Early next month Jean-Marie Le Pen, the infamous 79-year-old leader of the French far-right National Front, will hear whether he is to suffer imprisonment for up to a year for allegedly conspiring to justify Nazi war crimes. This is the 25th time he has been on trial for similar offences, ranging from the trivial to the serious.
Justifying or denying the Holocaust is a controversial offence in France, where the population has still to come to terms fully with what happened in World War Two. Hardly anyone has admitted to being or knowing a collaborator and the total number of those who claim to have been in the Resistance is larger that the armies put into the field by France in 1939. Of course, but for the Channel, the British population might have been tested in the same way by a German occupation and been found equally compliant under threat of deportation to labour camps.
Le Pen ran into trouble in attempting to justify his right-wing antecedents, the war-time Vichy Government, for collaborating with the Nazis. Although acknowledging excesses took place, Le Pen argued in the weekly magazine Rivarol, known for its right-wing propaganda, that they were inevitable and proportionate in a country the size of France and that the German occupation was relatively humane. His argument was supported in print by his co-defendant, Rivarol editor Marie-Luce Wacquez, who said if the deportations were excluded, “The occupation was pretty moderate compared with what happened in the Netherlands and Belgium."
Those deportations, however, numbered 76,000 Jews and perhaps 20,000 Resistance fighters for whom, by the very nature of the secrecy of their membership, no accurate records were ever kept. Le Pen caused outrage by characterising all of them merely as “political deportees” and claiming that the sheer scale of the deportations proved that stories of mass executions back in France were groundless. He alleged that the Gestapo, far from carrying out such atrocities, actually prevented a massacre in Lille and protected the civilian population throughout France.
If found guilty, Le Pen is expected, because of his age, to be given a suspended sentence and a fine estimated at £30,000 – which his organisation can easily afford.
From our January 2008 e-newsletter
