Atalante and Its Sympathizers: Quentin Pallavicini’s Canadian Dream

This article offers a portrait of Quentin Pallavicini, known up to this point by his pseudonym “Jean Brunaldo,” a patented fascist imported from France, who over the years has become an important figure in Atalante Québec, particularly in its efforts to establish the group in the Montréal area.

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Atalante in Montréal

When Atalante Québec was founded in the summer of 2016, the organization was based in the street gang the Québec Stomper Crew and its entourage, the fan base of the band Légitime Violence, and the bonehead milieu still active in the areas around the capital city, which provided the organization with a few dozen sympathizers from the outset.

In Montréal, the situation was altogether different. In 2016, there were no longer any organized groups, or even an informal scene, in the city that Atalante could turn to for support. The most recent attempts at building something in the bonehead/neonazi milieu at the end of the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s, e.g., Strike Force, Légion Nationale, and the Troisième Voie, ended in defeat under the pressure brought to bear by antifascists, and more than few of these neo-Nazis left the city, while others slithered back under their rock. As for the forces behind the group La Bannière Noire, in many ways an immediate precursor to Atalante, they were never able to find the necessary space for their project to take root and disappeared into oblivion in 2014–2015.

In 2017, Atalante grew closer to the Soldiers of Odin in Montréal, an organization recently formed around the bonehead Philipe Gendron. On November 25, 2017, the SOO went to Québec City to join Atalante and other neo-Nazis protesting on the city’s ramparts. Then on January 20, 2018, a handful of SOO and its sympathizers, including the ill-famed Shawn Beauvais-MacDonald, participated in a postering action in Montréal on Atalante’s behalf. The idiots were easily identified as a result of their own stupidity and ineptitude.

Atalante and the Soldiers of Odin came together in Québec City, on April 2, 2018.

On April 2, 2018, the rapprochement between Atalante and the SOO seemed to be stronger than ever, with quite a few of the SOO joining a commemoration in Québec City. Then, in July 2018, the SOO were routed by a in the Montréal region, after which Atalante Québec no longer had an allied group already active in Greater Montréal region that it could rely on. At that point, the organization probably understood that it would likely have to rely on its own relatively limited means.

In 2018, a small group, including, among others, Beauvais-MacDonald and Vincent Cyr, was formed. A handful of the old-school boneheads that hadn’t left Montréal could be found hovering around the periphery (e.g., Francis Hamelin, Gabriel Drouin, and Dominic Cossette), and a few ex-pat French fascists joined the group, for instance, a certain Charles Leclerc (since returned to France) and the couple Quentin Pallavicini (alias “Jean Brunaldo”) and Lucie Mergnac (alias “Chloé Fleuri”). Fairly quickly this little gang began participating in Atalante Québec activities (training exercises, outings in the woods, social events, etc.) and attempted to establish a street presence in Montréal.

• On April 28, 2018, for the first time, a few of them handed out bagged lunches in downtown Montréal, taking up a form of selective charity used by neo-Nazis first and foremost to clean up their image.
• A month later, on May 23, 2018, a half a dozen militants from Montréal and Québec City, including Shawn Beauvais-MacDonald and Quentin Pallavicini, invaded the Vice office.

Quentin Pallavicini takes part in the infamous invasion of Vice Québec‘s office in  Montréal, in May 2018.

• On July 28, 2018, a sizeable group of Atalante militants from Québec City made a weekend trip to Montréal in one of their largest shows of force. About thirty of them distributed sandwiches in the afternoon in the Quartier Latin, and a few of them showed up in a tavern in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve that evening.

Quentin Pallavicini takes part in a postering action for Atalante in Montréal, on July 28, 2018.

• On February 9, 2019, a small group of them distributed sandwiches in downtown Montréal.
• On July 15, 2019, Atalante was in Montréal again.
  

  Atalante probably gathered all its militants from across the province to take this picture in front of the Jean Vauquelin monument, in Old-Montreal, on July 15, 2019. Quentin Pallavicini is circled.

• On September 30, 2019, the group carried out another food distribution action in Montréal, in the Quartier Latin and the Village. They gathered outside the Berri Metro station in a largely unsuccessful effort to intimidate the clients at the L’Escalier bar.
  

  Unmasked, from left to right, Shawn Beauvais-MacDonald, Quentin Pallavicini and Vincent Cyr, organized a sandwich distribution action with other Atalante militants in Montréal, on September 30, 2019.

• There were also a few poster and banner actions in 2019 and 2020, primarily in the east of Montréal, as well as at the onramp for autoroute 15 at boulevard Crémazie. The final postering action took place on September 13, 2020, the only known action carried out by Atalante in the Greater Montréal area during the pandemic.

Quentin Pallavicini in a lunchbag distribution action with Atalante in Montréal, on July 28, 2018.

Quentin Pallavicini in a lunchbag distribution action with Atalante in Québec, in August 2018. Notice the cobweb tattoo on the right elbow.

On the right, Quentin Pallavicini and Lucie Mergnac, with other Atalante activists on a trek, in October 2018.

Lucie Mergnac and Quentin Pallavicini, in October 2018.

Quentin Pallavicini walks with Atalante in Quebec City on May 6, 2019. In the foreground, Vincent Cyr of Varennes.

Quentin Pallavicini trains with Shawn Beauvais-MacDonald in Montreal in spring 2019. The Netflix reference is to Beauvais-MacDonald’s brief appearance in Vice‘s documentary “Charlottesville: Race and Terror”, on the Charlottesville events of Aug. 11-12, 2017.

As we can see on the Atalante Facebook page and on its members’ social media accounts, while the Québec City group makes numerous outings, the Montréal team is much less active, and even communication among members is much rarer.

In September 2019, the Montréal crew suffered another difficult blow: Shawn Beauvais-MacDonald and Vincent Cyr were targeted in a number of ways, including in an article titled “Chasing Atalante: Where Do the Fascists Work?,” which exposed where they worked.

At a certain point, Shawn Beauvais-MacDonald seemed to take his distance from the group, quite likely to reduce the possibility of his reputation as a lowlife creating any blowback for Raphaël Lévesque, whose trial for the Vice office invasion was set for December 2019. It was around this time that antifascists distributed leaflets exposing him in his neighbourhood and at the trade school he (briefly) attended. Vincent Cyr also began appearing less frequently in Atalante group photos. Posters were regularly hung around Fruiterie Milano, in the Jean-Talon neighbourhood where he worked (and still works) as a butcher, and leaflets were where he lives.

Posters pasted in the window of the Fruiterie Milano, in Little Italy, in Montréal, in the summer of 2019.

Quentin Pallavicini, on the other hand, just kept getting closer to the Québec City hard core, whose social activity is thoroughly documented by Roxanne Baron on Instagram!

Quentin Pallavicini (with a KKK t-shirt), Roxanne Baron, Yannick Vézina and Lucie Mergnac.

Gabriel Bolduc, Vivianne St-Amant, Quentin Pallavicini and Yannick Vézina.

Quentin Pallavicini (on the left, standing) with some of Atalante’s core crew.

Who is Quentin Pallavicini?

Quentin Pallavicini (born November 16, 1994) and Lucie Mergnac arrived in Québec in January 2017. They lived in Montréal for a couple of months, before settling down in Laval.

He comes from the Paris area, is a plumber by training, and spent his adolescence as part of a gang of young boneheads who gravitated to KOP of Boulogne (supporters of Paris St-Germain soccer team who are known for their racism, homophobia, and extreme violence), the Jeunesses nationalistes révolutionnaires (JNR), and Troisième Voie, a groupuscule within the “nationaliste révolutionnaire” movement organized around the emblematic Serge Ayoub. Troisième Voie dissolved in 2013 following the murder of left-wing activist Clément Méric by JNR boneheads.

Quentin Pallavicini with his bonehead friends from the Jeunesse nationalistes révolutionnaires (JNR) at Serge Ayoub‘s bar in Paris, around 2013.

Quentin Pallavicini remembers “when everything was fine” with his bonehead friends in Paris, in May 2013, only a few weeks before the murder of Clément Méric by Esteban Morillo and Samuel Dufour.

Here is the same picture, uncensored. Quentin Pallavicini is circled; on the left, Samuel Dufour, one of the two murderers of Clément Méric.

A close friend of Samuel Dufour, one of Clément Méric’s killers, Quentin Pallavicini exiled himself to Québec, possibly to escape an increasingly intense environment. Since arriving in Québec, he has made contact with Atalante and set about living his true Canadian Dream.

A car lover, Pallavicini has bought and sold a number of SUVs and, for a time, became a sort of designated driver for Atalante. A self-tyled neo-Nazi and provocateur, he’s living his version of the good life at the heart of Québec’s neo-Nazi microcosm.

Quentin Pallavicini chauffeurs Raphaël Lévesque’s small entourage to the courthouse for the latter’s first appearance in the case of the invasion of Vice Québec’s office.

Quentin Pallavicini regularly serves as a driver for Atalante activists’ social outings in 2019. For a good laugh, Gabriel Bolduc throws a Nazi salute in the back seat, and Beauvais-MacDonald flashes a White Power sign…

From Jean+Chloé to Quentin+Lucie

Since arriving in Québec, Quentin and Lucie have hidden their identities behind pseudonyms. Although Lucie’s identity was rapidly uncovered, Quentin maintained his anonymity for a longer time.

One of Quentin Pallavicini’s fake accounts under the pseudonym Jean Brunaldo.

It was thanks to Lucie that we got our first clue about her boyfriend’s first name from a customer service platform of a telephone service company, when the couple were attempting to get their operator identity statements (OIS), so they could continue to use their French telephone numbers when they arrived in Québec. A certain “Quentin P.” used the same message as “Lucie Mergnac” word for word and provided a partially obscured e-mail address. An indiscretion on the part of a member of his family gave us his last name: Pallavicini. A little quick research and we had our fascist.

Quentin Pallavicini’s Achille’s heel …

The same e-mail address was used in July 2020 to advertise a car for sale in Nouvelle-Calédonie (where it is possible that Quentin spent part of the first shutdown); the advertisement was reproduced on the site of a Facebook group in Nouvelle-Calédonie . . . using Jean Brunaldo’s account. That closed the circle.

In the summer of 2020, during the low point of the COVID-19 pandemic, Quentin Pallavicini used his Gmail account to try and sell cars imported from Canada on the online sales site Argus of New Caledonia.

At the same time,  «Jean Brunaldo» posts very similar ads on the Nouméa Expats Facebook group, a group used by French expatriates… in New Caledonia.

One ad posted on the Facebook group Nouméa Expats by “Jean Brunaldo” to sell an SUV exported to New Caledonia from Canada.

The discovery of this e-mail address proved quite revealing: we turned up the portrait of quite distasteful and reactionary young French man—with zero points for originality. . .

One of the comments made by Quentin Pallavicini under his Gmail account.

Furthermore, activity on his Gmail account tells us that during the winter of 2019, Pallavicini visited the Cutty Sark bar and Roma Classic tattoo parlour in Rome, two businesses notorious for their connection to CasaPound, the Italian neo-fascist groupuscule with close ties to Atalante. The timing corresponds exactly with a trip that a number of Atalante members made Italy. .

Quentin Pallavicini’s online activity reveals that he visited Roma Classic tattoo parlor and Cutty Sark Pub in Rome in January 2019. Both of these businesses are associated with CasaPound.

Aatalante militants, including Quentin Pallavicini and Lucie Mergnac, visit CasaPound HQ at 8 Via Napoleone III, Rome, in January 2019.

From left to right: Vivianne St-Amant, Lucie Mergnac, Quentin Pallavicini, Yannick Vézina, Roxanne Baron (canceled), Jonathan Payeur, Simon Gaudreau and Gabriel Drouin, on the rooftop of CasaPound’s HQ at 8 Via Napoleone III in Rome, January 2019.

Atalante militants, visiting Rome in January 2019, pose in front of the Cutty Sark pub (linked to CasaPound) at 5 Via Carlo Botta. In the foreground, on the right, Sébastien Magnificat, CasaPound’s international relations “minister”.

His Instagram account (now closed) provided other clues that allowed us to easily find his home in Chomedey area of Laval.

A glimpse of Quentin Pallavicini’s activity in the Chomedey sector of Laval, near his home.

If you know Quentin Pallavicini or Lucie Mergnac and you’d like to take part in the collective antifascist effort by sharing your information with us, write to us at alerta-mtl(a)riseup.net.

In conclusion

We have outlined the picture of an Atalante Québec militant who has been quite active in the Montréal area for a while now. Whatever Alexandre Cormier Denis might tell you, sadly, French immigrants are not all “filthy leftists.” Not even close, it ends up! There is, as it happens, in the inner circle of neo-fascists in Atalante’s orbit.

Finally, some questions arise: even if we have good reason to believe that Quentin Pallavicini is still living in Québec, we have been unable to specifically identify him around Atalante actions since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. He might be taking advantage of the group’s inactivity in the Greater Montréal region in the recent years to distance himself. Is he still a self-described neo-Nazi and an inveterate racist? There can’t be the least doubt. As a militant fascist since his adolescence and having made the rounds of the worst “nationaliste-révolutionnaire” organizations in France and Québec, we cannot see him one day, all of a sudden, just abandoning his toxic ideology.