Everything had been said, we thought. Eighty years after the Vél’ d’Hiv roundup which led to the deportation of more than 8,000 Jews, including some 4,000 children, “one would think that all this is far away. Eight decades… We could forget it”, observed Emmanuel Macron on July 17, during the commemorations of the roundup. Before him, in 1995, President Jacques Chirac had assumed the shame that tainted the country. Recognizing, finally, the responsibility of France in carrying out the roundup and, in doing so, in achieving the final solution, the founder of the RPR had admitted that France, on July 16 and 17, 1942, “achieved the irreparable”, ending more than fifty years of denial.
However, from Pithiviers (Loiret), where the current president was going on Sunday to inaugurate a new Holocaust memorial at the station in the small town, Emmanuel Macron still had a lot to say. “Let us have the lucidity to see our time. We are not done with anti-Semitism”he asserted in this place both cursed and sacred for the survivors, which, with the neighboring station of Beaune-la-Rolande, saw eight convoys leave for Auschwitz. “This anti-Semitism is even more burning, rampant than it was in 1995, in our country, in Europe and in so many places in the world. It can today of course take on other faces, drape itself in other words, other caricatures. But the odious anti-Semitism, as Zola said, persists, persists, returns.he insisted.
Without making any concrete announcements, the Head of State urged the “republican forces” to double our vigilance for suppress and punish », et « commemorate and instruct”. Then he listed the translations of this contemporary anti-Semitism, evoking social networks and, more seriously, the terrorist attacks, which, from rue des Rosiers to Montauban, decimated families because they were Jewish. But Emmanuel Macron’s fight this Sunday seemed above all political.
Back to the roots of evil
A few months after a presidential campaign marked by the excesses of Eric Zemmour, the head of state attacked the former journalist of the Figaro, without ever naming it. Evoking a “commentator”, he attacked the former far-right candidate who repeated on the platforms of his meetings as on the television channels that Marshal Pétain had “protected French Jews” : “Did we not see fit, even recently, to reopen a subject that had long been settled by historians and jurists on the participation of Pétain and the men of Vichy in the implementation of the final solution? So, let’s repeat it here forcefully, and with all due respect to commentators who claim to be revisionists: neither Pétain nor Laval nor Bousquet nor Darquier de Pellepoix, none of them wanted to “save” Jews. It’s a falsification of history to say so he snapped, banging his fist on the table.
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