The celebrations of May Day and the Feast of Joan of Arc on 11 May in unoccupied France differed greatly in theme and character from those held in Paris. Once again the Paris papers invoked Europeanism while genuinely patriotic sentiments wedded to French opinion appeared in Vichy. The Rassemblement national populaire (RNP) celebrated May Day in Paris with heavy European and national socialist overtones, a parade of its militants guarded by the black-clad soldiers of the SS whom Déat once again praised as true socialist revolutionaries. Déat hoped his own people would consider the First of May a chance to meditate on an adaptive national socialist revolution in both their national and common European community.

Marcel Déat, "Printemps européen", L'Æuvre, 1 May 1941; idem, "La seconde passion de Jeanne", ibid., 11 May 1941.

Both the symbols of France and the actions of her government drew sharply different interpretations in Paris and in Vichy. What was presented as socialist and European in the north was interpreted as conservative and national in the south. A case in point was the publicity given to both the Comité Européen de l'Automobile and the Ten-Year Plan of Lehideux, which became drawn into the Paris-Vichy press debate before and during the Joan of Arc celebrations. While the RNP papers pictured the Ten-Year Plan as the epitome of European planning and a blueprint for France's role in the New Order, the conservative Vichy press minimized its European aspects. Le Temps and Le Figaro interpreted the Lehideux scheme purely as a model for national renewal in the spirit of the French pioneers of the past.

Even in La Spezia, as in Bologna and in every other place where we have demonstrated in these months, we have affirmed a principle: there cannot be cities where we are not allowed to take to the streets.

Those who threatened to prevent us from doing so, to hang us upside down, to send us into the sewers, this time too, marched with their tails between their legs, staging the usual miserable theatrics, aware of being well protected by cordons and police vehicles. Instead, there was much applause from shopkeepers and citizens, much encouragement, despite the climate of tension created for days.

We certainly cannot retreat, in the face of a mafia system, that of anti-fascism and the increasingly clear connivance between the social centers and the cliques of the institutional left.

And it matters little if at every demonstration or commemoration we are hit with complaints, bans, trials, convictions.
We know that being on this side has a cost, sometimes a very high one to pay.

It's the price of being free.

In Stockholm, the Swedish court system has refused to continue the case against migrant Amin Kibuki (24), who set fire to the hair of a pensioner on a bus. They said he had "already been convicted of another offence, an explosion in a residential area" and the investigation decided that was "enough".

The victim, Egon Malmgren, a former state radio reporter, was travelling on the bus when two young men started filming him and set fire to his hair. The cameras on the bus were faulty, but after a while the police found a video of the attack on the perpetrator's phone. The case was reopened - and closed again. The judge literally said, "no substantial interests will be ignored if the case is dismissed". In other words, arson of a pensioner is nothing.

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