France will summon U.S. Ambassador Charles Kushner to protest comments made by the Trump administration over the death of a far-right activist, the foreign affairs minister said on Sunday.
Jean-Noel Barrot was reacting to a statement by the U.S. State Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau, which stated that “reports, corroborated by the French Minister of the Interior, that Quentin Deranque was killed by left-wing militants, should concern us all.”
The State Department said in its post on X that “violent radical leftism is on the rise and its role in Quentin Deranque’s death demonstrates the threat it poses to public safety. We will continue to monitor the situation and expect to see the perpetrators of violence brought to justice.”
Deranque, a far-right activist, died of brain injuries last week from a beating in the French city of Lyon. He was attacked during a fight on the margins of a student meeting where a far-left lawmaker, Rima Hassan, was a keynote speaker.
“We reject any instrumentalization of this tragedy, which has plunged a French family into mourning, for political ends,” Barrot said. “We have no lessons to learn, particularly on the issue of violence, from the international reactionary movement.”
Deranque’s killing highlighted a climate of deep political tensions ahead of next year’s presidential vote. French President Emmanuel Macron called for calm on Saturday as some 3,000 people joined a march in Lyon organized by far-right groups to pay tribute to Deranque.
Seven people have been handed preliminary charges. The Lyon public prosecutor’s office requested that each of them be charged with intentional homicide, aggravated violence and criminal conspiracy. Six of the accused were charged on all three counts. The seventh was charged with complicity in intentional homicide, aggravated violence and criminal conspiracy.
Barrot said he has other topics to discuss with Kushner, including U.S. decisions to impose sanctions on Thierry Breton, a former European Union commissioner responsible for supervising social media rules, and Nicolas Guillou, a French judge at the International Criminal Court.
Barrot said both are targeted by “unjustified and unjustifiable” sanctions.
The Foreign Affairs Ministry did not say when the meeting will take place.
This is the second time Kushner has been summoned by France. In August last year, he was summoned over a letter he sent to Macron alleging the country did not do enough to combat antisemitism.
In a statement obtained by CBS News at that time, France rejected the allegations, saying they “run counter to international law.”
“They also fall short of the quality of the transatlantic partnership between France and the United States and of the trust that must prevail between allies,” the statement said.
Macron told “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” in September that it was out of line for Kushner, who is the father of President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, to publicly accuse him of taking insufficient action to combat antisemitism.
Macron said a French ambassador would never be allowed to make similar public remarks about another country because it would risk diplomacy with those nations.
“So either you are a person who wants to express freely,” Macron said. “If you are a diplomat, you have to follow the rule of diplomacy. … The [American] taxpayer money is not properly used to finance this kind of statement.”
France’s foreign officials met with a representative of the U.S. ambassador since the diplomat did not show up to the meeting.
