Activists steal Macron waxwork from French museum to highlight trade with Russia
Environmental activists melted away from a Paris museum with a waxwork of President Emmanuel Macron to protest about France’s business ties with Russia and climate change.
Greenpeace France said in a statement Monday that they had “borrowed” the model from the Grévin Museum to highlight gas, chemical fertilizer and nuclear power contracts between the two countries which “finance the war in Ukraine.”
“Despite Macron’s international speeches of solidarity with Ukraine, France continues to line Moscow’s pockets,” the statement said. “As long as these dependencies persist, efforts to restore peace to Ukraine and strengthen the strategic sovereignty of France and the E.U. will remain futile,” it added.
Activists entered the museum as regular visitors, grabbed the statue and covered it with a blanket before rushing it out towards a waiting car, a Greenpeace spokesperson told Reuters.
“There was no confrontation with museum security because we had planned everything carefully to ensure it happened quickly,” the spokesperson said, adding the museum had not been made aware of the action beforehand.
NBC News has approached the Grévin Museum — which displays waxwork figures of more than 200 famous people — for comment. Macron’s office was not immediately available for comment.
The waxwork later reappeared outside the French capital’s Russian embassy, alongside several protesters. Greenpeace said they would return it to the museum, although it was unclear when this might happen.
No arrests have been made and the waxwork, worth a reported €40,000 ($45,674), has not yet been recovered.
Macron, along with fellow European leaders like the U.K.’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, has been leading efforts to broker a ceasefire in the war between Russia and Ukraine which entered its fourth year in February.
But France, along with Belgium and Spain, is among the main importers of liquefied natural gas from Russia according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), an independent research organization focused on air pollution.
Russia had made more than €883bn ($973bn) in revenue from fossil fuel exports since it first invaded Ukraine in 2022, of which, France contributed €17.9bn ($20.4bn), according to CREA.
“If we want to be coherent and consistent, we cannot, on the one hand, support Ukraine and, on the other, continue to import such massive amounts of gas, chemical fertilizers, and uranium,” Greenpeace France director Jean-Francois Julliard told Reuters.