The antisemitic sign held aloft by French far right activist Cassandre Fristor at a vaccine refusal demonstration in Metz. Photo: Screenshot via social media

A school teacher and former parliamentary candidate for two far-right parties in France has been arrested by the authorities after she brandished a virulently antisemitic sign at a COVID-19 vaccine refusal demonstration over the weekend.

French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin confirmed on Twitter on Monday morning that the offender, Cassandre Fristot, was in police custody. At a demonstration in the city of Metz on Saturday, Fristot carried a home-made sign listing a group of overwhelmingly Jewish personalities as “traitors.”

The list included, among others, billionaire financier George Soros, prominent philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, current French national health director Jérôme Salomon, and former Health Minister Agnès Buzyn, who is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. Also listed was “Rothschild,” referring to the Jewish banking dynasty that is regularly invoked by conspiracy theorists as the source of a range of global crises, such as the current pandemic and the financial crash of 2008.

The words “Mais Qui?”  — “But Who?” — were scrawled in large red letters on the sign, with devil’s horns marking the letter “Q.” That in turn was a reference to a now infamous June 22 television interview with a retired French army general who embarked on an antisemitic rant that avoided using the word “Jew.”

“You know who controls the media pack in the world and in France. Who controls the Washington Post, the New York Times, BFMTV and all the newspapers,” Gen. Daniel Delawarde stated at the time, in comments that were eagerly embraced across the vaccine refusal movement — many of whose adherents falsely assert that the present vaccination drive is a sinister plot to curtail basic freedoms while driving up corporate profits. Delawarde is now being investigated by the Paris Prosecutor for racial incitement.

Fristot herself is a controversial figure on the French far right, where some disdain her as an irrational extremist even by their standards.

She was twice a candidate for the National Front (FN), formerly France’s dominant far right party, in the 2012 parliamentary elections and in the 2014 municipal elections in the Moselle region. She was again a municipal elections candidate in 2020 for the “Party of France,” founded in 2009 by a breakaway group from the FN.

Fristot reportedly worked for a brief period as an assistant to the far-right politician Louis Aliot, who is now the Vice-President of the FN’s successor party, the National Rally (RN), apparently falling out with her new boss within a few weeks.

On Monday, Aliot told French news outlet L’Indépendant that “Fristot was my assistant for two months — I hired her and I fired her.”

He recalled dismissively that he had been introduced to Fristot by Florian Philippot — one of the main leaders of the vaccine refusal movement in France and a member of European Parliament — and that her performance at work had been marked by incompetence.

Asked about Fristot’s antics at the demonstration in Metz, Aliot said he wasn’t surprised that she had been present.

“These crazy things don’t make me laugh at all, it’s shameful,” Aliot added.

Among those denouncing the antisemitic sign carried by Fristot was the Israeli Embassy in France, which declared itself “appalled by this expression of the most abject antisemitic hatred.”

The International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism (LICRA), a leading French NGO, announced on Sunday night that it would be a filing a complaint against Fristot. SOS Racisme, another anti-racist organization, said it was considering a similar move.

Around 200,000 people have demonstrated against the French government’s recently-introduced “pass sanitaire” — (“health pass”) — for vaccinated individuals during the last week.

On Monday, the social activities for which the pass is required were extended to include dining and drinking in restaurants and bars, including outdoor terraces, traveling on long-distance trains and visits to hospitals and nursing homes, with some exceptions in the case of emergency.

Introduced last month, the pass already requires vaccinations in order to visit theaters and museums.

From Aug. 30, anyone whose job brings them into contact with the public must have the pass or face being suspended from work without pay.