CHAPTER THREE

CHANGES IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE

Another new development in the anti-Semitism of our time concerns the public sphere, constantly stirred up by various issues which are, in fact, the makings of new forms of political and intellectual life. Until the 1990s the anti-Semitism which attracted media attention was mainly a traditional form—at least in its most deeply rooted guises. However, its renewal could be observed quite early on, not so much in the nature of the themes propounded which remained the traditional ones—hatred of as the evil personi cation of money, power, the media and, possibly, of the Revolution or of Bolshevism, to which can be added hostility to the State of Israel. A new set of arguments was put forward after the war by ‘revisionism’; these either underestimated or banalised the Shoah or else, more frequently, denied that it had ever taken place. ‘Negationism’ (or historical revisionism) even went as far as accusations denouncing the Shoah as a ‘business’.

The Successes of Negationism

Negationism consists in denying the intention of the Third Reich to destroy the European Jews, the use of the gas chambers to this end and the systematic annihilation of this group of human beings. It began with the rst ideological partnership formed by Maurice Bardèche and Paul Rassinier.1 Maurice Bardèche was an extreme right activist who was also the brother-in-law of Robert Brasillach whose name he wished to clear. Rassinier was a former deportee, a man of the left, who started out socialist and strongly anti-communist, a paci- st, who, for a time was associated with the Fédération anarchiste (in the 1950s and 1960s) and whom Valérie Igounet, in her excellent Histoire du négationnisme, describes as “a godsend for the extreme right”.2 What

1 Nadine Fresco has written a biography of Paul Rassinier, Fabrication d’un antisémite, Paris, Le Seuil, 1999. 2 Valérie Igounet, Histoire du négationnisme en France, Paris, Le Seuil, 2000, p. 33. 24 chapter three brought the two men together was not hatred of the Jews, but of Com- munism. For, one of the founding concepts of what was, at the outset, merely revisionism, is the idea that was not the only form of barbarism: there was also Bolshevism and . For them, the dramatisation of communist crimes went hand in hand with the banalisation of those committed by the Nazis. A new theme emerged fairly rapidly in these rst revisions of history. This was anti-. It was already linked to the theory that the destruction of the Jews was an invention aimed at ensuring the success of the State of Israel. In Paul Rassinier’s words: This lie (the destruction of six million Jews) was told to procure the funds required to set up the State of Israel (German indemnities proportionate to the number of Jewish victims).3 The extreme right’s criticism of Zionism was to become more focused a little later, at the time of the Six Day War (1967), making no distinc- tion between hatred for the State of Israel and hatred for the supposed power of the Jews of the Diaspora. Negationism, which had had no particular impact on public opinion until then, was revived in the 1970s by the forming of a new alli- ance—that of Robert Faurisson, an academic specialising in literature, who went much further than Rassinier and Bardèche by denying out- right the existence of the gas chambers, at least those intended for the destruction of the Jews, and , an extreme left activist. In an interview published in L’Express (October 1978), the former Com- missioner for Jewish Affairs in Vichy, Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, who had taken refuge in Spain, broke a taboo by declaring, “In Auschwitz, only the eas were gassed.” Robert Faurisson took this opportunity to broadcast his ideas. He explained in an interview on Europe 1: The so-called massacre of the Jews and the so-called existence of the gas chambers is simply one and the same politico- nancial scam. The main bene ciaries are the State of Israel and the international Zionist movement, and the main victims are the German people, excluding its leaders, and the entire Palestinian nation. Faurisson was quickly joined by Pierre Guillaume, himself backed, for a while at least, by a few friends, extreme left, libertarian and other

3 In Le Drame des juifs européens, rst published in 1964 and then re-published in 1984 by La Vieille Taupe.