Fabrice Robert

Fabrice Robert (born in 1971), is a French political activist, a figure of the and later of the identitarian movement. He was a member of Third Way and later of Nouvelle Résistance, and served as a National Front city council member in La Courneuve from 1995 to 2001. In 1998, he helped found Unité Radicale, becoming one of its leaders, and in April 2003, he co-founded the Bloc identitaire with Guillaume Luyt and , serving as its president. He founded the Novopress news agency in 2005. He has been the bassist of rock identitaire français band since its founding in 1994. He was convicted in 1992 for distributing negationist leaflets, and again in 2005 for defamation.

Biography Background Fabrice Robert was born in 1971. In 1996 he obtained a maîtrise in political science from the Université Nice-Sophia-Antipolis, on the subject of nationalist propaganda through music, under the title La Diffusion de l'idéal identitaire européen à travers la musique contemporaine ("The spread of the European identitarian ideal through contemporary music"); in it he concluded that the internet represented the best vehicle for spreading identitarian ideas and that music was an essential component of this.

Political activism Early on he was a skinhead within the neo-fascist movement Third Way. During the 1990s he was subsequently a member of Nouvelle Résistance, where he was responsible for youth affairs.

In 1998 he took part in founding Unité Radicale. It was through contacts he personally established that the Groupe Union Défense joined the alliance. He was the webmaster of Unité Radicale's website, at the time among the most-visited sites of the far-right online scene, drawing nearly 60,000 page views a month in spring 2002. Robert was also head of the National Republican Movement (MNR) in Nice and helped organise the MNR congress held in that city in February 2002, at which he was elected, alongside Christian Bouchet, to the MNR's national council. That same month Robert became Unité Radicale's spokesperson after the post was created. In April 2002, Bouchet handed leadership of Unité Radicale to Guillaume Luyt and Fabrice Robert. In 2002 Fabrice Robert explained that the aim had been to create a vehicle for politicisation within the skinhead movement, without the band either splitting from it or becoming a separate political structure, the objective being the radicalisation of extremist youth, particularly youth. In 1998, when Nouvelle Résistance was transformed into Unité Radicale, the band dropped the name "Hexagone" and became simply Fraction. Fraction ceased activity in 2004.

In 2005, then director of publication of the Jeunesses identitaires website, Fabrice Robert was convicted of insult and defamation against a school headmaster, and fined €5,000 (€3,500 suspended), plus €1,500 in damages, after the site had criticised the headmaster's ban on wearing the Harrington jacket, deemed a "symbol of belonging to a group whose ideology is racism".