25 June 2025

Pro-LGBT Leftist Activist Appointed President of French Scout Movement

This is exactly why independent Scouting is burgeoning! The World Federation of Independent Scouts, founded in 1996, now has 151 affiliated Scout organisations in 65 countries.


From The European Conservative

By Hélène de Lauzun, PhD

The lady claims to be a champion of pluralism—but of a one-sided kind.

The national Scouts and Guides of France movement has just appointed a new 39-year-old president. An unexpected choice: Marine Rosset is a socialist politician and an LGBT activist known for her pro-abortion stance. Such a choice for a youth movement that draws its identity from Catholicism has sparked controversy.

The news was announced on Saturday, June 14th, and immediately provoked cautious reactions. France’s largest scouting movement, with nearly 100,000 members across the country, has chosen a president who is anything but neutral. Marine Rosset is known to Parisians for having been a socialist councillor in the capital’s 5th arrondissement. She was nominated by the left-wing alliance in the 2022 elections, under the NUPES banner, and then in 2024 for the New Popular Front. Officially, the Scouts et Guides de France, affiliated with the French Scouting Federation, are supposed to be ‘apolitical.’ But in France, ‘apolitical’ is often synonymous with ‘left-wing.’ Only right-wingers can be criticised for their political commitment, which is, of course, by necessity bad.

But that’s not all. Rosset’s positions are almost entirely at odds with Catholic values, which are at the root of the French Scouting movement, founded by Father Jacques Sevin and Canon Cornette in 1920, following in the footsteps of the British Baden-Powell. Rosset, who is herself homosexual, has made women’s rights, gay rights, and abortion “her priorities,” according to The Huffington Post.

Rosset’s election is no coincidence. The new president enjoyed broad support for her appointment as head of the movement, confirming a fundamental shift towards uncompromising progressivism that has been underway for several years in France’s oldest youth movement. The chaplain general of the Scouts et Guides de France, Xavier de Verchère, who was unable to take part in the vote, publicly disapproved of this choice. 

On the Left, however, socialist politicians welcomed Rosset’s success, which they see as a victory “against those reactionary voices that cannot tolerate the progressive evolution of our society or political pluralism.” Make no mistake: the political pluralism referred to here is, of course, one-sided, and one can well imagine the public outcry that would have accompanied the election of a right-wing figure to the presidency of the conservative Guides et Scouts d’Europe movement—the competitor of the Scouts de France. 

Among the Guides et Scouts d’Europe, it is normally considered essential for access to the movement’s leadership to have no known political affiliations whatsoever. But not everyone has the same ethical standards. 

Rosset assures that the association “will never be reduced to a single party.” She is probably thinking of the diversity that exists within the New Popular Front: socialists, greens, communists, Mélenchonists, all are welcome. It has been a long time since families who lean a little too far to the Right deserted the movement, where they were not welcome.

It remains to be seen whether the Conference of Bishops of France will rule on this contentious case. When abortion was enshrined in the Constitution, the French bishops reiterated that abortion was “an attack on life” and could not be reduced to a claim for individual freedom. How does Rosset intend to reconcile this statement with her convictions on the matter? 

As Father Clément Barré, a priest in the diocese of Bordeaux who is very involved with young people and himself chaplain to the Scouts de France, points out, it is problematic that the head of a scouting movement should be someone who defends “positions that are directly contrary to the teachings of the Church.” He adds on X: “If the Scouts et Guides de France continue to embrace all the world’s struggles, its vocabulary, and its obsessions, they risk having nothing left to defend but themselves.” This observation, which sadly applies to this French youth movement today, could be extended to all progressive activism.

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