Macron: It is false to claim French leaders did not collaborate in the Holocaust
France's president warns against revisionism and rising antisemitism in landmark speech to mark 80 years since the country's Jews were rounded up
Michael Daventry is Jewish News’s foreign and broadcast editor
It is a falsification of history to suggest French leaders were attempting to save the country’s Jews when they collaborated with the Nazis, Emmanuel Macron has warned.
The French president used a speech to mark the 80th anniversary of a mass roundup of Jews to point to a “new type of revisionism” in his country.
It was on July 16 and 17 that around 13,000 people were taken to Paris’s Vel d’Hiv, the Winter Velodrome, before being sent to concentration camps elsewhere in Europe.
It was the largest mass detention of Jewish people by French police in collaboration with the Nazi German occupiers.
“We have not finished with antisemitism and we must be lucid in observing it. (It) is more ardent and rampant,” Macron said on Sunday.
“This anti-Semitism is more ardent and rampant than it was in 1995 in Europe and in so many parts of the world.”
1995 was the year Macron’s predecessor Jacques Chirac officially recognised the Vel d’Hiv roundup and the role of French authorities in facilitating it.
After defeat by Germany in the early stages of the Second World War, most of France was occupied and administered directly by the Nazis. A puppet regime was established in the southeast of the country led by Marshall Phillipe Petain, a First World War veteran, based in the town of Vichy.
Many Jewish people were targeted.
In recent years some far-right fringes have claimed that Petain, collaborationist statesman Pierre Laval, police chief Rene Bousquet and Vichy official Louis Darquier de Pellepoix had in fact attempted to save France’s Jews.
But Macron insisted on Sunday that this was false.
“Have some not recently reopened a controversy that had nevertheless been settled long ago by historians, as well as jurists about the participation of Petain and the men of Vichy to the application of the ‘Final solution’?” he said.
“So let us repeat it here with strength, even if it might anger revisionist commentators: neither Petain, nor Laval, or Bousquet, or Darquier de Pellepoix, none of these men wanted to save the Jews.
“Saying it is a falsification of history.”
Macron was speaking at the inauguration of a memorial in the central town of Pithiviers, south of Paris.
The town was the second largest transit camp and deportation point in France for Jews, after Drancy.
The Shoah Memorial in Paris, which collects archives on France’s Holocaust victims, has launched an appeal to reach the last witnesses and survivors of the Vel d’Hiv round-up.
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