France: criminal complaint over call against hobby hunting

French Green MP Sandrine Rousseau called for physical confrontation with hobby hunters at an eco gathering near Tours.

A right-wing nationalist MP subsequently filed a criminal complaint, and the French hunting association FNC has announced a suit of its own. We have reconstructed what was said, when, where and exactly how, and assess the legal situation.

What happened, when and where

From 21 to 23 August 2026, the «UniREVcité» took place in Saint-Antoine-du-Rocher near Tours, the summer university of Aymeric Caron's movement «Révolution écologique pour le vivant» (REV). Alongside Caron and left-wing politician Philippe Poutou, Paris National Assembly member Sandrine Rousseau also appeared, deliberately choosing this gathering rather than the official summer university of her own party «Les Écologistes».

On Sunday, 23 August, Rousseau spoke in a debate about the imminent opening of the hobby hunting season. According to the wording documented by several French media outlets, she said among other things: «Nous n’avons pas le temps d’être polis, d’attendre» ("We have no time to be polite, to wait") and announced: «Ma résolution de la rentrée, c’est que je n’ai plus rien à péter de leur bienséance, je ne veux plus être polie» ("My resolution for the rentrée is that I don't give a damn about their propriety, I no longer want to be polite").

She then called on her supporters to go to the hunting grounds at the start of the season: «Il va nous falloir nous affronter à cette ouverture de la chasse» ("We will have to confront this opening of the hunting season"), coupled with the hope «que nous serons nombreux et nombreuses à aller dans les forêts, dans les campagnes, dans les lisières, sur les chemins» ("that we will be numerous in going into the forests, into the countryside, to the woodland edges, onto the paths"). She spoke of mobilising «ce peuple de l’écologie», «pour empêcher qu’on ait un permis de tuer» ("to prevent there being a licence to kill").

Central to the subsequent complaint was the following sentence: «C’est parce que nous serons là, debout, face à eux, physiquement, qu’enfin ils prendront conscience de la réalité de ce que nous sommes» ("It is because we will be there, standing, facing them, physically, that they will finally realise the reality of what we are").

Why the statement became a legal case

RN member of parliament Matthias Renault (3rd constituency of the Somme) filed a report under Article 40 of the Code of Criminal Procedure with the public prosecutor in Tours on 25 August 2026. He bases this on the combination of the terms «affronter» (to confront), «empêcher» (to prevent), «face à eux» (facing them) and «physiquement» (physically). Renault expressly emphasises that he has so far received no indications that the appeal has already been followed by acts of violence or obstruction. His report therefore concerns the statement itself and its possible implications, not acts that have already occurred.

On 25 August, the Fédération Nationale des Chasseurs (FNC) also published a communiqué and announced its own criminal complaint against Rousseau, combined with a submission to the Prime Minister, the Interior Minister and the Justice Minister. In addition, the President of the National Assembly is to be called upon so that sanctions against Rousseau can be examined. The FNC speaks of a «radicalisation du discours public visant les chasseurs» and of a «dérive totalitaire de la pensée».

Legal assessment

Two different types of proceedings. Matthias Renault's report is a signalement under Article 40 CPP: an authority or public official brings possible criminal offences to the attention of the public prosecutor without itself being a plaintiff party. The public prosecutor decides independently whether to investigate. An action by the FNC, by contrast, would be a civil or criminal action with the FNC as a party actively demanding damages or a conviction.

The provisions invoked. Renault invokes Article 24 of the Press Act of 29 July 1881, which criminalises public incitement to certain offences, even if the appeal remained without consequences. He additionally cites Article R. 428-12-1 of the Environmental Code (Code de l’environnement), which sanctions concerted acts of obstruction against the conduct of hobby hunting.

Under settled French case law, a conviction under Article 24 requires a sufficiently direct and specific call to a concrete offence, not merely a general political declaration of war. Rousseau's wording is ambiguous: «affronter» and «physiquement» can be read both as a call to violent confrontation and as a call to a visible but non-violent presence on the ground («debout, face à eux» – standing, facing them). Whether the judiciary sees a punishable incitement in this depends heavily on the overall context of the speech, which, according to Renault's own letter, the public prosecutor has yet to clarify.

The background suggests caution in assessing the outcome. The FNC has already failed once with a structurally similar action against Rousseau. After her statement in February 2022 on the programme «Télématin» that a quarter of all femicides were linked to hunting weapons, and that this was an expression of an «intrinsic violence» of hobby hunters as a group, the FNC brought a civil action for around 9’888 euros in damages. In October 2024, the Paris Tribunal judiciaire dismissed the claim: the general tort liability under Article 1240 of the Civil Code could not be invoked to sanction breaches of freedom of expression, which properly fall under the Press Act of 1881. The court further held that the group of around one million hobby hunters was too indeterminate for any individual to feel personally targeted. The FNC lodged an appeal.

Difference from the current case. The present accusation is not aimed at the defamation of a group, but at a possible public incitement to concrete action under the Press Act itself, that is, the very law under which the earlier claim failed precisely because of the wrong legal basis. The legal starting position is therefore different this time; whether it is more robust will depend on whether the judiciary classifies the combination of words as a concrete call to action or as political rhetoric. As things stand today, there is no evidence of any obstruction of hunting activities or acts of violence having taken place as a result of the speech.

Where does the figure «a quarter of all femicides» come from

The figure used by Rousseau in 2022 and taken up again in the reporting on the current case goes back to research by the French online medium Reporterre from December 2021. For this, the journalist Moran Kerinec analysed press reports on homicides and suicides in 2020 and 2021 and compiled his own database from them, because there is no official crime statistic covering this connection. The result: in at least 27.54 per cent of the 102 femicides of 2020 and 25.44 per cent of the 106 cases of 2021, an «arme de chasse» (hunting weapon) was used, from which the widely circulated order of magnitude of «a quarter» is derived.

Important for context: Reporterre used a broad definition of the term «hunting weapon», including category B and C firearms, which also cover semi-automatic multi-shot weapons that are not even permitted for hunting in France. Critical voices from the hunting scene therefore objected that the figure conflated different types of weapon. Irrespective of this methodological weakness in the individual investigation, other sources support the basic finding: the forensic pathologist Alexia Delbreil and the criminologist Jean-Louis Senon found in a study that around 71 per cent of killings committed with firearms were carried out with hunting rifles, because these are frequently present in the household as «weapons of opportunity». As early as 2003, the psychiatrist Jean-Louis Terra had established that the risk of a woman being killed is five times higher in a household containing a firearm — a finding he described to Reporterre in 2021 as still valid.

Switzerland: an even poorer data situation than France. While France at least has a journalistic database, this country lacks even that. In cases of domestic violence resulting in death, a firearm is used in around half of all cases in Switzerland, and in more than 80 per cent of extended suicides involving the killing of a partner and children a firearm is involved. Hunting weapons, however, are not recorded separately in Swiss crime statistics: it is not known how many femicides were committed with hunting weapons or how many perpetrators held a hunting licence. What is well documented internationally, by contrast, is the general link that the availability of firearms in the household increases the risk of lethal violence against women — a pattern that has also been documented for Swiss army-issue weapons in studies by the Universities of Lausanne and St. Gallen.

This means that France, despite all the methodological criticism of the Reporterre figure, performs better than Switzerland on transparency: there is at least an attempt at systematic recording. In Switzerland, this has so far been entirely absent.

A Swiss case study illustrating this pattern. How strongly this gap operates in practice is shown by the femicide in Faido TI in July 2026. A 59-year-old man shot his ex-wife there and, the following day, blew up a house in Leontica in the Blenio valley, injuring several police officers; the perpetrator himself died. At the media conference of the Ticino criminal police on 13 July 2026 it was confirmed that the perpetrator was a hobby hunter and legally owned several firearms. Wildbeimwild.com reported on this, citing a written confirmation from the RSI editorial team, which classified it as «fatto accertato e confermato», an established and confirmed fact. No other media outlet took up this point. In the broad coverage of the case, the perpetrator's hunting background went unmentioned, even though it had been raised at the press conference.

This case is therefore more than a footnote: it illustrates in exemplary fashion why, even where a confirmation is publicly available, no robust statistics can emerge. If a perpetrator's hunting background regularly fails to make it into reporting even at the level of daily news, it certainly cannot feed into downstream crime statistics, which in any case rest on everyday categories such as «firearm» rather than «hunting weapon» or «holder of a hunting licence». The dark figure thus arises not only from the absence of official data collection, but already from a media selection process that as a rule does not even make the perpetrator's milieu a topic.

More on the case: Femicide in Faido, explosion in Leontica: not an isolated case, but a pattern among hobby hunters.

More on the topic in the Hunting and Weapons dossier as well as on template texts for hunting-critical motions on hunting weapons and femicides in cantonal parliaments. On how the French hunting lobby deals with criticism: Hobby hunters as victims? Hunting criticism and figures from France. Further background in the dossier on hobby hunting in France.