In the bullring of Béziers, with 8,000 people crammed into the stands and fanning themselves in the heat, an extraordinary spectacle began. France’s most controversial mayor, glancing up at the adoring crowds, solemnly paraded around the ring in an elaborate holy procession following an effigy of the Virgin Mary and a dozen horse riders in flamenco dresses watched over by priests. It was, he said, about reaffirming France’s Christian roots.

The vast, town hall-sponsored, public Catholic mass is unheard of in fiercely secular modern France, which has strict laws on the separation of church and state. It caused outrage on the left, which has accused the mayor of turning this picturesque but poverty-stricken Mediterranean town into an increasingly polarised “laboratory of the far right”.



Robert Ménard, 62, was once best known as the outspoken founder of the international journalists’ group Reporters Without Borders (RSF), which he headed for nearly 25 years before becoming a TV current affairs star. When younger, he held memberships to the Communist Revolutionary League then the Socialist party. But since his shock election in Béziers last year on a far-right ticket, he has become the focal point of a raging debate in France about anti-immigration feeling, diversity and stigmatisation.



“No other mayor in France would imagine doing this,” Ménard told the Guardian in his town hall office, speaking of his idea for the Catholic mass. He dismissed what he deemed France’s “ayatollahs of secularism”, and said he was not stigmatising any other religion. The French League of Human Rights last year lost its court battle to stop him installing a large Christmas nativity scene in the town hall.



A nativity scene displayed at Béziers city hall in December 2014. A French court overruled regional authorities and the French League of Human Rights who demanded its removal. Photograph: Pascal Guyot/AFP/Getty

Controversy has surrounded Ménard since he took the helm of this historic town in the southern region of Languedoc-Roussillon, which was once rich from wine production but has suffered decades of unemployment and is now one of the poorest towns in France.

First he imposed an 11pm curfew on minors. Then he banned people from hanging washing from balconies in the historic centre, run-down parts of which are home to a large population of north African origin and settled Gypsy communities – many of whom have been French for generations. Next he banned spitting in public. “So I was told it’s a tradition in a certain number of countries to spit. All very well, but it’s not a tradition here, therefore it’s banned,” he said. “I caught a youngster hoicking in the street the other day. His excuse was that he had a cough. I said: ‘Fine, there’s something that’s called a tissue.’”



When Ménard armed the local police with 7.65-calibre handguns and put posters of giant handguns across the town reading ‘Police officers have a new friend’, the Socialist government was outraged. Then police swooped on Ménard this spring when he claimed on live TV that he had counted the first names of nursery and primary school children in the town and determined that 64.6% were Muslim.

It is a criminal offence in France to collect any data or statistics on race or ethnicity – a law rooted in the country’s shame over collaboration with the Nazis during the second world war, when Jews were marked with yellow stars and sent to death camps. Bernard Cazeneuve, the Socialist interior minister, said counting children “sends us back to the darkest hours of our history”. Last month, police dropped the inquiry into Ménard, citing lack of evidence.

Ménard’s view is that immigration is France’s real problem. “Our immigration has to stop,” he said.

Although elected with the official support of Marine Le Pen and the far-right Front National, he has deliberately stayed outside the party. This leaves him free “to say what I want when I want”. But he is an important figure to the Front National. Last year Le Pen’s party gained a record 11 mayors across France, but Béziers, with a population of more than 71,000, is by far the biggest town run by a Front National-aligned mayor.

Le Pen, her eyes on a presidential bid in 2017, has insisted the Front National mayors keep their heads down and avoid the controversies that plagued the party when the party ran towns in the 1990s. Ménard, outside the party, is not bound by this and has dominated French headlines and transformed his town hall newsletter into a slick, polemical magazine. He is seen by many as further right than Le Pen and more socially conservative. He says they have a good relationship and she takes inspiration from some of his policies.

Ménard lived in Béziers as a teenager but was shaped by his early years in Algeria in a family of pied noirs, or European settlers, in the French colony. His father was a member of the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète paramilitary group in French Algeria that fought against Algerian independence. Ménard recently sparked more headlines and outrage from the left when he changed the name of a Béziers street that marked the end of the Algerian war of independence.

“Today, everyone in France knows where Béziers is,” he said, claiming that curiosity about him and his policies has boosted tourism this year. He brushed off media criticism that he was an authoritarian or provocateur.



He doesn’t like the term “extreme right” preferring to talk of a rise in nationalist and patriotic feeling in a French electorate disgusted with traditional parties.

“I think he’s wonderful,” said one 92-year-old woman, a retired cleaner. “He’s really cleaning up the town. The police are a lot more visible. I’ve got nothing against Arabs; I’ve got lots of Arab friends, but there used to be too many Maghrebins [north Africans] just hanging around the square.”

Outside the mass, Robert Clavijo, a retired French teacher carrying a placard protesting the flouting of French laws on secularism, said: “Since his election, this mayor has just been about pure provocation.”



On the poorer streets, many complained of inadequate housing stock, no hope of jobs and a grim mood.



His media strategy relies on polemics aimed at shattering the politically correct consensus Cécile Alduy

Sofiane Lecomte-El Ouarary, 20, a student, said: “The laundry ban was very revealing. Ultimately it targets the large numbers of poor people living in tiny two-room apartments who don’t have space to dry their washing anywhere but out the window. Many of those families have north African roots. Divisions are being heightened between rich and poor, believers and non-believers.”



Cécile Alduy, a Stanford University professor and co-author of Marine Le Pen’s Words: Decoding the New National Front Discourse, said: “Paradoxically, at the same time the Front National leadership has tried to normalise and soften its official discourse, Ménard, who comes from the left, has been much more vocal and polemical in his stances against the Muslim community and culture, and in defence of ‘French by root’ citizens.



“His media strategy as mayor of Béziers relies on polemics aimed at shattering the politically correct consensus on secularism, immigration, and even the poor.”



Ménard said: “The media can say whatever they want. My only concern is doing what I think has to be done for the people of Béziers and for my own convictions.”

