Commentary: The Le Pen Moment

On July 14, 2002, a 25-year-old neo-Nazi named Maxime Brunerie drove a rented car from suburban Courcouronnes to Paris for the Bastille Day parade along the Champs Elysées. He carried a guitar case containing a .22 rifle he had recently purchased. The day before, on the British neo-Nazi website Combat 18 (18 signifying AH, the first and eighth letters of the alphabet, the initials of Adolph Hitler), Brunerie had posted a message: “Watch television on Sunday, I’ll be the star.”

At the parade site, Brunerie blended in with the crowd. As President Jacques Chirac’s vehicle approached, Brunerie extracted the rifle from the guitar case and took aim. According to most accounts, he managed to get off one shot before the person in front of him, a 56-year-old Alsatian nurse named Jacques Weber, grabbed the barrel and wrested the gun from him. The would- be assassin was then wrestled to the ground by, among others, a French Canadian of Algerian descent, Mohamet Chelali.