'All the
banks are owned by Jews': the anti-Semitic writings of France's far-right party
boss Jordan Bardella
Politique —
Investigation
Alexandre Berteau
and Antton
Rouget
28 September
2026 at 16h11
© Photo
illustration Simon Toupet / MediapartSommaire
Mediapart
has obtained written exchanges involving the chairman of France's far-right
Rassemblement National (RN) party, Jordan Bardella, from the early days of his
political career. They reveal the obsessive anti-Semitism of a man who dreams
of becoming France’s prime minister next year if Marine Le Pen is elected as
head of state in France's presidential election. Bardella denies the claims,
attacking what he calls “crude fakes”.
28 September
2026 à 16h11
TheThe
chairman of France's far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party, Jordan
Bardella, anointed by presidential candidate Marine Le Pen as her future prime
minister should the far-right win the keys to the Élysée Palace in 2027, wrote
a series of messages in his early political carrer in which he displays
obsessive anti-Semitism, according to a Mediapart investigation based on
numerous private conversations and backed up by witness accounts.
In 2024
Bardella, 31, described several RN parliamentary candidates who uttered racist
or anti-Semitic comments as being a few “black sheep”. But now the “shepherd”
himself has been tainted by his own writings.
Bardella,
who is also an MEP, is the symbol of a new generation of the party previously
called the Front National and renamed in 2018 as the Rassemblement National,
and which now presents itself as the protector of Jewish people in France (the
Front National was co-founded
by veterans of the Waffen-SS and figures from wartime French collaborators).
The
31-year-old MEP displayed his anti-Semitism in several exchanges dating from
around a decade ago, when he joined what was then the Front National (FN). At
the time of those writings, Jordan Bardella was already an active FN
campaigner. In 2014, he became the leader of the party’s branch in
Seine-Saint-Denis, a suburban département (the administrative equivalent
to a county) north of Paris, and was elected as a member of the regional
council of the greater Paris region the following year.
At the same
time as his outbursts, which were accompanied by wild conspiracy theories,
Bardella indirectly revealed the truth behind the strategy known as
“de-demonising” the negative image of the party, a strategy it has pursued in
France’s political and media spheres for the past 15 years. “Politics is all
about communication,” he said. In other words, what matters is not what you
really believe. This was all the more crucial given that Marine Le Pen, then
head of the party, was at the same time publicly declaring that the FN was the
“best shield” for protecting Jewish people in France.
Jordan
Bardella, chairman of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party, Paris,
June 19th 2024. © Photomontage Mediapart avec Julien de Rosa / AFP
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Yet the
exchanges now revealed by Mediapart show a Jordan Bardella completely at odds
with this public façade and fully aligned with the theories of Alain
Soral, a French anti-Semitic activist with multiple convictions, including
his belief in an alleged Jewish conspiracy aimed at controlling the “world
order”. It was also during this period that Bardella developed a particular
relationship with Frédéric Chatillon, an old friend of Marine Le Pen and one of
the key figures behind the FN’s rapprochement with Soral’s circles.
In this
report, focussing on a two-year period of Bardella’s political career, from
2013 to 2015, Mediapart presents the findings of a months-long
investigation based on dozens of written conversations, which Mediapart
has submitted for independent authentication, drawn from a larger body of
documentary evidence and supplemented by witness accounts.
The Jew must
dominated (sic) other peoples, crush them and rob them.
Comments by
Jordan Bardella
In the
written messages seen by Mediapart, the RN chairman complained that “all the
banks are owned by Jews”. He also lamented that “the Jew must dominated (sic)
other peoples, crush them and rob them, a Zionist is necessarily and profoundly
Jewish. In France, two good examples are BHL [editor's note, the philosopher
Bernard-Henri Lévy] and [editor's note, prominent economic and political
advisor Jacques] Attali. And that is what they want, a New World Order
dominated by Israel, with of course Jerusalem as its capital”.
In another
exchange, Bardella again complained that the “most important ministries go to
people for whom Israel and banking interests take precedence over French
interests”, singling out three ministers who served under François Hollande
during his 2012-2017 presidency: Laurent Fabius, Pierre Moscovici and Manuel
Valls.
Contacted by
Mediapart, Jordan Bardella - who said in 2023 that Front National
co-founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, father of Marine Le Pen “was not anti-Semitic”,
before then qualifying his remarks in the face of a widespread outcry - issued
a blanket denial of all the findings of this investigation. “I categorically
reject your assertions that I made racist or anti-Semitic comments of this
kind, whether publicly or privately, orally or in writing,” he told Mediapart,
denouncing “crude fakes” and “a genuine dirty-tricks operation” (see the
Black Box bottom of page).
“The fact
that I was not an active Front National campaigner during the summer of 2013,
and was still a minor, should alert you to the dishonest nature of these
‘sources’,” he also said. On that particular point, Jordan Bardella contradicts
himself.
In
interviews, such as with French daily Le
Parisien in 2025, the RN chairman has repeatedly said that he joined
the party in 2012, at the age of 16. In his autobiography, Ce que je cherche
('What I'm Looking For’) published in France by Fayard in 2024, he repeats that
he became politically engaged after seeing Marine Le Pen on television on
February 23rd 2012. “I was a minor. I had to persuade my mother, with some
difficulty, to sign the parental authorisation needed to join a political
movement…” he wrote.
In that same
autobiography Bardella declared: “I dislike both outrageousness and excess. I
have never felt any intellectual affinity with the political legacy of the
‘far-right’.”
In private,
the same Jordan Bardella wrote in 2013 that he had joined the far-right party
because its “basic ideology” had never changed since it was founded by Marine
Le Pen's father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 1972, even as he welcomed the efforts
being made to make the movement appear more presentable.
A
fascination with anti-Semitic ideologue Alain Soral
According to
the recollections of Gilles C. (last name withheld), who was politically in
charge of Bardella at the time, the ambitious campaigner cut his political
teeth in the FN branch in Seine-Saint-Denis, the département (county),
made up of north Paris suburbs, where he was born, in “February 2013”. A few
months later, Jordan Bardella began a geography degree.
His
obsession with an alleged “takeover of the country by the Jewish-Zionist
community” was heavily influenced by the theories of anti-Semitic ideologue
Alain Soral, for whom he privately acknowledged his fascination. Soral, founder
of the Égalité & Réconciliation (E&R) movement, had been involved in
Jean-Marie Le Pen’s 2007 presidential campaign. Officially, however, Soral's
ties with the FN were severed in 2009.
“His
analyses are correct because everything is borne out by the facts,” Jordan
Bardella wrote of the essayist in September 2013. Soral had already been
convicted in France in 2007 of racial defamation and incitement to hatred.
Among the conclusions Bardella said he drew from Soral’s thinking were the
“submission of France to a Zionist mindset” and the claim that “Zionism and
banking domination are linked (Goldman Sachs, Rothschild, Lehman Brothers…)”.
“Jordan
watched hours and hours of Soral videos and read his books. He was partly
politicised around that. His activism involved reading and watching videos on
the internet,” confirms a former close advisor to Bardella, while explaining
that he himself had not been aware of the RN chairman’s anti-Semitic remarks.
In his
conversations, Jordan Bardella also supported Dieudonné, the black French
comedian widely regarded as an anti-Semitic political activist, who had made
Jean-Marie Le Pen godfather to his daughter. “He's fighting a genuine battle of
ideas, otherwise he would have stayed with [editor's note, his Jewish
professional partner] Élie Semoun,”
Bardella said approvingly in September 2013. Yet as
early as 2008, Dieudonné had invited Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson on
stage to receive an “outcast award” from an actor dressed as a Jewish deportee,
earning him one of his many convictions.
Bardella was
also quite willing to spread conspiracy theories. He claimed that if the then
economy minister Pierre Moscovici wanted to “save businesses”, it was to
“avenge Moses”, and spread fake news about the September 11th attacks. Twelve
years after those attacks in the United States, he was still expressing doubts
about the “official theory” and encouraging those around him to watch a video
by a supposed former CIA agent who suspected the Israeli intelligence agency,
the Mossad, of being behind the attacks. In another message, he claimed that
the “halal food trade (the brands) belongs to Jews”.
If Marine Le
Pen comes to power, she risks a plane crash or an attack by a supposedly crazed
Islamist (manipulated from above, of course).
Jordan
Bardella
“I remember
that he was interested in theories circulating at the time about the
possibility that Adolf Hitler had survived World War II,” said Laurent G. (last
name withheld), a former head of the Front National de la Jeunesse (FNJ) – the
FN's youth wing – in Seine-Saint-Denis, who crossed paths with Bardella in the
local FN federation between 2013 and 2014.
According to
the former FN official, who became “head of campaign activities” for the party
in Seine-Saint-Denis, Bardella also kept by his bedside a copy of The
Secrets of the Federal Reserve, by American Holocaust-denying writer
Eustace Mullins. The book, also endorsed by Alain Soral, attributes the
creation of the US central bank to a conspiracy by Jewish bankers to serve
their own interests.
Questioned
about that recollection, Jordan Bardella did not respond.
Jordan
Bardella applauds Marine Le Pen during her speech in the north-east town of
Hénin-Beaumont, an RN stronghold, September 13th 2026. © Photomontage
Mediapart avec Alain Guilhot / Divergence
“The richest
in the world isn’t Bill Gates, but the FED (and the 12 or 13 bankers who divide
the spoils between them),” Jordan Bardella wrote in a private exchange in
September 2013, urging his correspondent to “look at the names” of the heads of
the “world’s biggest banks”, who according to him were inevitably “Zionists”.
“It’s a
certainty that if Marine Le Pen comes to power, if she tries to take back
control of the Bank, she risks a plane crash or an attack by a supposedly
crazed Islamist (manipulated from above of course),” he suggested in the same
message.
Within the
local FN federation where the future RN chairman began his career, Laurent G.
himself set about spreading anti-Semitic ideology among Le Pen’s rank and file.
In dozens of internal emails obtained by Mediapart, the local official widely
and frenetically shared reading recommendations as a form of “ideological
training”. On February 8th 2014, he sent Bardella and another local campaigner
a digital copy of a book by Alain Soral and Éric Naulleau, entitled Dialogues
désaccordés ('Discordant Dialogues').
In fact,
Soral's work appears almost moderate compared with Laurent G.’s other reading
recommendations. The FN official bombarded members of the federation and young
party officials with emails praising the writings of some of the best-known
collaborationist and revisionist authors, from Lucien Rebatet and Robert
Brasillach to Édouard Drumont. More contemporary counterparts such as Robert
Faurisson, Hervé Ryssen and Vincent Reynouard were also given pride of place.
As was the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, whose book Battle for Berlin
was recommended by Laurent G. in May 2012, as also, in September 2012, the
paintings of a “well-known Austrian painter”, Adolf Hitler. In the same vein,
in April 2014, he praised the “merits of the revisionist school”.
Contacted by
Mediapart, Laurent G. says he sent the emails “on my own initiative”, to
encourage the campaigners’ “intellectual curiosity”, without “pushing anyone to
think anything whatsoever”, adding: “I was never reprimanded.”
Jordan
Bardella did not respond to questions about Laurent G.’s influence and his
emails, but insisted: “I cannot under any circumstances be held responsible for
the writings or words of third parties."
A memo on
polishing the party’s image
Another
episode illustrating the militant environment in which Jordan Bardella was
politically formed was the expulsion from the FN, in October 2014, of Maxence
B. (last name withheld), one of the party’s campaigners in Seine-Saint-Denis,
who had then recently converted to Islam. The conversion was deemed intolerable
internally, as several exchanges of messages seen by Mediapart show.
Promoted to
head of the local federation in the summer of 2014, Bardella forced the convert
out of the movement three months later, under pressure from campaigners
exasperated by the situation.
“A rumour
has reached me: a young Frenchman from the 93 [editor's note, the
administrative number designating the Seine-Saint-Denis département],
native-born, Caucasian, ‘one of are (sic) own’, has converted to Islam… Nothing
serious, you might say, there are hundreds more every month… Except for one
detail, because this young man is apparently Maxence B., a member of the FNJ,”
a campaigner complained in an email sent to several FN officials, including
Jordan Bardella. The campaigner then warned the party leadership: “Keeping
Maxence B. within the movement presents a risk. (…) All this is leading us to
disaster.”
“Members at
the time considered the fact that Maxence had hidden his conversion to be a
problem,” Gilles C. told Mediapart.
Meanwhile,
campaigner Elisabeth C., who openly described herself as “Islamophobic” in an
email attacking Maxence B., was selected by the FN just a few months later to
stand in the 2015 departmental elections. Writing “Still RN” today, in a
message to Mediapart Elisabeth C. praised Jordan Bardella as someone
“very committed, very capable, very intelligent”.
The RN’s
main asset in its “de-demonising” drive – or “[suit and] tie strategy” –
which he adopted from his very first steps in politics, Jordan Bardella
identified very early on the need to clean up the far-right party’s public
image, and to keep the media away from what was going on behind the scenes.
On November
26th 2014, with the March 2015 elections of members of the Seine-Saint-Denis
council approaching, he sounded the alarm among his troops. “Dear friends,” he
wrote in an email addressed to party candidates and co-signed with his deputy,
“as with every election campaign, we are not immune from a new media storm,
orchestrated by our rivals seeking publicity, concerning our ‘literature’
and/or the images we publish.”
Left to
right: Alain Soral, Jordan Bardella and Frédéric Chatillon. © Photomontage
Mediapart avec l'AFP et MaxPPP
Yet
“although we repeat this at every meeting”, “our instructions are clearly
proving difficult for some people to remember and follow”, the email continued.
Members were asked to “check” their social media content or “get it checked”.
Nothing from internal exchanges should leak.
In a
previous message sent in the summer of 2013, Bardella, explaining that he drew
inspiration from Machiavelli, wrote: “Since Marine has been head of the party
you receive a charter when you join, as a campaigner you have to be exemplary.
Especially in what you say […] Politics is all about communication.”
Arab
dictators are demonised, whereas the Assad regime ultimately corresponds to the
reality of the country.
Jordan
Bardella
In the same
exchange, the future would-be prime minister points out that “since [Marine
Le Pen’s] rhetoric has become more polished the number of voters has
exploded”, while celebrating the fact that the FN was the only party to have
“remained faithful to its fundamental ideology” for “more than 40 years”. At
the same time, the far-right party’s vice-president Louis Aliot was developing
the idea that anti-Semitism was the last “ideological barrier” that had to be
“removed” in the public's mind to finally allow the movement to come to power.
Soral
bites back at Bardella over Israel
The RN’s
“de-demonising” strategy led Marine Le Pen to take part in a march against
anti-Semitism held in Paris in November 2023 following the October 7th Hamas
attacks against Israel, and Jordan Bardella to travel to Jerusalem in March
2025 at the invitation of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government – a first for a
leader of the French far-right party.
A month
earlier, the RN chairman publicised on X his meeting in Washington with
Israel’s minister for diaspora affairs and combating anti-Semitism, Amichai
Chikli. This infuriated his former mentor Alain Soral, who responded: “To think
that I knew him when he was a revisionist [editor’s note, none of Jordan
Bardella’s writings seen by Mediapart contain any evidence of Holocaust
revisionism]. Turncoats really do always make the best lackeys of the Jews.”
The
anti-Semitic blogger spouted off again when Jordan Bardella condemned Emmanuel
Macron’s decision in April 2025 to recognise a Palestinian state. Marine Le
Pen’s heir apparent had argued – in writing – for such a move in 2014. “That
was back when little Jordan used to listen to me!” declared Soral, who declined
Mediapart's request for comment.
Jordan
Bardella, meanwhile, continued to move in the same ideological circles as
before. Between February and June 2015, he was hired as an assistant to MEP
Jean-François Jalkh, who combined his European Parliament seat with the post of
party vice-president – the employment contract between them is now the subject
of suspicions
that it involved a fake job, something the current RN leader disputes.
A
longstanding FN campaigner who joined the party two years after it was founded,
Jean-François Jalkh made himself known for having commemorated
the 40th anniversary, in 1991, of the death of Marshal Philippe Pétain, head of
the collaborationist Vichy regime during the 1940-1944 German occupation of
France, and later making negationist comments on the subject of World War II.
“I say that we should be able to discuss even this issue [the gas chambers],”
Jalkh told a researcher in an article published in 2005, praising the
“seriousness” and “rigour” of Holocaust deniers such as Robert Faurisson, repeatedly
convicted of “denial of crimes against humanity”.
The
'Patriotic Suburbs' initiative
In January
2016, a month after his election to the council representing the greater Paris
region, the Île-de-France, Bardella continued on his ascension through the FN
ranks by launching a new group, 'Banlieues patriotes' ('Patriotic Suburbs'),
aimed at people living in the urban periphery. On its website, Soral’s Égalité
& Réconciliation movement was jubilant. “Has Alain Soral’s message finally
been heard within the Front National?” the organisation asked in an article
illustrated with a large photograph of the young Bardella.
Speaking to
Mediapart, one of E&R’s co-founders, Thomas M. (last name withheld),
recalled: “People linked to E&R were present at the launch of Banlieues
Patriotes.”
“The FN, now
the RN, is a very broad church. There were sovereigntists but also much more
radical elements that had to be accommodated,” he added.
Subsequent
events lend credence to this account. For its first, and only, public event,
Banlieues Patriotes held a discussion in a bar with an unexpected guest: Muslim
community activist Camel Bechikh, who was well-connected in Soral’s circles. “I
had no say over the choice of guest, that decision was made at Jordan
Bardella’s level,” Guy D. (last name withheld), then secretary general of
'Banlieues Patriotes', told Mediapart.
At the time,
Camel Bechikh was head of the 'Fils de France' association and dreamed of
building bridges with the far-right. He was helped in this by lawyer Philippe
Péninque, a friend and adviser to Marine Le Pen who was also close to Alain
Soral. Those links grew stronger during La
Manif pour tous protests against same-sex marriage in 2013, of which Camel
Bechikh became one of the representatives, but above all during the Jour
de Colère ('Day of Anger') marches in 2014, which were awash
with anti-Semitic and homophobic slogans.
Answering
questions from Jordan Bardella at a Banlieues Patriotes event on October 19th
2016, Camel Bechikh told those attending: “I believe that when you guillotine a
king who guaranteed a certain religious order in the country, when you separate
Church and State in 1905, when you pass a law on abortion, and most recently a
law on same-sex marriage, all of this runs counter to deep-rooted values,” he
told the discussion. Sitting beside him then, the now RN chairman nodded in
agreement.
YouTube
screenshot showing François Paradol, left, Jordan Bardella, centre and Camel
Bechikh, right, in 2016. © Mediapart photomontage
Sitting one
row behind them in the audience, a short-haired man in a polo shirt was
watching the event with keen interest. An FNJ campaigner alongside Jordan
Bardella, François Paradol was then the official treasurer of Banlieues
Patriotes. He, too, had been bombarded with recommendations for anti-Semitic
reading sent by Laurent G. in 2013, and had moved in Alain Soral’s networks, as
Mediapart revealed in December 2025, without this prompting any reaction
within the RN. He remains the party chairman’s chief of staff today.
Long-standing
and ongoing links with Frédéric Chatillon
During the
period 2013-2015, Jordan Bardella was also under the influence of another
mentor, Frédéric Chatillon, who was himself at the heart of the links between
the FN and Égalité & Réconciliation, as emails seen by Mediapart
demonstrate. A long-standing friend of Marine Le Pen, Frédéric Chatillon, who
travelled to Syria with Alain Soral and the comedian and activist Dieudonné in
2006, is known for his fascination with the Third Reich and his hatred of
Israel.
In the
exchanges seen by Mediapart, Jordan Bardella has nothing but harsh words for
the Jewish state. “I'm anti-Zionist, meaning that I am both against Zionism's
hold over France and against Israel’s domestic and foreign policies,” he wrote
in 2013. Like Frédéric Chatillon, he also voiced support for the dictatorial
regime of Bashar
al-Assad in Syria, whom he included among the “Arab dictators” who were
wrongly “demonised”.
Bardella’s
links with Frédéric Chatillon were not merely ideological. For a time, he
became part of the family of the former leader of the dissolved radical-right
group, the Groupe
union défense (GUD), after starting a relationship with one of his
daughters, Kerridwen Chatillon, who shares her father’s political views.
Bardella appeared with her at Marine Le Pen’s annual political gathering in
Brachay, in north-east France, on September 9th 2017, as journalist
Pierre-Stéphane Fort recounts in his book Le Grand Remplaçant ('The Great
Replacement') published by Studiofact in 2024.
Bardella's
fondness for this leading figure in the neo-fascist movement endured beyond the
end of that relationship, as shown by the roughly 40 posts on Frédéric
Chatillon’s Instagram account that Bardella “liked” up until June 2020.
A member of
Jordan Bardella’s current staff, Donatien Véret, was also among the recipients
of the recommended reading lists sent out by Laurent G. Another man who has
since become indispensable to the RN also appears on the same email chain:
Paul-Alexandre Martin. This protégé of Frédéric Chatillon runs the
communications company e-Politic, where François Paradol and Donatien Véret
have both worked. They all got to know each other in the FNJ alongside Jordan
Bardella and shared the same political commitments before advancing together
towards the top of the party.
Contacted by
Mediapart, François Paradol, Donatien Véret and Paul-Alexandre Martin did not
respond.
The friendships
that Paul-Alexandre Martin has maintained with certain figures in the
neo-fascist movement have done nothing to undermine his status as the Le Pen
party’s favoured communications contractor. Nor have they prevented him from
making money in Brussels thanks to the European Parliament group chaired by
Jordan Bardella, Patriots
for Europe (PfE). In 2025 alone, e-Politic received 341,395.52 euros from
the group, as reported by La
Lettre.
The
businesses run by Frédéric Chatillon, a long-standing contractor for the FN and
later the RN, have themselves continued to prosper. A June 2026 report
disclosed by Politico and Mediapart revealed
that his company, Unanime, secured a 1.4-million-euro contract with the
Identity and Democracy group (the name of the RN’s previous parliamentary
group) for printing and publishing services between 2019 and 2024.
More than a
year before uncovering Jordan Bardella’s writings, Mediapart unearthed
anti-Semitic, Islamophobic and homophobic writings by Caroline Parmentier, an
RN member of France’s parliament and a longstanding friend of Marine Le Pen.
Despite
those revelations, Parmentier, who had denounced the existence of a “Jewish
lobby” and who in 2018 paid tribute to Vichy regime leader Philippe Pétain,
retained her position as vice-president of the far-right party's parliamentary
group in the National Assembly, without a single voice raised against the
situation, in contrast to the fate of the handful of “black sheep” the RN takes
pleasure in expelling in order to protect the movement’s leadership.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- The original French version of
this article can be found here.
English
version by Michael Streeter, editing by Graham Tearse
Alexandre Berteau
and Antton
Rouget
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