Macron denounces Petain for role in rounding up Jews for Nazis

EMMANUEL MACRON yesterday denounced General Philippe Petain for his collaboration with France’s Nazi German occupiers after previously praising him as a “great leader”.

In a speech commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Vel d’hiv roundup, when France deported more than 13,000 Jews, the French president also denounced continued efforts by some – particularly on the far-right – to downplay Petain’s role in the forced exodus.

“Not Pétain, nor Laval, nor Bousquet, nor Darquier de Pelleport, none of these wanted to save Jews,” he said, referring to members of the Vichy government. “This is a falsification of history.”

Mr Macron faced criticism following a 2018 Armistice Day speech in which he referred to Mr Petain as a “great soldier during World War I” even though he made “fatal choices during the Second World War”. In a tweet posted on Saturday Mathilde Panot, a far-left MP sparked controversy by referring to Mr Macron’s earlier remarks.

“Don’t forget these crimes, today more than ever, with a President of the Republic who honours Petain alongside 89 [far-right] deputies!” she wrote.

Mr Macron also warned that Europe was “not done with anti-semitism” and accused a growing number of people in France of “falsifying history” by underplaying the country’s collaboration with the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Mr Macron said France had “deliberately betrayed all of its duties,” when it voluntarily handed thousands of French Jews over to the Nazis.

Over the course of two days in July 1942, French police gathered more than 13,000 people, including 4,000 children. More than half were held in the Vel d’hiv, a sports stadium in southern Paris, before being sent to the death camps. “French families whispered words in Yiddish to each other to reassure themselves that France would never do this. Yet France did this. The French state did this,” Mr Macron said.

The 44-year-old leader began his speech by echoing the words of Jacques Chirac, who in 1995 became the first president to acknowledge the Vichy regime’s collaboration with the Nazis.

“France, at that time, accomplished the irreparable,” Chirac said, breaking more than 50 years of silence by the French government.

“Breaking its word, it delivered its dependents to their executioners,” he said.

Yesterday Mr Macron warned “antisemitism is even more burning, rampant, than it was in 1995 in our country.”

He was speaking at the inauguration of a memorial in the central town of Pithiviers – the second largest transit camp in France for Jews, after Drancy.