ORLÉANS, France—Marine Le Pen launched her campaign for the 2027 presidential election on Oct. 25 in Orléans, about 80 miles southwest of Paris, where nearly 3,000 police officers and gendarmes had been deployed amid warnings that thousands of radical far-left militants were planning to disrupt the National Rally’s (RN) 19th party congress.
The two-day gathering came just over a week after the Oct. 17 riots, which saw shops looted in several French cities.
A City Under Lockdown
Loiret prefect Hugues Moutouh described the security operation as unprecedented. Two bridges over the Loire were closed to traffic, while armored vehicles, water cannons, helicopters, and drones were deployed across the city.
Authorities had expected between 20,000 and 30,000 counter-protesters on Saturday, including an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 “radical elements.” Moutouh banned all demonstrations on Sunday within a broad perimeter around the congress venue, while downtown shopkeepers boarded up their storefronts ahead of the weekend.
Saturday’s main march against the RN ultimately drew 13,500 people, according to Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez, or 26,000 according to organizers. It ended without major disturbances.
Nuñez attributed the relative calm to the heavy police presence, saying that the march had been “supervised at a very high level by the security forces,” despite the participation of ultra-left militants. Gendarmes had also seized “a great many improvised weapons” before the march began, he said.
The police prefecture shared on its X account two pictures of seized objects, including shotguns, swords, knives, and batons.
Bus Attacked
Around 5 a.m. on Sunday, a bus carrying 11 RN supporters from Grenoble in southeastern France to the congress was attacked by about ten hooded and gloved militants, who smashed every window before fleeing, AFP reported. No one was hurt, but the bus was left unusable, and an investigation has been opened.
In Orléans, according to public broadcaster franceinfo, about 100 anti-fascist extremists defied the ban, gathering shortly after 1 p.m. outside an immigration detention center, 2.5 miles from the 10,000-seat Co'Met arena where Le Pen was to speak.
Chanting “R for racists, N for Nazis, down with the RN,” they headed toward the neighboring town of Olivet and briefly blocked a main road before being escorted back, with a helicopter overhead and the riot unit CRS 8, specializing in urban violence, mobilized.
‘A Climate of Terror’
At the National Rally Congress, Christophe, a 43-year-old RN supporter, told The Epoch Times that the city’s shopkeepers have been “in despair,” fearing all weekend that their businesses would be looted or that they would lose revenue even if nothing happened.
“It is a victory for these activists, who sow a climate of terror with complete impunity. That has to change,” he said.
Virginie Joron, an RN member of the European Parliament, told The Epoch Times that the far-left “is anti-democratic” for wanting to destabilize the meeting of France’s largest right-wing party.
During this year’s municipal campaign, she said that members of the Young Guard, an antifa group dissolved in 2025, have tried to disrupt her meetings, and assaulted one of her activists.
She added said that the far-left, supported by the democratic socialist party France unbowed, has “become even more unbridled and even more organized” since the death of 23-year-old nationalist activist Quentin Deranque last February.
Deranque died from brain injuries sustained during clashes in Lyon between extreme-left and extreme-right activists; 14 people have been indicted, including an aide to LFI deputy Raphaël Arnault, who co-founded the Young Guard.
“Tomorrow, we fear this anger and violence will go up another notch, in particular with attacks on people,” Joron said.
Members of the Union of Jewish Students of France (UEJF), a left-wing Jewish student organization, also disrupted National Rally president Jordan Bardella’s speech on Sunday by unfurling a banner reading, “Bardella re-elected: Racism and anti-Semitism don’t bother the RN. Quite the opposite,” and shouting slogans.
During the congress, Bardella was re-elected as party president.
The protest drew sharp criticism from the right-wing Jewish student organization Movement of French Jewish Students (MEJF).
“The MEJF condemns the stupid and disruptive actions of UEJF activists at the RN congress in Orléans,” the organization wrote on X, denouncing the UEJF as “the Jewish tokens of the macronist left” and an organization that was “harming the very cause it claims to defend.”
‘The Great Battle for France’
Le Pen chose Orléans, the city that Joan of Arc liberated in 1429, for her first major campaign speech.
“In Orléans—the city of our national heroine, a city that symbolizes the refusal of resignation and fatalism—begins the great battle for France, the one that will lead our country to the dawn of a new day,” she said.
The images flooding French screens, “disconcerting yesterday,” have become “often terrifying, as violence, day after day, grows ever more serious, ever more incomprehensible,” she said. “What makes our strength, we patriots, is that we have always refused denial.”
Le Pen pledged to apply “the rule that the vandal pays” and to keep France from sliding “into Mexicanization with cartels.”
She vowed to treat criminal organizations as terrorists. Whoever breaks the law, “and especially whoever attacks people—above all representatives of the state; firefighters, teachers, or police officers—will have three certainties: the certainty of prosecution, the certainty of punishment, and the certainty that it will be carried out,” she said.
Foreign offenders will face “automatic and permanent expulsion.”
“France has always risen again because there have always been French people to pick up the flag that lies on the ground and dare to raise it,” she said. “We want France to regain its power.”
Marine Le Pen and National Rally President Jordan Bardella applaud alongside supporters waving French flags during the launch of Le Pen’s 2027 presidential campaign in Orléans, France, on Oct. 25, 2026. Etienne Fauchaire/The Epoch Times
France Unbowed’s leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon reacted to Le Pen’s speech on X, saying, “In Orléans, a dazed crowd, stupefied with hatred, applauds at the RN congress any platitude on the same level as the most stupid street-brawl slogans. I thank them for booing my name and insulting the new France. The future of the country will be made in spite of you! It will be made because it is the choice of life against the death of the spirit and of fraternity.”
Pierre Meurin, an RN member of the National Assembly, told The Epoch Times that the far-left is “tensing up enormously” as the RN approaches power.
“Even though no major incidents ended up happening during our congress, these attempts at intimidation say a lot about the terror the far-left could impose if it ever came to power,” he said.
“There is a totalitarian temptation on the left,” he added, comparing it to the Terror of 1793 during the French revolution.
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