“The meaning of the absurd“. Sunday April 4, 2021, Pierre-Jean Chalençon’s lawyer – owner of Palais Vivienne and renowned collector passionate about Napoleon suspected of having organized illegal dinners in Paris in times of Covid-19 following an investigation by M6 – assured AFP that his client was doing “humor” and that he wielded the “sense of the absurd”. His remarks on ministers who had taken part in clandestine dinners in Paris had indeed caused a stir. It all started with the broadcast of a report in the 19.45 from M6 on Friday April 2, 2021. The investigation filmed with a hidden camera showed a paid party organized in a private place in the capital. The images are blurred but many Internet users are convinced that they have recognized the Palais Vivienne, owned by Pierre-Jean Chalençon.
The former buyer ofCase Concluded, who also lambasted the France 2 program, then responded to these accusations on Sunday April 4, 2021 on Twitter being very clear: “Totally false and slanderous … !!!!! “. In this same report, the organizer of the illegal dinner in the place that Internet users believe to be the Palais Vivienne, presented as a renowned collector, provides under disguised voice-over: “I had dinner this week in two or three restaurants, which are precisely supposedly illegal restaurants with a certain number of ministers. So that makes me laugh gently. We are still in a democracy, we do what we want” .
“Pierre-Jean Chalençon has always enjoyed making humor”
Even if nothing guarantees that this voice-over is that of Pierre-Jean Chalençon, his lawyer Me Jean-Luc Chetboun took the lead in his press release to AFP on Sunday April 4: “Pierre-Jean Chalençon, a great collector of Napoleon’s objects, always enjoyed making humor (…). This is how when he specifies that he dines with ministers in illegal restaurants, he brilliantly handles the sense of the absurd … ”
Besides Pierre-Jean Chalençon, the chef Christophe Leroy is also targeted by internet users. The latter indeed seem convinced that he is the cook at the head of the upscale restaurant in which the journalists of M6 managed to go during their report. Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin clarified that “either (these facts) are false and one should not cast the reproach obviously, or they are true and obviously (…) the people must be able to be prosecuted and, I imagine, condemned for having organized such parties” . He asked the Paris police chief to seize the facts related in the report. The Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire, however assured on LCI : “All ministers, without exception, respect the rule.”
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