Paris – Pig’s tail, pig’s feet and other pig parts, all tossed into a pot with turnips, carrots and onions.
Perfumed with smoked bacon and served steaming hot. Delicious!
But there’s trouble brewing in this broth.
Small groups linked to the extreme right are ladling pork soup to France’s homeless.
Critics and some officials denounce the charity as discriminatory: Because it contains pork, the soup is off-limits for Muslims.
Critics view the stew – dubbed “identity soup” by its cooks – as a cynical far-right ploy to penetrate the most vulnerable level of society while masking their intentions as humanitarian.
The associations offering the soup are satellites of Bloc Identitaire, a small, extreme-right movement that defends the European identity and, as its leader Fabrice Robert said, “the rights of the little whites.”
“It’s not that we don’t like Muslims. It’s a problem of critical mass,” Robert said in a telephone interview. “Just 1,000 Muslims in France poses no problem, but 6 million poses a big problem.”
The country’s Muslim population – the largest in western Europe – is estimated at 5 million, many of them French citizens.
The associations deny any ties to the far-right National Front party, which opposes Muslim immigration and built its reputation around the theme of “French first.”
Still, the National Front salutes the pork soup project.
“One has the right to be charitable toward whom one wants,” said Bruno Gollnisch, the party’s No. 2 person. Moves to forbid soup kitchens offering pork reveal authorities’ “alienation” from the French people, he said.
Pork soup is an age-old staple of the rural heartland from which all the French, at least in the national imagination, are said to spring.
The groups dishing up the soup say their victuals are no more than traditional French cuisine and deny they are serving up a message of racial hatred – a crime in France – or that they would deny soup to a hungry Muslim or Jew.
In Strasbourg, pork soup was banned this month after officials deemed it could disrupt public order.
