Bansky strikes again? Provocative murals appear in Paris

The world's best known graffiti painter apparently "blitzed" the French capital over the last few days, leaving as many as six works on walls across the city.

In one mural, a young black girl sprays a pink wallpaper pattern over a swastika on a wall next to her sleeping bag and teddy bear in an attempt to make her patch of pavement more cozy. 

The image is on a wall in northern Paris, next to an official refugee shelter that was controversially closed in March despite protests from the city's Socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo.

Read more: New Banksy mural in New York protests Turkish artist Zehra Dogan's imprisonment

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Banksy's unofficial photographer

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Banksy's unofficial photographer

France's tough anti-migrant policy has resulted in nearly 40 makeshift camps being razed in Paris in the last three years. President Emmanuel Macron is determined that the city should not become a magnet for refugees.

Since then, around 2,000 migrants, including children and teenagers, have been sleeping rough along canals and under motorway bridges. Migrants were still sleeping next to the mural on Sunday.

Banksy, a long-time supporter of the refugee cause, has not yet confirmed the works are his.

Read more: Banksy's world caught on camera

None of the works were signed, as is typical of Banksy in recent years, but experts said they look genuine.

"The color, the line, the subject and the way he has adapted the images from photos ... all point to them being Banksy's style. There is a very particular signature. If (the mural of the girl) is not by Banksy, it is a very good copy," said art historian and street art expert Paul Ardenne.

Napoleon wearing a prohibited headscarf

Another of the new works appears to touch on the equally sensitive subject of the ban on the niqab in France. It shows Napoleon rearing his horse as he crosses the Alps to invade Italy in 1800, his face and body wrapped in his red cloak.

The pastiche of David's canvass, one of the most iconic in French 19th-century art, appeared on a wall in an ethnically-mixed district of northern Paris.

The Disneyfied legacy of May 1968  

And a third image near the Sorbonne university on the Left Bank, which was rocked by a student uprising 50 years ago, appeared to be a dig at the death of French revolutionary spirit.

One of Banksy's trademark rats, his avatar for wronged ordinary people, sits under the caption "May 1968" wearing a Minnie Mouse bow.

The Disneyland Paris theme park just outside the French capital is now one of its biggest employers.

This work also appeared in the center of Paris over the weekend

A fourth mural nearby took a swipe at politicians and business leaders. A man in a suit offers a dog a bone having first sawn the animal's leg off — suggesting the bone might be the canine's own.

Two more Banksy rats appeared in further images discovered this weekend, one dynamiting a road sign and another riding a popped cork from a champagne bottle.

sh/eg (AFP, AP)