Published: 14 December 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
COLIN SHINDLER: Presidential candidate Eric Zemmour is Jewish and far-right; a growing number of French Jews believe they have finally found their political champion
LAST WEEK, THE killer of 85-year-old Mireille Knoll was sentenced by a French court to 22 years without parole. The courtroom was told that the assault in March 2018 on this aged Jewish woman started out as a petty robbery but was transformed into a frenzied attack — and that this was fuelled by “a broader context of anti-Semitism” and prejudices about “rich Jews”.
As a young girl, Knoll had managed to survive the Nazi occupation, the lethal acquiescence of the regime of Marshal Pétain in it - and its role in rounding up Jews for deportation in July 1942.
In 1995, President Jacques Chirac gave a speech at the Velodrome d'Hiver — the assembly point of the arrested Jews — and stated that the French state accepted responsibility for what had happened.
Chirac said: “France, land of the Enlightenment and of Human Rights, land of hospitality and asylum, France, on that day, committed an irreparable act. It failed to keep its word and delivered those under its protection to their executioners.”
A total of 64 trains left for Auschwitz; 76,000 Jews never returned.
Yet Éric Zemmour, who is campaigning for the French presidency on an ultra-nationalist ticket, argued in his book Le Suicide Française (2014) that Pétain protected Jews with French citizenship from deportation.
There are two concerning conclusions which emerge from Zemmour's candidacy. The first is that it allows those Jews without a sense of history to embrace the far right.
Zemmour's approach is reminiscent of the attempt to induce a historical amnesia during the post-war years in France. It was only when Marcel Ophuls’ film, The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), and the publication of Vichy France (1973) by the American academic, Robert Paxton, that young people, born since 1945, began to seriously look at French collaboration with the Nazis.
