Paris (AFP) – Two Greenpeace activists who removed French President Emmanuel Macron's waxwork from a Paris museum to stage anti-Russia protests were on Thursday charged with aggravated theft, their lawyer said.
The pair have now been released, but their lawyer, Marie Dose, said the activists, a man and a woman, spent three nights in a cell in "absolutely appalling conditions".
"I found out this morning that I was going to be charged," one of the charged activists, who did not wish to be named, told AFP.
"I find it a bit much, all this for exercising my freedom of expression in France."
On Monday, several activists stole a 40,000-euro statue of Macron from the Grevin Museum and placed it in front of the Russian embassy. On Tuesday they placed Macron's double outside the headquarters of French electricity giant EDF to protest France's economic ties with Russia.
They stood the statue on its feet and put next to it a sign reading "Putin-Macron radioactive allies".
The waxwork, estimated to be worth 40,000 euros ($45,500), was handed over to police on Tuesday night.
The pair were detained on Monday.
On Thursday they were brought before an investigating judge and charged as part of a judicial inquiry into "the theft of a cultural object on display", the Paris prosecutor's office told AFP.
Jean-Francois Julliard, head of Greenpeace France, said that the detained pair were people who drove a truck during the protest in front of the Russian embassy, and not those who "borrowed" the statue from the museum.
The activists' lawyer condemned authorities for detaining and later charging them.
"I don't understand this decision to open a judicial investigation, as the Grevin Museum clearly stated that there was no damage," said Dose.
"Increasingly, the justice system is becoming a tool to deter activists from exercising their freedom of expression and opinion," she added.
The Grevin Museum filed a complaint on Monday but subsequently took the matter in good humour. "The figures can only be viewed on site," it said on its Instagram feed.
Speaking earlier, Dose denounced the detention as "completely disproportionate", saying they had spent three nights in a cell.
The lawyer condemned the "deplorable" conditions in which the two activists were being held, "attached to benches for hours and dragged from police station to police station".
One activist spent the night without a blanket and was unable to lie down because her cell was too small, the lawyer said.
"The other had to sleep on the floor because there were too many people in the cell," she added.
The lawyer argued that "no harm resulted from the non-violent action", insisting that "all offences" ceased to exist once the statue has been returned to the museum.
The activists managed to slip out through an emergency exit of the museum by posing as maintenance workers.