Le Pen falters with Holocaust gaffe

La Croix (Paris)

One reason the National Front’s Marine Le Pen is now a front runner in the presidential campaign is that she turned her back on the crude anti-semitism of the party’s founder, her father Jean-marie Le Pen. Notoriously, he referred to the Holocaust as a “detail of history”. So why on Earth has she gone back on this, asks Guillaume Goubert. In a recent interview she let slip that she’s sick of France being blamed for wartime atrocities, notably the 1942 “Vel’ d’hiv” roundup of some 13,000 Jews for deportation to concentration camps. This, she insisted, had nothing to do with the “real France”, whose leaders were in exile in London. What’s she trying to prove? National pride is all very well, but as Jacques Chirac acknowledged in 1995, when he officially recognised French complicity and condemned the roundup as “an insult to our past”, it can’t be built on a web of lies. Besides, is the truth really so bad? Yes, many French people collaborated with the Nazis. But many others fought back. As a result, 75% of French Jews survived the Holocaust, more than in most German-occupied countries. Le Pen has made her first major gaffe in an otherwise meticulously controlled campaign.