Paris ( CNN ) -- The gesture could n't have been more dramatic , nor the setting more grand : 78-year-old French writer and historian Dominique Venner chose the altar of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris to shoot himself in front of about 1,500 horrified visitors . Just before pulling the trigger , he had meticulously laid a letter on the altar for the police . Venner , a former paratrooper and member of the Secret Army Organization ( OAS ) , a group opposed to Algeria 's independence and which waged a war of terror against Charles de Gaulle and his government in the early 1960s , was a theorist of the French Extreme Right . Marine Le Pen , leader of the Extreme-Right National Front party , provoked controversy when immediately took to Twitter to salute Venner 's `` political gesture , '' concluding that he had tried `` to wake France up . '' `` Venner 's models were ancient Greece and ancient Rome , he was a pagan and an anti-Christian but chose a highly symbolic place of western civilization to kill himself , `` commented Christophe Forcari in the French daily newspaper LibÃ©ration . Read more : Man kills himself at Notre Dame Cathedral . Lately , Venner 's anger had focused on the same-sex marriage bill which became law last Saturday , and the abrogation of which , he thought , the French should seek in mass street protests . He dreamt , in fact , of a reactionary insurrection , a `` French Spring . '' In a last post on his blog , he backed the anti-same-sex marriage march planned for this Sunday . He wrote that demonstrators were `` right to shout their impatience and anger '' and that laws could be overturned if the people shouted loudly enough . A xenophobe , he loathed multicultural France and called for radical and symbolic acts to `` reawaken the memory of our origins . '' By committing suicide in such a fashion , Venner certainly hoped to show the way to like-minded radical militants ; he recently wrote : `` sometimes words are not enough , they need to be substantiated by acts . '' The four-month-long campaign on the same-sex marriage bill , during which supporters and protesters fought each other , sometimes violently , with hundreds of arrests , certainly antagonized the country in unexpected ways . If a majority of the French people backed equality of treatment and therefore civil union for all , with its strings of fiscal advantages , they did however split on the second part of the bill , and the question of adoption rights and access to IVF for gays and lesbians . Read more : Hollande signs same-sex marriage bill . In France , unlike in Britain for example , adoption and IVF for gay couples -- alongside automatic joint parenting rights -- was still illegal until last Saturday and remains controversial , simply because it touches on the highly sensitive question of family and what family is made of . Surveys have showed that the divide is both political and generational : The Left is , for the most part , in favour of the same-sex marriage law while the hard Right , and leaders of the French Catholics , Muslims and Jews oppose it . The young , the educated and women are the main supporters of Hollande 's law . The National Assembly was the theater where such French uneasiness played out : The bill required 172 hours of heated and angry discussion , and was the most debated in recent history . Even the laws introducing abortion in 1974 , and the abolition of the death penalty in 1981 , required fewer hours of debate in parliament and proved less contentious . France is the ninth country in Europe ( and the 14th in the world ) to adopt same-sex marriage . The first civil union of this kind , between two gay men , will take place in Montpellier next week . It will likely take years for the whole of French society to adjust to this new reality . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Agnes Poirier .
Historian and writer Dominique Venner shot himself inside Notre Dame Cathedral . 78-year-old right-wing activist was an opponent of France 's new same-sex marriage law . Score: 6 Poirier : Divide over law is both political and generational .