Activists return Macron waxwork stolen from Paris museum
Carrying on the action late on Tuesday, they placed the waxwork, estimated to be worth €40,000, in a chest and put it outside the headquarters of French electricity giant EDF.
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They also put the statue on its feet and stood next to it a sign with a slogan denouncing French President Emmanuel Macron for not completely cutting ties with Russia under Vladimir Putin, in particular in the energy sphere.
"Putin-Macron radioactive allies," it said.
Police then arrived and secured the chest and waxwork ahead of its return to the Musée Grévin, the Paris equivalent of Madame Tussauds in London.
"We came to bring back the statue of Emmanuel Macron because, as we said from the start, we had just borrowed it," Jean-Francois Julliard, executive director of Greenpeace France, told AFP at the scene.
"We notified both the management of the Musée Grévin and the police. It's up to them to come and retrieve it," he said.
The choice of the EDF headquarters was "to make Macron face up to his responsibilities concerning the trade that is maintained with Russia, particularly in the nuclear sector," he added.
According to Julliard, French companies can still, despite the sanctions regime in place since the invasion, "import a whole host of products from Russia" including enriched uranium to power French nuclear power plants, natural uranium transiting through Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan via Russia, LNG and chemical fertilisers.
He said Greenpeace particularly criticised the surge in Russian fertiliser imports into the EU, which rose some 80 percent between 2021 and 2023 according to French fertiliser manufacturers.
According to a police source, two women and a man on Monday entered the Grevin Museum posing as tourists and, once inside, changed their clothes to pass for workers. The activists slipped out through an emergency exit with the waxwork.
A museum spokeswoman acknowledged that "they had clearly done their research very thoroughly".
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A product with "a story to tell" The CEO admits to an obsession with mastering his business model, taking the time to build and consolidate the different strata of his project. He focuses on profitable growth, making sure to gradually increase his production capacity to meet demand on his e-commerce site, at his factory, and in the Montpellier boutique opened last year. "We thrive in digital, but perform better physically because our in-person experience aligns more with who we are—an excellence of products to touch, a strong story to tell. But we don't make any commercial decisions that might damage our values. Before developing a network of boutiques, we need to be sure we have the products to sell in those boutiques. You need factories and supply chains that stand the test of time. At a time when many companies were accelerating their commercial rollout, we insisted on our production facilities. We are super manufacturers: what's important is that we generate a super margin. We have very solid shareholders' equity. That's cool, because when you go to see your banker, that's the first thing he looks at." This focus on profitability is underpinned by a vision of financial autonomy to drive long-term transformation. With this in mind, Julien Tuffery admits that for the time being, he is not considering developing wholesale sales, as the margins of resellers today do not allow him to maintain prices in line with the market, in his opinion. "That would mean a retail price of less than €40," he says. "Right now, at €40, I've made half a pair of pants. I don't want to change our model. In 1983, my dad went from 60 to three people in a village of 2,000 inhabitants, because big retailers left for North Africa overnight. We've learned a lesson from this, and a great deal of humility about development." On the other hand, Atelier Tuffery is looking to the future. 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