Between the massive beams of the old brickyard, Emmanuel Macron imagines for a moment the 10,000 men, women and children who were herded there, in the clay dust, tormented by hunger and fear, between September 1939 and the end of 1942.
This Monday, December 5, the Head of State surveys the ocher bowels of the Milles camp, which was the largest internment center in the south-east of France, located a few kilometers from Aix-en-Provence (Bouches -du-Rhone). Guided by Alain Chouraqui, president and founder of the memorial foundation, he arrives at the only window from which mothers threw themselves into the void with their babies, eighty years ago. In July 1942, the gendarmerie reported suicides of Jews, who knew that death awaited them at the end of the convoys.
It was on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the existence of this memorial that Emmanuel Macron went to Camp des Milles, accompanied by the ministers of the interior, Gérald Darmanin, and of national education, Pap Ndiaye. It is also an opportunity to get out of the daily grind to recall, just five months after commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Vél’ d’Hiv roundup, that the Vichy regime never intended to save Jews, French or foreign. His speech then delivered in Pithiviers (Loiret), on July 17, had, to the taste of the Elysée, not impressed enough on people’s minds. Nor calmed the demons that agitated an uninhibited fringe of society during the last presidential campaign.
In 1995, Jacques Chirac spoke words that have gone down in history by acknowledging that “the criminal madness of the occupier was seconded by the French State”answering “to the demands of the Nazis”. “Chirac was brave! Here, the current president goes one step further. He says that Vichy acted in the free zone”supports the researcher Alain Chouraqui, who was awarded the medal of the Legion of Honor.
“Deliberate victims of the French state”
From the Milles camp, 2,000 Jewish men, women and children were deported to Auschwitz, including around fifty toddlers under the age of 2, whom the Nazis did not ask for. “This France was free from the yoke of the Nazis. The latter had not demanded that children be included in these raids, underlined Emmanuel Macron, in front of an audience of elected officials from the region, associations and high school students who came to attend the ceremony. Yes, these Jews were the deliberate victims of the French state. »
As in his past tributes, the Head of State recalled that the state anti-Semitism of Pétain and Laval dates back to the end of the 19th century.e century with the Dreyfus affair, in a shift illustrated by the Milles camp. From 1939, the last governments of the Republic at war interned there foreigners living in France, Germans and Austrians who had for the most part fled the Nazi regime, but regarded as “enemy subjects”. “Here, it was the betrayal by the Vichy regime of the right of asylum. The refugees became hostages”insisted Emmanuel Macron.
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