Marine Le Pen tries to revise France’s history of anti-Semitism
Marine Le Pen was here Sunday for an unusual purpose: to lay a wreath of flowers at a memorial for the 30 Jewish children and women arrested by the Gestapo on Oct. 23, 1943.
Unusual, that is, because Le Pen shows little sympathy for French Jews. She distorts the history of the Holocaust, keeps company with neo-Nazis and wants to limit the wearing of yarmulkes.
But Sunday was “National Day of Remembrance of the Victims and Heroes of Deportation,” which France has observed since 1954. Politics is politics.
Curiously, she would not be seen doing it — not by Jews, whom she might have invited, or anyone else. Le Pen went without the media. Her campaign tweeted pictures afterward.
That way, a demagogue appears “presidential” before the election on May 7. At the same time, she hopes her loyalists won’t think she’s going soft on the Jews.
That’s unlikely in Provence and beyond, a stronghold of the National Front. In the Second World War, this was the domain of the Vichy regime, which collaborated with the Nazis. France was the only country to do so in Western Europe.
Anti-Semitism, coded or cryptic, comes easily to Le Pen. You can’t blame her for her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who called the gas chambers “a detail” of history. However, she did appoint Jean-François Jalkh — who disputed years ago that the Nazis used Zyklon B, the poisonous gas, on the Jews — as her deputy. An aggrieved Le Pen called the outcry following his recently reported comments “a defamation,” before Jalkh resigned.
Le Pen pushed out her father and has tried to cleanse her party (even using, perversely, nativist, anti-Muslim rhetoric to court anxious Jews). But “detoxifying” the National Front is like separating baguette from brie in France. She can’t because this is how she and others think in a country with a history of antiSemitism.
Le Pen and her fellow-travellers are why the Jews are leaving France, the largest Jewish community in Europe. Some 40,000 (of an estimated 500,000) have decamped since 2006. They see no future here.
Beyond highly publicized terrorist attacks, smaller random acts of violence continue in the streets, like the hacksaw assault on two brothers in suburban Paris in February. Jews see things getting worse if Le Pen wins (not unlike rising intolerance in the United States, emboldened by the election of Donald Trump.)
Jews are appalled when Le Pen says that France was not responsible for rounding up 13,000 French Jews in Paris on July 16-17, 1942. French police — not the Nazis — pulled Jews from their homes and herded them into the filthy, reeking stadium known as Vélodrome d’Hiver. They were sent to Auschwitz.
Oh, but that was not the French, Le Pen declares, because the good guys were in London with Charles de Gaulle. France has been “mistreated,” she says.
You don’t say those things — you don’t think those things — if you understand France during the war. Many French were Hitler’s willing accomplices. This does not include the brave “righteous gentiles” and “martyrs” of the French resistance, like the tens who were massacred on June 12 and 13, 1944, in the piney woods of Provence near Roque d’Antheron and Fenouillet, where two poignant memorials now stand.
Vichy was popular, which took France a generation to acknowledge. Now the National Front, against the facts, picks up the old falsehood.
No wonder Emmanuel Macron has made two visits in the last week to wartime memorials. One was in Paris to remember the murdered Jews, with words of remorse. The other was to the village of Oradour-sur-Glane, where the Nazis slaughtered 642 people.
Macron wanted to contrast his France — one of contrition and responsibility — with that of Le Pen, nationalist and revisionist. It’s not easy to come to terms with the past. The Germans do this best with monuments, museums and memorials. The Japanese struggle.
Suddenly, history is the new political battleground here. If French Jews are on the wrong side on Sunday, as they have been before, they won’t wait to see what happens. Expect an exodus.