French privately owned radio station, founded in 1958. Until 2017, it was headquartered in Labège, Haute-Garonne near Toulouse, before it moved to Courbevoie, Hauts-de-Seine. This relocation to the Parisian region allows for the ...

, in a debate with

Elisabeth Lévy Elizabeth or Elisabeth may refer to: People * Elizabeth (given name), a female given name (including people with that name) * Elizabeth (biblical figure), mother of John the Baptist Ships * HMS ''Elizabeth'', several ships * ''Elisabeth'' (sch ...

: “You find that the freedom not to love a religion is very important. But when

Bernard-Henri Lévy Bernard-Henri Lévy (; ; born 5 November 1948) is a French public intellectual. Often referred to in France simply as BHL, he was one of the leaders of the " Nouveaux Philosophes" (New Philosophers) movement in 1976. His opinions, political acti ...

calls me an anti-Semite – even if I was an anti-Semite, which of course I am not… But even if I was an anti-Semite, I should have the right to be an anti-Semite. In the same way that I should have the right to be Islamophobic, or Christianophobic...” He goes on to affirm that “nobody has any hatred of the Jews”, evoking in support that it has “been 35 years”. that he is a teacher and that he has not seen any “hatred of Jews”. France-Soir reacts by emphasizing that "after two years of decline, anti-Semitic acts in France have risen very sharply (+69%) in the first nine months of 2018". Asked in June 2019 on Le Média about the existence of the gas chambers during the Second World War, he replied that "it's not issubject", that he "knows nothing about it" and has “never read anything about it”. These remarks triggered accusations of Holocaust denial against him and the cessation of his weekly program on Sud Radio. The Union of Jewish Students of France ( UEJF) and the

LICRA The International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism—or Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l'antisémitisme (LICRA) in French—was established in 1927, and is opposed to intolerance, xenophobia and exclusion. In 1927, French journ ...

announced their intention to file a complaint. Faced with the controversy, he said he "regrets" his remarks, admits having "said a huge bullshit", affirming "not to be a Holocaust denier, and not to be anti-Semitic", and ensuring that "the gas chambers are an absolute horror".. In L'Humanité, Olivier Morin considers that "even after having retracted his remarks, Chouard and his remarks contribute to minimizing the horror of the Nazi camps": presenting him as "accustomed to confusionist theses and holder of many names of notorious Holocaust deniers in his address book", he points out that "a denial never succeeds in counterbalancing the information to which it refers. All the more so if it appears on another medium, even more confidential, as is the case here”..

References

External links

Official website about democracy
(French)
le-message.org
website offering a synthetic view of the work, videos and documents of Étienne Chouard {{DEFAULTSORT:Chouard, Etienne 1956 births Living people French bloggers French male writers Male bloggers French activists