“I am not contracting with you, I do not have to blow the balloon”, “I refuse to contract”. The message, if not clear, is repeated several times by Pierre and Laetitia during a roadside check with an alcohol test to which they refused to submit. In the video recording of the scene, taken from the passenger seat by the driver’s wife, which has gone viral on X since Tuesday, the couple uses abstruse legal language specific to the conspiracy movement of “sovereign beings”.
“In lower case, please, we are not businesses,” continues Laetitia in front of the police who tell her husband to reveal his identity. An absurd statement at first glance, but which refers to the founding concept of the movement: “legal name fraud”. According to this principle which describes a global legal conspiracy, when a person is born, a company is produced by the state in his name. “This name is then written in capital letters,” explains Vincent Flibustier, digital citizenship trainer, behind the publication of this video on X, which had more than 2 million views on Friday.
“Subjugate and exploit the population”
The recording of the disjointed exchanges between the two parties ends with the police destroying the window of the vehicle to arrest the driver and place him in police custody. Questioned live on the “Julie et Leelou” channel on Wednesday, alongside his wife, the man, visibly released from police custody, claims to have “suffered a kidnapping and sequestration by an organized gang”.
“Sovereign beings consider that the State is a harmful fiction which aims to subjugate and exploit the population,” explains Tristan Mendès France, associate lecturer at Paris Diderot University and specialist in conspiracy movements. To avoid it, it would be enough to “declare oneself sovereign by refusing to respect the laws, by not honoring signed contracts,” says the specialized site Conspiracy Watch. According to this founding principle, some refuse to pay their taxes, others to “submit” to police authority.
A movement from the United States
“They seek to put themselves on the margins of society”, summarizes the expert and, to achieve this, “put themselves in impossible situations”. “Some will lose their housing, their social assistance or their driving license, others will be ruined,” he lists.
The “sovereign beings” movement, which has gained sudden media coverage in recent days given the virality of this video, is not new. It was born in the United States, before being exported to other Anglo-Saxon countries in the 1980s, notably to Canada and Australia, before arriving in Europe. She advocates “civic disobedience through extremely virulent speeches imbued with strong mysticism”, adds Miviludes, an organization dedicated to the study of sectarian abuses, in its activity report for the year 2021.
In its American version, certain members were described in 2011 as a “domestic threat”. At issue in particular is the claim, by a person who helped plan the bloody attack in Oklahoma in 1995, of his belonging to “sovereign beings”. More recently, the “Oath Keepers” militia stood out during the Capitol riots in Washington DC. Further north, Romana Didulo, the self-proclaimed “Queen of Canada”, took over the movement and took on the role of guru.
Followers “in pain, desocialized”
Its more recent importation into France has been “gradual”, with a “fairly marginal” expression, although difficult to quantify, believes Tristan Mendès France.
The people concerned are “in pain, desocialized, fragile,” he adds. Ideas spread on the fertile ground of anti-system discourse, which functions as “a gateway to this radical vision”. All maintained “by a business which takes advantage of this anger by selling false papers, standard letters to send to bailiffs, which do not work”, according to Vincent Flibustier.
Part of the most convinced fringe has decided to isolate itself. Miviludes mentions, in its report, the ecovillage project carried by the One Nation movement in 2021. Led by the conspiratorial figure Alice Pazalmar, this group aims to create “a network of villages, a place of community life, under the form of an oasis bathing in harmonious interdependence with the living, populated by sovereign beings.” A project for which Miviludes indicates having processed ten referrals in 2021.
Another part of the movement continues to follow a more classic way of life, as seems to be the case of Pierre and Laetitia. “We have people who have decided to cut themselves off from society, to secede, while living next to us,” laments Vincent Flibustier, who sees it as a “real time bomb.”