Majority of French voters AGREE with military chiefs who threaten=

Christian Piquemal, stripped of his privileges by army chiefs

Piquemal, 80, a former general of the Foreign Legion, leads the signatories of the furious letter addressed to Emmanuel Macron.

He was stripped of his privileges as a retired officer after he was arrested at an anti-immigration rally in Calais in 2016.

Also in attendance were members of the anti-Islamic Pegida movement.

Piquemal denied knowledge that Pegida were also going to be there and denied his protest was racist. 

The general was said to have been the de-facto leader of the rally but was later acquitted by a judge, while others were handed fines. 

Piquemal, who retired in 2000, was stripped of his right to wear the uniform and lost his military officer’s ID card. However, his rank was not withdrawn. 

Emmanuel de Richoufftz, ‘general of the suburbs’

A graduate of the prestigious Saint-Cyr military school founded by Napoleon, de Richoufftz served as aide-de-camp to French Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy from 1981 to 1984.

He served in Iraq, Africa and Bosnia.

He is known as the ‘general of the suburbs’ after penning a book titled Another Late War in 1992.

The general sought to alert the public to ‘real ghettos on the outskirts of cities’, warning that intervention was needed to integrate disadvantaged young people.

He represented Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party in local elections in Le Grau-du-Roi in 2019.

Last year he ditched Le Pen’s party to join up with Debout la France (‘France Arise’), a right-wing Euro-sceptic party.

Jean-Pierre Fabre-Bernadac, former police chief and Yellow Vest activist

Fabre-Bernadac is the manager of the Place Armes website which is ‘open to all retired, active, and reserve military personnel who love France and realise that France is on the brink.’

In 2018, he participated in Yellow Vest protests against Macron’s government.

In a recent radio appearance, Fabre-Bernadac lamented the ‘omerta’ which hangs around the issue of immigration, claiming that murders and assaults perpetrated by migrants were not given media coverage.

He called it a ‘terrible double standard.’

In another recent media appearance he said: ‘The French do not trust politicians but they trust the army.’ 

Antoine Martinez, former air force general

Martinez was also embroiled in the furore over the Calais rally organised by Piquemal in 2016.

He hosts the Volunteers for France website.

In a video filmed in November last year for the Volunteers for France Youtube channel, Martinez described how the coronavirus crisis masked what he believes is the more pressing matter of Islamic radicalisation. 

He wrote in an accompanying article: ‘There is no point, in fact, to project our soldiers into external theatres to protect us, if our leaders give up, despite the evidence, to name the enemy, and to fight him on our soil.’  

Francois Gaubert, Le Pen ally

Gaubert, 77, another graduate of the elite Saint-Cyr officer training college, spent four decades in the Navy on operations abroad, including in Africa, the Indian and Pacific Oceans, in Berlin after the fall of the wall and in Sarajevo, at the end of the war in Bosnia.

He retired in 2002.

He joined Front National in December 2012 and was a candidate in council elections in Montpellier.

He was elected as a councillor in 2015.

Today he is National Rally councillor in Occitanie. 

The 20 generals:

Christian Piquemal, Gilles Barrie, François Gaubert, Emmanuel de Richoufftz, Michel Joslin de Noray, André Coustou, Philippe Desrousseaux de Medrano, Antoine Martinez, Daniel Grosmaire, Robert Jeannerod, Pierre Dominique Aigueperse, Roland Dubois, Dominique Delawarde, Jean Claude Grolier, Norbert de Cacqueray, Roger Prigent, Alfred Lebreton, Guy Durand and Gérard Balastre.