Why did activists steal the wax statue of Emmanuel Macron from museum?

Euronews

03-06-2025

Greenpeace activists stole the wax statue of French president Emmanuel Macron from the Musée Grévin on Monday before planting it outside the Russian embassy in Paris.
According to reports, activists posing as tourists entered the famous Parisian museum, located in the 9th arrondissement. After posing as museum employees, they managed to steal the statue, worth €40,000, and hid it under a blanket.
A man who identified himself as a member of Greenpeace then contacted the museum to claim responsibility. The museum management immediately informed the police.
The activists then took the statue to the Russian embassy in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, brandishing placards and a banner saying 'Ukraine burns, business continues' to denounce France's economic ties with Russia – specifically French imports of gas and fertiliser from Russia.
Greenpeace said in a statement that it had "borrowed" the statue and explained their action on social media.
'For us, France is playing a double game,' said Jean-Francois Julliard, Director General of Greenpeace France. 'Emmanuel Macron embodies this double discourse: he supports Ukraine but encourages French companies to continue trading with Russia.'
He added: 'We are targeting Emmanuel Macron, because he has a particular responsibility in this situation. He is the one who should be at the forefront of European discussions to put an end to trade contracts between Russia and European countries.'
Une publication partagée par Libération (@liberationfr)
The protest lasted a few minutes before police intervened.
Two people have been arrested, and no news yet on when the wax statue will head back to the Musée Grévin.
Israeli soldiers on Monday barred journalists from entering villages in the West Bank on a planned tour organized by the directors of the Oscar-winning movie No Other Land.
The directors of the deeply compassionate and powerful documentary, which focuses on the systematic Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank, said they had invited the journalists on the tour to interview residents about increasing settler violence in the area.
In video posted on X by the film's co-director, Yuval Abraham, an Israeli soldier tells a group of international journalists there is "no passage' in the area because of a military order.
Basel Adra, a Palestinian co-director of the film who lives in the area, said the military then blocked the journalists from entering two Palestinian villages they had hoped to visit.
'They don't want journalists to visit the villages to meet the residents,' said Adra, who had invited the journalists to his home. 'It's clear they don't want the world to see what is happening here.'
Some of the surrounding area, including a collection of small Bedouin villages known as Masafer Yatta, was declared by the military to be a live-fire training zone in the 1980s. Some 1,000 Palestinians have remained there despite being ordered out, and journalists, human rights activists and diplomats have visited the villages in the past.
Palestinian residents in the area have reported increasing settler violence since 7 October 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel and kickstarted the war in the Gaza Strip.
Israeli soldiers regularly move in to demolish homes, tents, water tanks and olive orchards — and Palestinians fear outright expulsion could come at any time.
Adra said the journalists were eventually able to enter one of the villages in Masafer Yatta, but were barred from entering Tuwani, the village where he lives, and Khallet A-Daba, where he had hoped to take them.
Adra said settlers arrived in Khallet A-Daba Monday and took over some of the caves where village residents live, destroying residents' belongings and grazing hundreds of sheep on village lands. The military demolished much of the village last month.
No Other Land, which won the Oscar this year for Best Documentary, chronicles the struggle by residents to stop the Israeli military from demolishing their villages. The joint Palestinian-Israeli production was directed by Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Palestinian activist from Masafer Yatta, and Israeli directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor.
The film also won Best Documentary at the Berlinale, with Adra using his acceptance speech to say that it was difficult to celebrate while his Palestinian compatriots in Gaza were being 'slaughtered and massacred.' He called on Germany 'to respect the UN calls and stop sending weapons to Israel.'
Abraham, then took to the stage: 'We are standing in front of you. Now, we are the same age. I am Israeli, Basel is Palestinian. And in two days, we go back to a land where we are not equal.'
He continued: 'I am under civilian law; Basel is under military law. We live 30 minutes from one another but I have voting rights. Basel does not have voting rights. I am free to move where I want in this land. Basel, like millions of Palestinians, is locked in the occupied West Bank. This situation of apartheid between us, this inequality, has to end.'
At the time, the speeches of Abraham and Adra were criticized by the Mayor of Berlin, Kai Wegner - of the Christian Democratic Union party.
On X, he wrote: 'Anti-Semitism has no place in Berlin, and that also applies to the art scene. I expect the new management of the Berlinale to ensure that such incidents do not happen again.'
This led to a massive backlash, and this year, the new Berlinale director Trcia Tuttle addressed the controversy around the film, defending the No Other Land filmmakers by saying that 'discourse which suggests this film or its filmmakers are antisemitic creates danger for all of them, inside and outside of Germany, and it is important that we stand together and support them.'