Emmanuel Macron on Sunday called on “republican forces” to “redouble their vigilance” in the face of “even more burning” and “creeping” anti-Semitism than 20 years ago. He gave a speech in Pithiviers (Loiret), commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Rafle du Vel d’Hiv.
“Eight decades ago, Vichy France betrayed its children by delivering thousands of them to their executioners. It is France’s duty, to be true to itself, to recognize this and not to give in to this contemporary fight once morest anti-Semitism,” declared the Head of State on his way to a new place. memory of the Holocaust with four ministers.
He inaugurated the open museum in the former Pithiviers station, from which 8,100 Jews, including 4,400 children, left for the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Only a few dozen of them came back. “No offense to some, this station bears witness to the deep and inhuman anti-Semitism of the French state”, which “has made available to the Germans its police, its gendarmerie, its trains…”, underlined Eric de Rotschild, the president of the Shoah Memorial, responsible for the site.
Emmanuel Macron took up the words of Jacques Chirac who, in 1995, had marked the spirits by recognizing, the first, the full responsibility of France in the Roundup of Vel d’Hiv, in which no German soldier participated. “These dark hours forever sully our history. France that day accomplished the irreparable, ”declared the former president, followed by his successors.
“Revisionism”
Almost 30 years later, anti-Semitism “can take on other faces, wrap itself in other words, other caricatures,” said Emmanuel Macron. “But the odious anti-Semitism is there, it lurks, still alive, persists, persists, returns”, he continued, evoking in turn the “terrorist barbarism”, the “assassinations and crimes”, the resurgences on “social networks” or “tomb desecrations”.
“He interferes in debates on television sets. It plays on the complacency of certain political forces. It also thrives around a new form of historical revisionism, even denial,” he insisted, alluding, without naming him, to the far-right presidential candidate Eric Zemmour who had notably maintained that Marshal Pétain had “saved” French Jews during the Second World War.
“Neither Pétain, nor Laval, nor Bousquet, nor Darquier de Pellepoix, none of them wanted to save Jews. It is a falsification of history to say so, ”replied the head of state. “Those who indulge in these lies have the plan to destroy the Republic and the unity of the Nation,” he castigated.
“Looking our truth in the face is not weakening France or repenting. It is to recognize everything so as not to reproduce it”, urged Mr. Macron.
Controversy around Pétain
He spoke in front of an audience of personalities from the Jewish community and elected officials, in particular local ones, including two new deputies Rassemblement National du Loiret. One of them, Thomas Ménagé, considered that “the question of the responsibility as such of the State” in the roundup of Vel d’Hiv was not “challenged”, even if Marine Le Pen made the opposite statement in 2017.
The day was marked by a controversy around a tweet from the leader of the LFI deputies Mathilde Panot, who called for “not to forget the crimes” of the Roundup, “today more than ever, with a president of the Republic which honors Pétain and 89 RN deputies”. In 2018, Mr. Macron called Pétain a “great soldier” during the First World War, even if he then “led disastrous choices”.
Like Emmanuel Macron, several personalities present at Pithiviers insisted on the importance of teaching this period of history “so that young people know it and have a critical mind”, according to Serge Klarsfeld, the president of the Association of sons and daughters of Jewish deportees.
While the number of Holocaust witnesses still alive is inexorably reduced, the priority of the Pithiviers station museum is to welcome school children by showing them films and images, in particular portraits of the victims.
In the morning, Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne attended the traditional ceremony on the site of the former Vélodrome d’Hiver, in the presence in particular of the PS mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo.