How the death of far-right activist Quentin Deranque became France’s ‘Charlie Kirk moment’

If police predictions come true, France’s third-largest city of Lyon will on Saturday witness a thousands-strong march in the city centre bringing together figures from the farthest fringes of Europe’s radical right.

The march, which will take place under a heavy police presence, has been organised in tribute to 23-year-old far-right activist and student Quentin Deranque, who died from his injuries last weekend – two days after being severely beaten in the final moments of a street brawl between ultranationalist and anti-fascist militants.

A parliamentary aide to the hard-left France Unbowed party (La France Insoumise, or LFI) has been charged with complicity in the killing. He denies having been responsible for Deranque's death. 

The march – which Deranque’s family will not attend – comes after days of small-scale tributes paid by far-right groups, including a night-time neo-Nazi march in Paris and a series of attacks on LFI's offices. The same night, the capital’s Place de la République was painted in swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans.  

While Deranque’s killing has been met with shock across the political spectrum in France, it’s no coincidence that the radical right has used his death as a rallying cry.

Deranque, who had recently converted to Catholicism, was active in far-right identitarian group Audace Lyon and a member of the neo-fascist Allobroges Bourgoin after having previously campaigned for anti-Semitic royalist group Action Française. Last May, he took part in the neo-Nazi May 9 Committee parade in Paris, where black-clad militants marched under flags bearing the white supremacist Celtic cross.

Jordan Bardella, the president of the far-right National Rally (Rassemblement National, or RN), has called on members not to join Saturday’s march, describing the organisers as "unclear". Despite this, Bardella and his party – which polls suggest is well-placed to win the 2027 presidential election – have also rallied around the fatal beating, saying the political left’s “dehumanising” rhetoric had paved the way for fatal far-left violence.   

Timothy Peace, a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow’s school of social and political sciences, said that the RN had been quick to turn Deranque’s death to its own political advantage.

“The tragedy of this young man’s death offers them the opportunity to paint the left, and LFI in particular, as the main source of political violence in France – and to distance themselves from their own problematic history with extreme and violent street movements,” he said.

Researchers on social violence in France have been quick to emphasise that far-right groups continue to perpetrate the bulk of politically motivated killings, increasingly targeting Muslims, immigrants and Jews as well as left-wing opponents. Sociologist Isabelle Sommier stressed that of the 57 deaths linked to violence between political groups recorded between 1986 and 2017, the radical right had been responsible for all but five.

In a long social media screed Thursday referencing the high-profile assassination last year of a US ultraconservative activist, former prime minister Dominique de Villepin warned that France was in danger of having its own “Charlie Kirk moment”.

"It's a moment aimed at delegitimising part of the political spectrum and casting the triumphant far right as a victim," he wrote. "Let's stay vigilant. Let's not concede ground to the far right."

A history of violence

The brawl that led to Deranque’s death broke out on February 12 in the streets surrounding Sciences Po Lyon’s Institute of Political Studies, where French-Palestinian LFI lawmaker and European parliamentarian Rima Hassan was slated to speak.

Members of the anti-immigration “nationalist feminist” group Némésis came to protest against Hassan, whose outspoken opposition to Israel’s devastating military campaign in Gaza has made her a frequent target of conservatives. The group has claimed that Deranque was present to provide security for the group – something his family denies.

Video footage shows a brief scuffle as counter-protesters tried to snatch a banner carried by Némésis activists, dragging several to the ground – a scuffle from which Deranque appears to have kept his distance.

Instead, the violence that led to the 23-year-old student’s death broke out hundreds of metres away from the university, on the other side of a dark tunnel burrowing under the railway tracks reaching towards the city’s main train station.  

The moments leading up to Deranque’s fatal beating are still fiercely debated, with a video published by anti-fascist site Contre-Attaque showing a group of more than a dozen armed and masked ultranationalist militants charging a group of far-left militants at the junction outside the tunnel.

Subsequent footage published by Le Canard Enchaîné shows a fierce clash between a bloc of black-clad far-right militants, some armed with pepper spray, reinforced gloves, a metal crutch and a pyrotechnic flare, and a group of anti-fascist militants, largely in street clothes.

Members of both groups were masked and traded blows. At one point in the video, a far-right militant ignites the pyrotechnic flare and hurls it at the head of one of his opponents. Another blasts the leftists with what seems like pepper spray as his comrades lay into their adversaries with the crutch and an umbrella.

As the antifascist cohort drove their opponents steadily down the street, the far-right militants seem to have broken ranks and fled the scene, leaving a couple of stragglers behind to be knocked to the pavement – Deranque among them. Footage filmed by bystanders show a group of anti-fascist militants punching and kicking him in the head as he lay curled on the ground.

After they scattered, passersby report that Deranque got back to his feet, dazed, and shook off efforts to convince him to go to hospital. Alongside a friend who came back for him, he made his way across Lyon’s twin rivers to the other side of town.

Paramedics picked him up and an hour and a half later more than a kilometre away, his condition sharply deteriorated. He was placed in a medically induced coma on arrival at Édouard-Herriot Hospital and died two days later.

Two young men have been charged with homicide for their alleged role in the fatal beating. A third has been charged with complicity in Deranque’s killing. This man has been identified as Jacques-Elie Favrot – a parliamentary aide to an LFI lawmaker, who has since begun proceedings to put an end to his contract.

Favrot has admitted to being present during the clash, but denied having delivered the blows that killed the young militant.

Casting blame

Seen by researchers as a stronghold for neo-fascists and other far-right fringe groups, Lyon is no stranger to street-fighting. Tristan Boursier, associate researcher at Sciences Po University’s political research centre, said that France’s third city had long been a battleground between far-right groups and left-wing networks of self-proclaimed anti-fascists.

“Lyon has been a recurrent hotspot for far-right/anti-fascist confrontations since the 2010s, partly because far-right groups have tried to build local ‘territorial’ presence – spaces, events, visibility – which have in turn produced sustained counter-mobilisation and cycles of escalation,” he said. “This latest clash fits that longer pattern of localised rivalry where street conflict becomes a form of political signalling.”

Among the more well-known of these anti-fascist groups is La Jeune Garde (“The Young Guard”), which was dissolved by the government last year for its alleged involvement in violent confrontations with far-right groups. The group’s co-founder is Raphaël Arnault – the LFI lawmaker whose former assistant was just charged with complicity in Deranque’s death.

Since the first rumours of its connection to activists suspected of being involved in Deranque's death, LFI has come under heavy fire from politicians on the right, centre and reformist left, with Socialist former president François Hollande calling on the social-democratic party to sever any last lingering ties with the rival group. 

LFI leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who came third in the 2022 presidential election, condemned the killing while ruling out any cutting of ties with anti-fascist groups.

"Neither death nor violence have any place in political disputes," he said.

But while most parties have concentrated their fire on LFI, the far-right RN party has not been sparing in its blame.

Bardella this week accused French President Emmanuel Macron of bearing a “heavy responsibility” for having “deliberately opened the doors of the National Assembly to the worst thugs of the far left”, as well as lashing out at what he described as the media’s “complacency” with what he described as the threat of left-wing violence.

Going further, he accused the country’s universities of becoming bastions of left-wing indoctrination, calling for the state to identify higher education institutions that had “drifted” and put them under direct “supervision”. He did not give details of what this would look like.

But the young RN president saved his sharpest words for the country’s increasingly divided left. Bardella accused the Young Guard of having served for years as “the left’s armed wing” – a left, he made clear, that extended through LFI to its erstwhile allies in the New Popular Front including the centre-left Socialist Party, the Communist Party and the Greens.  

“That wording is a classic attempt to generalise responsibility beyond the individuals questioned by police and onto wider political targets,” Boursier said. “It turns a criminal investigation into a broader political indictment designed to delegitimise LFI’s ecosystem and pressure reformist actors to publicly break with Mélenchon.”

Marta Lorimer, a lecturer at Cardiff University’s School of Law and Politics, said that it was not surprising to see the far right casting blame beyond LFI and onto the country’s wider left.

“These are not just being sold as problems of La France Insoumise,” she said. “More broadly in French politics there’s been this tendency to say, well, these people have allied – therefore, if the moderate left is working with the far left, then automatically all of the left is tainted by association.”

Boursier argued that allegations of left-wing violence had become a common theme among the country’s conservative media – most notably the growing constellation of TV stations and newspapers owned by conservative French billionaire Vincent Bolloré.  

“It is also worth noting that such a framing would have been far harder to impose 15 years ago,” he said. “Its effectiveness today reflects a transformed media environment in which certain outlets – notably those within the Groupe Bolloré sphere – have normalised narratives about ‘left-wing violence’ and provided platforms that amplify and legitimise these interpretations. This media ecosystem lowers the cost of generalising blame and accelerates the politicisation of violent events.”

Across the world

The shockwaves caused by Deranque’s death have not stopped at France’s borders. British far-right figure Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known by his adopted name Tommy Robinson, paid tribute to Deranque on social media, repeatedly sharing videos showing far-right French militants vandalising LFI offices.

Flemish far-right group Voorpost called for a march in Brussels to commemorate the activist, before calling it off as it became clear the event would draw counter-protesters. Italy’s hardline conservative Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni slammed what she described as a “climate of ideological hate”, calling Deranque’s death “a wound for all of Europe”.

“The death of Quentin Deranque has offered an opportunity for various groups of the far right across Europe to condemn the left and social movements, in particular anti-fascist movements,” Peace said. “In terms of precedents, a very similar situation occurred after the assassination of Charlie Kirk in the United States. In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government has recently enacted security measures targeting left-wing protesters, following clashes in Turin. Her administration has framed these measures as necessary to prevent the resurgence of violent, far-left radicalism, referencing the ‘Red Brigades’ and the ‘years of lead era’.”

Read moreHow Bolloré, the ‘French Murdoch’, carried Le Pen’s far right to the brink of power

As of Friday, the shockwaves had rippled to the other side of the Atlantic.

"Violent radical leftism is on the rise and its role in Quentin Deranque's death demonstrates the threat it poses to public safety," the US State Department’s bureau of counter-terrorism posted on social media. Under-secretary for public diplomacy Sarah Rogers said that Washington was watching the case closely.

"Once you decide to kill people for their opinions instead of persuade them, you've opted out of civilisation," she posted.

Boursier said that international right-wing networks had become increasingly quick to share accounts of suspected left-wing violence.

“We are seeing more than isolated reactions. What is emerging resembles what scholars like Cas Mudde describe as a transnational far-right ecosystem – sometimes framed more polemically as an ‘international fascist’ network,” he said. “Over the past decade, the MAGA movement around Donald Trump has helped normalise a political style built on grievance, rapid politicisation of violent events, and the portrayal of opponents as existential enemies. That repertoire has travelled to Europe.”

“What has changed is speed, scale, and synchronisation,” he added. “Social media now allows historically fragmented far-right actors – in France and across Europe – to converge rapidly around the same event, producing a coordinated narrative and intense media amplification. A local incident can become transnational political ammunition within hours.”

Lorimer said that Deranque’s death would likely cast a long shadow over the country’s upcoming municipal elections in March.

“For the right, this is what's going to continue happening – they’re just going to keep saying that the left are all extremists,” she said. “But I do see kind of a risk of a progressive de-legitimisation of the left more broadly.”