Nation’s wartime past is focus of presidential race

France’s troubled wartime past has taken centre stage in a highly charged presidential race as Emmanuel Macron visited the site of France’s worst Nazi massacre and Marine Le Pen’s party suffered a new blow over alleged Holocaust denial.

Seeking the moral high ground, centrist Mr Macron wants to send a message to voters that Ms Le Pen is the heir of a party stained by anti-Semitism, racism and an outdated world view.

Her years-long efforts to detoxify her far-right image suffered a setback yesterday as the interim leader of her National Front party, Jean-Francois Jalkh, quit because of an uproar over comments in a 2000 interview in which he allegedly cast doubt on the truth of Nazi gas chambers.

French emotions around a history of collaborating with the Nazis remain raw, seven decades after the end of the war. Mr Macron sought to bring the horrors of the Holocaust home to voters with his visit to Oradour-sur-Glane, a ghost town left behind after the largest massacre in Nazioccupied France. The town is a phantom village, with burned-out cars and abandoned buildings left as testimony to its history.

On June 10, 1944, four days after the D-Day landings in Normandy, an SS armoured division herded villagers into barns and a church, blocked the doors, and set Oradour-sur-Glane ablaze. A total of 642 people died.

Mr Macron said: “We don’t want to forget that from here comes our Republican pride, the National Council of the Resistance that has built our (fundamental) balances, our strength and the European project. That is everything Marine Le Pen wants to destroy.”