On Saturday evening, a black metal music festival close to neo-Nazi ideology and led by the Polish group Graveland was organized near Lyon in eastern France, despite a ban by the authorities.
The Call of Terror festival took place in Vézéronce-Curtin on February 24, a symbolic date corresponding to the anniversary of the founding of the Nazi Party in Germany in 1920.
The authorities claim to have learned “towards the end of the afternoon that the venue of this concert was in Vézéronce-Curtin, in the Isère, in a community hall that had been rented to an individual, without the community knowing the reason or nature of it “This gathering,” stated the prefecture of Isère, one of the five departments in which the festival was expressly banned.
The festival organizer was reminded of the ban by the gendarmerie but “refused to respect its conditions,” the prefectural press release said.
Five checkpoints have been set up by the gendarmerie on the main access roads to this town of 2,000, less than an hour's drive from Lyon, one of the strongholds of the ultra-right.
According to the prefecture, these “systematic controls” are carried out with a view to “prosecutions that may be initiated against the organizers or participants”.
Organizers risk up to six months in prison and a $10,900 fine. Participants are subject to a fourth-class fine, which cannot exceed a few hundred dollars.
The festival's headliners were the Polish group Graveland, known “for their paeans to the Third Reich”, and others such as Leibwätcher (bodyguards), in reference to the SS division responsible for the close protection of Adolf Hitler.
The event, announced on social networks without any other location as “Rhône-Alpes Region”, was banned because it was “close to neo-Nazi ideology” and to “prevent any attack on public order”, recalled the prefecture.