There’s no shortage of reasons to have doubts about France’s current push to confront “renewed forms” of antisemitism — the subject of a bill slated for debate before the National Assembly in mid-April.

This winter, the same parliament held a moment of silence for neofascist militant Quentin Deranque, who died from wounds sustained in a February 12 street fight between far-right and anti-fascist activists in Lyon. Thanks to an exhaustive sweep of the slain militant’s social media activity by Mediapart, Deranque can be said to present a textbook sample of France’s antisemitic past and present.

“We have to make all high schoolers read it,” Deranque wrote on X of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. He professed admiration for homegrown French fascists like Lucien Rebatet, author of The Ruins, an infamous antisemitic tract from the Vichy era of Nazi-collaboration. A “murderous slut” is how he termed Simone Veil, the Holocaust survivor and former health minister credited with France’s 1975 legalization of abortion.