{"id":320796,"date":"2025-08-05T21:20:13","date_gmt":"2025-08-05T21:20:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/320796\/"},"modified":"2025-08-05T21:20:13","modified_gmt":"2025-08-05T21:20:13","slug":"man-who-lit-cigarette-from-french-war-memorial-flame-faces-legal-action-france","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/320796\/","title":{"rendered":"Man who lit cigarette from French war memorial flame faces legal action | France"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"dcr-16w5gq9\">A French minister has said she is taking legal action against an unidentified man who was filmed lighting a cigarette from a memorial flame at a major <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/paris\" data-link-name=\"in body link\" data-component=\"auto-linked-tag\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Paris<\/a> war monument.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-16w5gq9\">The video of a man stooping to light a cigarette from the fire at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe, before walking calmly away watched by tourists, caused indignation when it was widely shared on social media.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-16w5gq9\">\u201cI am filing a case immediately with the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/paris\" data-link-name=\"in body link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Paris<\/a> state prosecutors so that this man will be found and sanctions imposed to make an example of him,\u201d Patricia Miralles, the minister for veterans and remembrance, wrote on X.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-16w5gq9\">\u201cYou cannot ridicule French remembrance and get away with it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-16w5gq9\">The tomb, under the arch at the top of the Champs-\u00c9lys\u00e9es avenue, contains the remains of a soldier killed in the first world war and is laid there as a tribute to France\u2019s war dead.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-16w5gq9\">\u201cThis flame does not light a cigarette, it burns for the sacrifice of millions of our soldiers,\u201d said Miralles.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-16w5gq9\">\u201cThis is an insult to our dead, to our history and to our nation.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-16w5gq9\">AFP was not able to determine the origin of the video.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-16w5gq9\">Le Figaro newspaper reported that it was filmed by a Latvian tourist on the evening of 4 August and first posted on TikTok.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A French minister has said she is taking legal action against an unidentified man who was filmed lighting&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":320797,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[12,26],"class_list":{"0":"post-320796","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-news","9":"tag-world"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=320796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320796\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/320797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=320796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=320796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=320796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}