Philippine Le Noir de Carlan had been dead barely a week when her image began to blanket protest signs and her name started to ring from the mouths of France’s most powerful. The nineteen-year-old had last been seen on September 20 of last year at Université Paris-Dauphine, where she was studying economics and financial engineering. It was a Friday afternoon, and she had plans to head to her parents’ home near Versailles, just southwest of Paris. When she didn’t arrive, her family alerted the authorities. Her body was found the next day, partially buried in the Bois de Boulogne park just behind the university. Witnesses told police they’d spotted a man wielding a pickaxe around the same area, a mere few hundred meters from the campus on the western edge of Paris.
Three days after Philippine’s body was recovered, a twenty-two-year-old Moroccan immigrant called Taha O. was detained in Switzerland and accused of the murder. He’d been convicted of rape in 2021 and released from prison in June 2024 with an order to leave French territory—an obligation de quitter le territoire français. Known in France by its initials, OQTF, the provision is handed down by the prefect of one of metropolitan France’s ninety-six departments, spread across thirteen larger regions. Depending on the risk they’re thought to pose to public safety, OQTF recipients are given either forty-eight hours or thirty days to relocate. But Taha ignored the order, remaining in France until shortly after Philippine was killed. Switzerland extradited Taha in November.
The far right immediately latched onto Philippine’s story as proof of the threat posed by lenient immigration policies. Jordan Bardella, the twenty-nine-year-old president of the National Rally (RN) and protégé of the far-right party’s longtime leader Marine Le Pen, blamed Philippine’s death on the government’s failure to enforce OQTFs, writing on X that “our justice system is lax, our state dysfunctional, our leaders let the French people live with human bombs.”
As the controversy unfolded, French President Emmanuel Macron was abroad in Canada. Facing plummeting popularity and an unruly legislature in which Le Pen wields huge influence, Macron has moved steadily rightward in hopes of staving off a challenge from the far right. From across the Atlantic, he called Philippine’s murder a “heinous and atrocious crime” while his minister of justice, Didier Migaud, spoke of “evolving the legal arsenal” so that “this type of situation can’t happen again.” Within a few weeks, Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau announced plans to introduce a stricter immigration law. Immigrants comprise roughly 10 percent of France’s population, totaling 7.3 million people in 2023. Over 320,000 new immigrants received residence permits in 2022, an increase of over 17 percent from the previous year. The number of migrants detained also rose from 2022 to 2023, as did the average duration of detention, but the number of those who were then deported dropped from 44.6 to 35.9 percent.
Philippine’s case revived a debate that last made headlines in 2022, when twelve-year-old Lola Daviet was raped and murdered by a female Algerian immigrant who’d overstayed an OQTF order. Macron set a goal of enforcing every order, but limited resources and varying levels of cooperation from the immigrants’ home countries made it impossible. Of about 134,000 OQTFs in 2022, only 6 percent resulted in voluntary departure or forced removal.
But Philippine’s murder dramatized a rift beyond factional jockeying for power over immigration policy. Her death fit squarely into the far right’s well-trod strategy of using the language of women’s rights to demonize immigrants and bolster its case for nationalism and authoritarianism—a phenomenon that sociologist Sara R. Farris has dubbed femonationalism. In her 2017 book In the Name of Women’s Rights, Farris defines femonationalism as “the exploitation of feminist themes by nationalists and neoliberals in anti-Islam campaigns,” as well as “the participation of certain feminists and femocrats”—bureaucrats in government gender equality agencies—“in the stigmatization of Muslim men under the banner of gender equality.” The ascendant RN, once a fringe party but now one of France’s strongest political forces, has spent years depicting itself as a defender of women’s rights against an illiberal, invading other—usually Muslim—that wishes to harm women and curtail their freedoms.
Collectif Némésis, a far-right group that calls itself “feminist and identitarian” and found its niche condemning the sexual harassment of French women by immigrants, began posting about Philippine on social media just a day after her body was found, eventually adopting the hashtag #ForeignRapistsOut. The group promptly organized a rally for the following weekend. “Philippine could have been our sister,” read posters with a drawing of her smiling face, hair tied back in a ponytail. Among the attendees were Florian Philippot, a former RN vice president, and Stéphane Ravier, a member of France’s Senate who previously belonged to both RN and the far-right Reconquest! party. The National Assembly, France’s largest legislative body, held a minute of silence.
There is a longstanding divide between competing groups that seek to define, or redefine, feminism in a rapidly changing France. Other feminist groups stressed that the primary issue at play in Philippine’s death was not immigration but a culture that has long tolerated violence against women. The murder took place just as the case of seventy-two-year-old Gisèle Pelicot was gripping the nation. Drugged by her husband and raped hundreds of times by more than seventy strangers, Pelicot forced a reckoning over France’s sexual politics and became a feminist hero, commended by Macron and celebrated across the political spectrum. She insisted her assailants’ trial be public and condemned the patriarchal culture that allowed her assaults to continue for years, involving so many men—none of whom ever bothered to report her husband. The proceedings began on September 2, less than three weeks before Philippine’s murder, and concluded in December with her husband receiving the maximum sentence of twenty years. Yet it was Philippine Le Noir de Carlan’s death that animated the right’s narrative, with Némésis leading the charge.
The Feminine Mystique
Founded in 2019 by Alice Cordier, Némésis’s stated mission is to “denounce the dangerous influence of mass migration on Western women.” It comprises at least 165 activists, ranging in age from eighteen to thirty, across more than fifteen cities. But the group’s media presence projects the image of a larger operation, leading to its outsize influence. They have interrupted meetings, protests, Paris Fashion Week, and the Cannes Film Festival. They often carry a banner reading, “French rapists: prison. Foreign rapists: prison + plane.” Confrontations are filmed in a calculated bid for media attention and new recruits. In April 2024, an eighteen-year-old member named Yona was arrested in Besançon, in eastern France, for holding signs that declared, “Foreign rapists out” and “Free us from immigration.” She was released after ten hours in police custody.
Némésis draws a straight, uncomplicated line between street harassment and immigration; but sexual violence in France is most often committed by men already in women’s lives.
On a trip to Paris nearly two months into the Pelicot trial and about a month after Philippine’s death, I reached out to Némésis. I quickly heard back from a spokesperson named Anaïs, who agreed to meet after a short phone call. When I spotted her outside a café near the Arc de Triomphe on Halloween morning, she looked the picture of traditional French femininity, with thick mascara, a tailored blue jacket, and a thin scarf tied around her neck. Anaïs told me that she stumbled upon the collective three years ago and had no prior experience with activism. Growing up in southwest France as the child of a Peruvian mother and a Spanish father, she never thought much about feminism. “My mom always told me to be elegant and nice, polite,” she said.
She initially embraced feminism upon entering adulthood, but her enthusiasm for progressive movements was short-lived. “I’ve had the impression that since the arrival of wokism, there’s been a sort of modification to the fight,” she said. Women remain at its heart, she elaborated, “but less so. Above all, I have the impression that the left-wing part of feminism is trying to defend minorities. They speak a lot about skin color, sexual orientation. And for me, I don’t understand why we need to bring that to light so much, when the objective is still the woman, no matter all that. And I don’t see why we have to divide even further by saying, well, if you’re a person of color, a lesbian, we are going to highlight you more than if you’re a classic woman.”
As far as accusations of racism or xenophobia are concerned, Anaïs stresses her parents’ immigrant background. “I was born in France, but I have nothing French apart from nationality,” she told me. “That doesn’t mean I’m not patriotic. I’m very patriotic. I love my country.” France adheres to an uncompromising idea of universalism that prioritizes French identity over all else. The government doesn’t collect data on racial, ethnic, or religious demographics. Attempts to organize around identities other than nationality are sometimes seen as unwelcome American intrusions—a version of le wokisme, a recent bête noire of the French right. When the Black Lives Matter movement inspired racial justice protests in 2020, some French politicians called for legalizing the collection of race statistics. But the government’s economy minister dismissed those proposals, arguing that they did not align with their principle of universalism.
Némésis’s identitarian label denotes a European ethno-nationalist vision that opposes cultural mixing with non-Europeans and the descendants of non-Western immigrants. Many of its adherents support the “great replacement theory,” an export of the French far right that’s gained traction with their American counterparts. Formulated by author Renaud Camus, it posits that white Europeans are being replaced by non-white people through a combination of migration and falling birth rates in the West.
For her part, Anaïs credits twentieth-century feminists with the right to vote and access to abortion, but she finds the movement’s present incarnation limited and unimaginative. When she moved to Paris, she experienced street harassment, often from men she described as homeless or drunk. She was also sexually assaulted at the age of nineteen by three men of Pakistani origin while living in London. Originally scared to talk about the experience, Anaïs said the women of Némésis were instrumental in her becoming comfortable discussing her assault.
Némésis draws a straight, uncomplicated line between street harassment and immigration; but, as in the United States, sexual violence in France is most often committed by men already in women’s lives, not by dark-skinned strangers lurking in public places. The Pelicot case offered both a reminder of the quotidian realities of sexual violence and a rejoinder to the right’s scaremongering. Over 244,000 people in France reported experiencing domestic violence in 2022, and 83 percent of the perpetrators were French nationals. But Némésis’s focus on immigrants was bolstered by 2019 government figures that attributed 63 percent of sexual assaults on public transportation in the Paris region to foreigners.
The left has “an anti-men discourse,” another Némésis spokesperson, twenty-seven-year-old Mathilda, told Le Monde last year, but “they never talk about street harassers. They say, ‘The problem is men, not a category of men.’ I find it shameful to not emphasize who the people women fear in the street at night really are. And they’re mainly the product of immigration.” Anaïs said the left ably denounces domestic violence, as in the Pelicot case, but echoed Mathilda’s line about street harassers. Némésis is looking to expand into the halls of government, starting by working with small-town mayors on assistance—financial, psychological, judicial—for local women. Next may come collaboration with political parties to pass stricter laws. (Némésis claims not to have any existing party affiliations, but two of their activists were aides to a RN politician in the National Assembly.)
Némésis also harbors international ambitions, with small chapters in Belgium and Switzerland and designs on Spain, England, and Italy. The weekend before my meeting with Anaïs, she and three other Némésis spokespeople traveled to London to speak at a rally in support of Tommy Robinson, one of the UK’s most prominent far-right figures, who had just begun serving an eighteen-month prison sentence for spreading lies about a teenage Syrian refugee. After the fifteen-year-old boy was assaulted at school by a sixteen-year-old Robinson supporter in 2018, Robinson erroneously claimed that the refugee had previously attacked two girls. He repeated the lie in a film he made about the case, which Elon Musk has shared on X as “worth watching.” Robinson has served four previous stints in prison—including for assault—and has appeared with American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on his site, InfoWars.
Robinson embodies a hypermasculine strain of far-right politics, but even the most macho corners of the movement may be starting to see the benefits of a coalition with their female counterparts. “He’s a bit controversial,” Anaïs allowed. But in Robinson’s nationalist crusade, she detected an echo of Némésis’s mission. The London crowd received her warmly and didn’t feel oppressively male-dominated to Anaïs at all, though a Guardian report described the rally as largely male, white, and middle-aged. Anaïs acknowledged Robinson’s history of violence—but “to my knowledge, there wasn’t violence against women,” she interjected. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t have been affiliated with him.”
Anaïs feels Némésis is part of a larger, increasingly global movement that’s carving out its own place on the right. “We try to consider ourselves right-wing feminists,” she said. “We don’t want to be affiliated with the left at all.” On the left, she told me, “you dress how you want, you do what you want. I think that’s great, but for us, we need to be quite elegant, make a little effort to be pretty, to be polite.” But why? I pressed. “Because we’re women,” she replied plainly, as if the answer were self-evident. “We’re women, we’re proud, we’re feminine. There you have it. Feminine and proud women, that’s it.”
Imported Patriarchy
The far right’s outreach strategy has come a long way since RN founder Jean-Marie Le Pen declared in 1979 that “it’s necessary that there is authority, and we believe that the most qualified authority in a household is a man.” Formerly called the National Front, the party was once known for projecting an uncompromisingly masculine image. At the time, it wasn’t aiming for anything close to respectability and leaned into Jean-Marie’s attention-grabbing comments, which included Holocaust denial and resulted in numerous convictions for hate speech.
Le Pen’s gender politics became a popular feature of RN’s rhetoric because it used simple feminist language to contort immigration into an issue of women’s safety.
When his daughter Marine took over the party leadership in 2011, she sought to “de-demonize” the RN and scrub away her father’s fingerprints. Adopting the jargon of human rights—women’s rights in particular, but to a lesser extent gay rights as well—was one way Le Pen could differentiate herself from her father and make her party more palatable. RN members began stoking fears of a growing immigrant Muslim population, claiming that Muslim men wished only to veil and harass women and roll back their hard-won rights. In 2010, Le Pen warned supporters that “in some areas, it’s not good to be a woman or gay or Jewish, or even French or white.” But her supposed support of gender equality contradicted her emphasis on traditional family values and promotion of natalist policies like financial benefits for families with more than two children. Still, Le Pen’s gender politics became a popular feature of RN’s rhetoric, allowing the party to use simple feminist language to contort immigration into an issue of women’s safety.
France’s strict concept of secularism, called laïcité, helped fuel the anti-Islam backlash. In 1989, three Muslim girls in a Paris suburb were expelled from school for refusing to remove their headscarves, launching a national debate on religious symbols in public spaces. The issue splintered the feminist movement, with some prominent figures arguing the veil symbolized submission to male authority and contradicted Western values. Another turning point came in 2013, when France legalized same-sex marriage. A huge countermovement sprung up, uniting many disparate strains of conservatives. The identitarian movement was largely led by Génération Identitaire, a male-dominated far-right group banned in 2021 and compared to a “private militia” by then-Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin. It pushed for “remigration,” or forcibly returning non-European immigrants to their countries of origin. Yet women activists began to gain visibility around this time. Némésis didn’t exist, but Belle et Rebelle, a now-defunct identitarian group with the slogan, “feminine, not feminist,” proved a precursor as it sought to bring immigration and security into debates about women’s rights.
When I met RN activist Éric B. in 2018, he brought up women’s rights unprompted (a Paris native, Éric once lost a job over his far-right affiliation and stopped publishing his last name). At the time, he was leading the city’s branch of the party’s youth wing; when I asked about campaigning in Paris compared to the rest of the country, he immediately mentioned street harassment. “If you look, for example, to women’s harassment in Paris, the problem is very high,” he said. “In Paris, if you’re a woman, you can’t go some places because it’s too dangerous.” On International Women’s Day that year, his organization shared a meme that read, “Defending women’s rights is fighting against Islamism: The French woman is neither veiled nor submissive!” The statement was a reference to feminist group Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores nor Submissives).
On that day four years later, right before France’s 2022 presidential election, Le Pen published an open letter to French women. She decried violence against women and wrote in support of single-parent households—emphasizing her own experience raising three children alone—before pivoting to her plan for registering those who engage in street harassment as sex offenders and, if foreigners, deporting them.
As an activist collective, Némésis doesn’t share the National Rally’s concerns about strategic moderation in order to gain political power or win elections. As is the case with much of the international right, the more outrageous the rhetoric, the better—whatever generates headlines. But unlike previous iterations of far-right women’s groups like Belle et Rebelle, who organized in opposition to feminists, Némésis embraces the feminist label, claiming parts of the movement’s legacy while denouncing aspects incongruent with its nativist outlook.
Némésis has emerged as a dominant force among France’s far-right women despite its small size. “The leaders saw the success of #MeToo, the success of feminism, as a wave they could surf,” Magali Della Sudda, a political scientist in France and author of Les Nouvelles Femmes de Droite (The New Right-Wing Women), told me. “It really has a strategic dimension.” Némésis’s feminism “is a way to better denounce Islam and non-Western immigration,” Della Sudda said. “It’s not an end in itself. It is a means of promoting an ethnically white society, to promote a project of Western civilization, and to fight against what we could call an imported patriarchy, brought back to France and the West from near-eastern and African immigration, and through Islam.”
This line of thinking extends beyond Némésis. Marguerite Stern, coauthor of a book attacking trans rights and a former activist with Femen, the radical feminist group known for topless protests, is being sued by anti-racism nonprofit SOS Racisme for 2023 comments linking immigration to sexual violence. “Proportionally, people of African and Middle Eastern immigration . . . attack women more than French people from French culture,” she declared. “I know that I’m going to be called racist. However, there is no ideology in what I say. These are facts.”
SOS Racisme argued that her remarks constituted a “public insult towards a group of people because of their origin,” as well as a “public provocation to discrimination, hatred, or violence against a group of people because of their origin.” SOS Racisme is well respected in France, but a vocal minority still sided with Stern: when she created a GoFundMe to cover legal fees, she reached her goal of €22,000 in just five days thanks to more than nine hundred donors.
Feminists for Justice
Two months after Philippine’s death, thousands marched through the streets of Paris carrying signs that read feminism is antiracist and antifascist, transphobia kills, and for a decolonial feminism. Organized by the feminist collective Nous Toutes (All of Us), the November protest rallied support for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. Nous Toutes had also organized a Paris march in solidarity with Pelicot in September, with supporters denouncing rape culture and wearing shirts sharing the statistic that there’s one rape or attempted rape every two and a half minutes in France. At both events, the feminism of Nous Toutes offered a striking juxtaposition to Némésis, as they rejected the far right’s claim to the feminist label.
French feminism appears to be ever-splintering, with divisions and disagreements on issues of criminalization, sex, and the power of the state.
The Nous Toutes analysis of street harassment calls attention to the underlying causes that lead some people to spend more time outside than others, such as the lack of housing or jobs or money needed to frequent commercial spaces. The problem is real, but the Némésis solution—blaming, criminalizing, and expelling immigrants—is hardly everyone’s preferred rejoinder. Finding ways to render public spaces safe for women and LGBTQ people without criminalization is an ongoing debate in leftist feminist circles, involving discussions of urban planning, infrastructure, public services, political education, and developing communal alternatives to calling the police. “The actual measures that would need to be put in place would be just financing more public services, keeping people out of precarious situations that often induce violence,” argued Vinora Epp, an organizer with Féministes Révolutionnaires, a queer, antifascist, and anti-capitalist collective that joined the Nous Toutes mobilization.
Since the 1970s and 1980s, mainstream feminist demands have moved from equal rights to criminalization, legislating new crimes based around gender discrimination and sexual violence. “These movements are calling for more criminalization of certain men—because we know well that only certain men are criminalized,” said Gwenola Ricordeau, a French criminal justice researcher, penal abolitionist, and author of Free Them All: A Feminist Call to Abolish the Prison System. “It’s the populations descending from immigration from France’s colonial history and people from working-class neighborhoods.”
The justice system isn’t meant to meet survivors’ needs, she said. It’s meant to condemn and punish—and it doesn’t even do that very well. Conviction rates are low, with 86 percent of France’s sexual violence cases and 94 percent of rape cases dismissed. Very few sexual assault survivors get the judicial win and widespread support that Pelicot received; very few possess the volume of evidence she had, with photos and videos of the assaults found on her husband’s computer. “We’re facing a mass crime that has hundreds of thousands of perpetrators across France,” Ricordeau told me. “And I don’t want to cover France with prisons because we would need hundreds of thousands of prison spots if we wanted to criminalize every perpetrator of violence against women.”
The Problem of Sex
French feminism appears to be ever-splintering, with divisions and disagreements on issues of criminalization, sex, and the power of the state. For decades, one of the major fault lines has been sex work. France criminalized hiring sex workers in 2016 while eliminating penalties for sex workers themselves. Many feminist groups, like Féministes Révolutionnaires, support legalization, but others remain staunchly abolitionist when it comes to sex work. Yet even across this live-wire divide, opposition to femonationalism reigns.
Némésis’s presence inadvertently transformed the march into an uncomfortably accurate portrait of current-day French feminism.
“Everywhere the far right has taken power, whether in Brazil, Poland, Cyprus, Italy, women’s rights have been rolled back—everywhere,” said Aliénor Laurent, co-president of Osez le Féminisme! (Dare Feminism!), an abolitionist, anti-racist, intersectional association that’s one of France’s major feminist voices. Far-right groups like Némésis and the RN appropriate feminist terms, like femicide, “and completely void the concepts to fill them with their own ideologies, which are very often—all the time, actually—racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, ableist, anti-minorities,” Laurent told me at a café in Strasbourg, on France’s eastern border, where she lives. Abolitionist, she emphasized, “means abolishing a system that leads to prostitution and pornography. It’s not at all against women in prostitution.” But Osez le Féminisme! didn’t take part in the Nous Toutes protest.
Nous Toutes tracks the yearly number of femicides in France. Philippine was number 104. By the time that the November march came around, they were up to at least 122. As the protest wove its way through Paris, one additional group appended itself to the more than four hundred organizations participating. Némésis appeared with at least sixty supporters and security guards with shields. They held aloft the same posters of Philippine they’d carried at the September rally, her image now a shorthand for the dangers of lax immigration laws. Posters with Pelicot’s face were also sprinkled throughout their contingent. They’d prepped for the march in a suburban manor home belonging to the Le Pen family.
Némésis has interrupted the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women march since 2019. In 2022, its activists arrived in burqas and niqabs, aiming to expose how the organizers considered their usual anti-immigrant slogans unacceptable but permitted ones like “my burqa, my choice” and “feminist and Islamist.”
Némésis maintains that it’s just filling a gap, focusing on foreign perpetrators not because they’re the only perpetrators but because no one else talks about that subset of harassers. But that choice is notable. Most feminist groups look at the broader picture of sexual violence and draw connections between women’s rights and immigrant rights rather than pitting one against the other. On nearly every issue affecting women beyond street harassment, Némésis remains silent. “Others do that,” Cordier said last year when asked about the group’s stance on reproductive rights. They celebrated Pelicot’s victory, however, unable to let the left claim such a grand-scale feminist moment.
Beyond its cultural impact, the Pelicot case may have major legal ramifications. France’s rape laws exclude any mention of consent. Rape is defined in France by “violence, coercion, threat, or surprise,” and the country kept the European Union from adopting a consent-based definition of rape in 2023. But over a dozen European nations include language about consent in their laws, and this case may have finally changed a few key minds. “I believe it is beyond understanding for our fellow citizens to refuse to include consent in the definition of rape,” said Didier Migaud, the justice minister.
Nous Toutes denounced the latest intrusion by Némésis at their November march, saying it “remains firm in the face of the instrumentalization of feminism in service of racist, xenophobic, transphobic, or lesbophobic discourse.” But Némésis celebrated. “We brought the left to their knees,” read the group’s preening press release. They’d sought to pay tribute “to the victims forgotten by the left” and referred to Nous Toutes as “a so-called ‘feminist’ association.” The message concluded with a fundraising plea to help cover the costs of travel, materials, and security, which they put at €10,000. Némésis’s presence, unwelcome as it was, inadvertently transformed the march into an uncomfortably accurate portrait of current-day French feminism: a fractured movement working out internal differences while battling an encroaching far right that pretends the problem of sexism is a foreign import and can simply be deported out of sight and out of mind.