"Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth"
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Égalité et Réconciliation (English: Equality and Reconciliation) or E&R operates as a Soral fan club, openly spreading “national-socialist” ideology and advocating for the reconciliation of the "left of labor and the right of values to avoid civil war." Since Soral set up the site in 2007, E&R has established itself as the undisputed flagship of France’s conspiracy sphere, accumulating millions of visits per month.
Soral, whose real name is Alain Bonnet has lived in Lausanne since 2019. Over the years he has accumulated multiple charges, guilty findings and prison sentences for spreading racial and antisemitic hate and homophobia, in France and in Switzerland.
After a series of court cases, Soral was found guilty in 2019 of denying the Holocaust, an infraction in France, and sentenced to a year in prison by a Paris court. In 2023 a Swiss court sentenced Soral to 60 days in prison for discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation after he called a journalist a “fat lesbian” who was an “unhinged” “queer activist”.
On May 30 2024, Soral was arrested in Lausanne following a complaint by the CICAD, a community association that organizes against antisemitism and defamation. The Swiss Public Prosecutor in the canton of Vaud confirmed the opening of a criminal investigation for antisemitism. Soral’s home was searched before he was detained and questioned under the status of a suspect. After several hours, he was released, but he faces potential imprisonment if he re-enters France, where he has been convicted in absentia for similar offenses. French authorities have also requested that Switzerland pursue charges related to Soral's hate speech.
French newspaper Libération reported in December 2024 that French investigating police had found a copy of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf and personal notebooks at Soral's apartment in Paris's chic Left Bank boulevard Saint-Germain. The writings, uncovered during a police raid on the apartment in 2020, contained anti-gay and anti-Jewish scrawlings and phrases including "Judaism is a crime against humanity". In November 2024, Libération also revealed that Soral faced criminal prosecution for having published antisemitic diatribes and calls for insurrection notably in videos broadcast during the Covid-19 pandemic which he blamed on an "epidemic of Jews". Soral incited his followers to "arm themselves" for a "war" against the Jews whom he described as "perverse, parasite predator satanists". He also mixed his hatred of Jews with conspiracy theories about "Big Pharma" as agents of the "New World Order". Prosecutors are investigating Soral not only for his antisemitic incitement to hate but for his broad attacks on France through his calls for violent acts and terrorism.
Since he moved there in 2019 Soral continues to spread antisemitic propaganda and manage his activities from Switzerland, leveraging new networks to try to evade prosecution. His case follows a broader pattern of legal challenges faced by figures in his orbit, such as the openly antisemitic former left-wing comedian Dieudonné, previously convicted in Switzerland for racial discrimination and defamation. CICAD’s Secretary General, Johanne Gurfinkiel, criticized Soral for acting as though he is "above the law" and emphasized his unrepentant antisemitic advocacy across borders. The investigation highlights ongoing international efforts to address hate speech and enforce accountability for persistent offenders.
Soral was a member of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s far right National Front movement until 2009 and the first president of the E&R organization was another ex-National Front figure Marc George. Two former members of the violent extremist organization Groupe Union Défense (GUD), linked to Frédéric Chatillon, also participated as proxies in its founding.
E&R revives an openly antisemitic far right tradition, propagating classic Holocaust denial as well as the theme of the "Judeo-Masonic" conspiracy and the "American-Zionist" axis. The worldview conveyed by the site is one of a France "entirely under Jewish domination" (according to Soral) and prey to a permanent conspiracy with international ramifications. Among the titles available on Kontre Kulture, an online bookstore founded by Soral and accessible from E&R, are works such as La France juive by Édouard Drumont, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler, and The Green Book by Muammar Gaddafi. Notorious antisemitic authors such as Joseph Goebbels, Robert Faurisson, Roger Garaudy, Maurice Bardèche, Julius Evola, Paul-Éric Blanrue, Stéphane Blet, Laurent Guyénot, and many other conspiracy theorists are also featured. When Holocaust denier Faurisson died on October 22, 2018, Soral released a 20-minute video lauding Faurisson as a "master of moral rectitude," suggesting streets and schools should be named after him.
Soral's site is replete with conspiracy theories targeting Jewish, Israeli, pro-Israeli, or "Zionist" organizations or figures indiscriminately. The assassination of John F. Kennedy, most of the terrorist attacks of the past twenty years – starting with September 11, 2001 – economic crises, wars, certain revolutions, or even the 2019 fire at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris are said to be the result of conspiracies involving more or less directly "Zionism," conceived as another name for a Jewish world domination project. The site also addresses, in a willingly conspiratorial manner, themes such as child abuse, vaccination, or New chronology.
E&R does not hesitate to publish the most improbable conspiracy theories. For example, on March 20, 2015, the site promoted a film exposing the "theory" that no planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001:
"If all the researchers, pilots, engineers who make up this movement agree on challenging the official version of September 11, they are still only a minority proposing an even more radical thesis, that of the total absence of planes. This thesis, which may seem far-fetched at first glance, was disseminated in French by Laurent Guyénot (author of JFK/September 11, 50 years of manipulations, available at Kontre Kulture) and seems much more serious than it appears!"
Media rating organization NewsGuard calls for vigilance regarding E&R, which "seriously violates basic principles of credibility and transparency."
On December 13, 2017, Facebook deleted Soral's pages and his site for violations of the platform's terms of service, which prohibit "organizations or individuals preaching hate."
E&R is very active on social media, on YouTube (with 159,000 subscribers and 70 million cumulative views) and on Dailymotion (41 million cumulative views).
In early June 2018, E&R's YouTube channel, ERTV Officiel, was suspended but became accessible again two days later. On July 6, 2020, its two YouTube channels – ERTV Officiel and ERTV International – were deleted for "repeated violations of the platform's terms of use."
In September 2018, the "Égalité & Réconciliation" app was removed from Apple's App Store.
The site also has an online radio station. Since January 2019, ERFM has been broadcasting the "Faits & Documents" (Facts and Documents) show every month, presented as the "official show of the Faits & Documents magazine, a bi-monthly 12-page newsletter founded by Emmanuel Ratier, which deals mainly with French and international political, economic, and cultural news."
Bon Sens "healthy & rooted products" is also a site accessible through E&R, edited by the registered business Culture pour Tous. One can buy all kinds of "natural" and/or organic products there.
Although it has been in decline for several years, Soral's site remains one of the main French-speaking conspiracy sites with nearly 4 million visits per month. It is ranked second in the "top 10 French-speaking misinformation sites" established by media rating site NewsGuard, just after FranceSoir.
With more than 12 million views and 52,000 subscribers, ERTV is one of the most influential channels on the Odysee video platform.
"When you talk to a Frenchman, a Zionist Jew, you start to say: 'Maybe there are problems that come from you. Maybe you've made a few mistakes. It's not always the other person's fault, totally, if no one can stand you wherever you set foot'. Because that's pretty much their story, you see. For 2,500 years now, every time they've set foot somewhere, after fifty years they've been beaten up. You have to admit, it's weird! Everyone's always wrong except them? The guy starts barking, screaming, going crazy, you know. You can't have a dialogue. In other words, I think there's a psychopathology, you see, of Judaism-Zionism that borders on mental illness."
– Source: Alain Soral ("Complément d'enquête", France 2, September 20, 2004).
"The new world religion is the Shoah [...] The cross is the gas chamber. Everyone must effectively visit the gas chamber. [...] For six million to be a possible figure, four and a half million human beings died, in less than two years, I think [...] which is the greatest miracle in the history of humanity, if you think about the material conditions involved, I say to myself that it's a good thing the footballers didn't go there because when you see how that space must have been saturated with... with... with I don't know what, with gas residue, it might even have been dangerous for their health."
– Source: Alain Soral, YouTube/ERTV, June 2012.
(Last updated on 17/12/2024)
