Police custody ended for Pierre Chin. The former National Front elected official was released without prosecution at this stage, the Paris prosecutor’s office said on Friday, after a judicial investigation was opened against him on Tuesday. the degradation of a painting at the Palais de Tokyo.
Pierre Chin, leader of the National Front group on the municipal council of Les Mureaux (Yvelines) between 2014 and 2015, was arrested on Sunday and then placed in police custody as part of an investigation opened by the prosecution for degradation of exposed cultural property. He was suspected of having sprayed paint on the work “ abstraction! by Swiss artist Miriam Cahn, accused of child ography by detractors.
Pierre Chin was then released on Tuesday without prosecution at this stage. The investigations are continuing, the prosecution having entrusted the investigation to an investigating judge. The latter “will carry out the necessary expertise to ess the psychiatric state and the criminal responsibility of the person concerned” before deciding on a possible indictment, explained the public prosecutor.
“Smear campaign”
After the fact, President Emmanuel Macron condemned an “act of vandalism”. “To attack a work is to attack our values,” he tweeted on Monday. “In France, art is always free and respect for cultural creation is guaranteed”. The Minister of Culture Rima Abdul Malak for her part questioned the National Rally, accused of having carried out a “smear campaign” against this work. The minister had notably been questioned on the subject by the deputy RN Caroline Parmentier in March.
But Marine Le Pen replied that she could not be “held responsible for an individual act of someone who was a municipal councilor eight years ago” and ured that Pierre Chin was no longer a member of the party.
Exhibited in the Parisian contemporary art center since mid-February, the painting depicts a frail person with tied hands, forced into oral sex by a powerful faceless man. For his detractors, the victim is a child, which the artist denies, invoking the representation of as a weapon of war and a crime against humanity.
The ociations Lawyers for Childhood, Childhood in Sharing, Facing Incest and Innocence in Danger, considering child ography, demanded its removal but were dismissed in the spring by the Paris Administrative Court and then by the Council of State.