Le Pen denies French guilt in Holocaust role
Presidential candidate says only individuals to blame for Vél d’Hiv roundup
PARIS— A casual remark about France’s wartime anti-Jewish actions by Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front, threatened on Monday to derail her yearslong effort aimed at “un-demonizing” her party just as she is emerging as a strong contender in this month’s presidential election. The remark was made Sunday during an interview in which she referred to the most notorious roundup of Jews in France during the Second World War, when nearly 13,000 were arrested in Paris by the French police on July 16 and 17, 1942, in what is known as the “Vél d’Hiv roundup.”
“France wasn’t responsible for the Vél d’Hiv,” she said.
“If there was responsibility, it is with those who were in power at the time, it is not with France. France has been mistreated, in people’s minds, for years.”
Le Pen’s words created a small eruption in an already-heated campaign, drawing criticism by politicians and by Jewish groups, who all saw it as an echo of her party’s antiSemitic roots.
In addition, the remark contradicted more than 20 years of state policy, which has been to recognize French responsibility for the roundup, in which thousands of men, women and children were rousted from their homes by French police officers, parked in a stinking overcrowded sports arena in Paris — the Vélodrome d’Hiver, which has since been destroyed — and eventually deported to their deaths in concentration camps.
Le Pen’s words also flew in the face of more than four decades of historical research into the eager collaboration of the wartime French government, which had been installed in the spa town of Vichy.
It was the French government’s po- lice chief, René Bousquet — a favourite of the head of government at the time — who organized the roundup, impressing his German counterparts with his energy.
“Vichy did not have a knife to its throat,” the historian Philippe Burrin wrote of the Vél d’Hiv roundup in his landmark book, La France à l’Heure Allemande, ( France Under the Germans).
Le Pen’s remark Sunday was criticized as a “grave mistake” by her principal election opponent, a former economy minister, Emmanuel Macron, and as “negationism” by a leader on the right, Christian Estrosi, president of the Provence-AlpesCôte d’Azur region. The Israeli government also had harsh words, as did French Jewish organizations.
Le Pen’s campaign has been oriented around an extreme form of nationalism, and she often criticizes historians and others who bring up the uglier aspects of France’s past, as she did Sunday.
But the Vél’ d’Hiv and France’s wartime treatment of its Jews have generally been off-limits to this sort of historical revisionism. As the American historian Robert Paxton has pointed out, France was unique in Western Europe in that it was the only country to use its own police force for roundups in territory not occupied by the Germans.
Ever since President Jacques Chirac declared in a speech in 1995 commemorating the Vél d’Hiv roundup that “France, on that day, committed the irreparable,” the question of French complicity and guilt has appeared largely settled, officially at least.
“Going back on its word, it delivered those whom it was protecting to their executioners,” Chirac said at the time.