Memories of Assassins, Assassins of Memory

...If crimes against humanity go unpunished every day, why should the Butcher of Lyons be prosecuted forty-five years later...

...The history of the French left is central to an understanding of the Faurisson Affair...

...If there was no Holocaust—no "grand alibi" — then nothing distinguishes the crimes of Nazism from the crimes of the totalitarian East and the imperialist West...

...According to Lipstadt, Rassinier apparently exerted an influence on Harry Elmer Barnes, an American historian who during the 1920s had argued that Germany was not responsible for World War I. In one incident, Barnes visited the exiled Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was, he 256 • DISSENT Assassins of Memory reported, "happy to know that I did not blame him for starting the war in 1914...

...Initially charged with organizing the Jewish roundups, Bousquet was absolved by the High Court in 1949, going on to become a successful banker and journalist...

...He discounted reports of German atrocities, blamed England and France for starting the war, and, in the 1930s, extolled the Fiihrer's peaceful intentions and reasonableness...

...As Finkielkraut emphasizes, a principle that only applies to a single case, even if the case is unique, is of no value...

...Typical of his generation, Sartre hated it: he saw its refusal to uphold the myth of national heroism as an utter disregard for "political truth...

...Still, few historians have been able to bring the relatively fresh memories of this century's catastrophic events into focus as the subject of historical inquiry...

...It reached a crescendo during the trial of Klaus Barbie, when Jacques Verges, Barbie's defense attorney—part showman, part trickster, and a courtroom virtuoso—pursued the strategy of putting France and "the West" on trial for its crimes in Algeria, Vietnam, and Cambodia...

...Finkielkraut identifies the ethical implication of Nuremberg as the legal sanctioning of punishment for the crimes of a state that are not specifically war crimes...

...Lipstadt also points out that since Auschwitz effectively discredited so-called scientific racism, the anti-Semitism of the intelligentsia has reappeared as the pseudoscholarship of denial...

...Finkielkraut's entirely understandable antipathy to the corrosive lack of principle that Verges personifies blurs his judgment about the ultimate impact of the defense's strategy...

...This new preoccupation of historians and intellectuals also attests to an important shift away from the original historiographical program of the prestigious Annales School...

...It was echoed throughout the 1950s and consecrated by the analogy of the sword (de Gaulle) and the shield (Main), most notably in Robert Aron's Histoire de Vichy published in 1954...

...Despite a predilection for words like "trauma" and "mourning," Rousso's choice of a psychoanalytic vocabulary does not extend far beyond his chapter headings...

...In June 1951, a former Resistance leader, Gilbert Renaud (nom de guerre, General Remy) dared put in print what many already thought, that the "France of June 1940 needed both Marshal Main and General de Gaulle...

...With characteristic immodesty, de Gaulle regarded himself as the embodiment of a unified and vindicated France: the nation in arms...

...Vidal-Naquet carefully corrects Mayer's assertion in a footnote to a recent book by Jean-Claude Pressac...

...And if many of those crimes were committed by "the West," isn't Nuremberg simply the victors' justice, masking their own transgressions...

...At the time of the Eichmann trial in 1961, Hannah Arendt and the German philosopher Karl Jaspers believed that the charge of "crimes against the Jewish people" and the Jerusalem venue of the trial would restrict the scope of justice...

...Indeed, his long-standing association with President Francois Mitterrand may explain the many obstacles placed in the way of a new trial, which those who have documented his activities, like the lawyer Serge Klarsfeld, began to demand in the late 1970s...

...television drama "Holocaust" (initially rejected by the state broadcasting system), the indictments of several former Vichy officials, and, finally, the bombing of SPRING • 1994 • 255 Assassins of Memory the synagogue on the rue Copernic, the stage was set to propel the Faurisson Affair into the national spotlight...

...His "confusion of feelings" after a decade of combat against Holocaust deniers leads him at once to pose and resist the melancholy question: "Does this mean that one should capitulate in the face of such denial, sliding bit by bit toward a world in which all things are equivalent, the historian and the forger, fantasy and reality, massacres and car accidents...

...At the dawn of the cold war, it became apparent even to de Gaulle that the nostalgia for Main, for "glory and sacrifice," and for a France uncontaminated by communism, could be serviceable...

...More specifically, he wonders if the appear ance of Why Did the Heavens Not Darken...

...She indiscriminately accuses "scholars" in general, and "deconstructionist history" in particular, of having fostered a climate in which "no fact, no event, and no aspect of history has any fixed meaning or content...

...Rousso points out that the film all but obliterated the truths of the official myth, ignoring the military, the organization, the patriotism of the Resistance and—most prominently— de Gaulle himself...

...As Vidal-Naquet points out, this claim is belied by Chomsky's "friendly" exchange of letters with Faurisson, as well as by his preface, in which he said that he had found "no credible proof " that Faurisson was an antiSemite...

...Alain Finkielkraut's report on the Barbie trial, Remembering in Vain, is a passionate appeal on behalf of the Nuremberg principle, on which the charge of "crimes against humanity" rests...

...In the cataclysm of genocide, he maintains, the court recognized the vulnerability of humanity itself and consecrated the principle of human responsibility—as opposed to that of states or power...

...It is interesting to compare Vidal-Naquet's reaction with Finkielkraut's...

...The central figure orchestrating the memory of the Occupation during the postwar years was General Charles de Gaulle...

...The syndrome in Rousso's title refers to the manifold "symptoms" produced by the "trauma" of the Occupation and the persistence of its memory in the postwar period...

...Yet, beyond drawing the zero-degree line of facticity against denial, how does the struggle against revisionism impinge on what he calls the "shattered realm of historical discourse...

...Their suspicion of "events" was understandable in a century so rich in cataclysms (the Annales co-founder Marc Bloch was killed by the Germans in 1944...

...Robert Faurisson created an uproar, not as a public figure, but as the mouthpiece for a tiny group of post-Marxists, who by protesting alleged infringements on his civil liberties managed to attract the sympathy of several prominent left-wing intellectuals...

...headquarters of Holocaust denial, founded by Willis R. Carto, a far-right publicist whose career Lipstadt documents...

...But Vidal-Naquet apparently fears that when we are faced with a battleground of antagonistic memories, the inability to judge might eventually become a far more threatening "assassin of memory" than a mere sect of Holocaust "deniers...

...A century earlier this scientistic mood provided "the initial ambience of those fighting—during the heroic phase—for a judicial review of the Dreyfus case...

...In an elaborate two-day ceremony, the General managed to upstage his old subordinate, relegating the Resistance to a bit part...

...He called Roosevelt's foreign policy "the greatest public crime in human history," insisted that German savagery was "exaggerated," and expressed doubt as to whether the Holocaust had occurred...

...In fact, one of the best sendups of the circularity of Holocaust denial comes from Jean-Francois Lyotard, the arch postmodern/ poststructuralist: since only the dead can be valid eyewitnesses for the existence of gas chambers there are no such witnesses, ergo, no gas chambers...

...It is not immediately evident why the ravings of an obscure professor of literature who claimed to offer scientific "proof " that the Holocaust was a fabrication should be perceived as a threat to the memory of the Nazi era...

...After the war, he emerged as a fervent anti-Semite and anticommunist, producing the prototype of all denial literature, Le Mensonge d'Ulysse, in 1950...

...If only crimes against the Jews are included in the charge, Nuremberg is eviscerated...

...Historians have now turned their attention to studying how history and memory are distinct if not competing ways of regarding the past...

...The Faurisson Affair became a crisis of self-understanding for the left not because Faurisson himself was a radical (his genealogy is on the right) but because his arguments were used to shore up a deteriorating anti-Zionism by radicals who had crossed over into a political twilight zone, where left-wing ideology merged with anti-Semitic hallucination...

...Nuremberg overturned the principle of "reason of state" by giving legal credibility to a morality and a justice superior to power and state authority...

...This apologetic use of historical comparisons—which does not discredit all attempts to contrast historical events—is hardly a monopoly of the German right...

...The danger, as Stanley Hoffman pointed out, was that one myth would be replaced by another...

...If the long-cherished ideal of the unified nation resisting the Nazi yoke was unraveling, the distinction between Vichy and Berlin was officially refurbished...

...See Christopher Browning's review of Mayer's book in Dissent, Summer 1989...

...Rousso draws up a brief catalogue of some of the ways that the past can be mobilized: as heritage, as nostalgia, and as fantasy...

...The odyssey of Socialisme ou Barbarie?, the Trotskyist group from which the Moles split off, had reached a point where, in order to uphold the purity of revolutionary anticapitalism, they had to obliterate any distinction among bourgeois democratic, fascist, Stalinist, social democratic, and third-world regimes...

...To demonstrate the growing effectiveness of Holocaust denial in infiltrating the public mind, Lipstadt cites a variety of examples: the presence of "deniers" on television talk shows, the proliferation of noHolocaust literature in the Arab world, public opinion polls in Italy, remarks by Pat Buchanan that the gas chambers at Treblinka were a technical impossibility, and comments by Croatian president Franjo Tudjman about the "biased testimonies and exaggerated data" used to estimate Holocaust victims...

...After the Liberation, the purge (ipuration) of collaborators was conducted unevenly and politically, frequently obscuring the distinction between revenge and law...

...The link to the Dreyfus Affair may lie less in the relation of one "revisionism" to another, than "in the left-wing aversion to the struggle against anti-Semitism at the time of the Affair, on the one hand, and the lingering left-wing distrust of the politics of antifascism on the other...

...As Vidal-Naquet's translator, Jeffrey Mehlman, notes, there is a SPRING • 1994 • 257 Assassins of Memory good deal of irony in the circumstance that the language of the revisionists is so unabashedly "positivist...

...Chomsky has also published a volume of rebuttals, Reponses inedites a mes detracteurs parisiens, prefaced by Pierre Guillaume, France's leading publisher of denial literature...

...As The Sorrow and the Pity shattered the "mirror" of Gaullist consensus, and as once incontestable truths about the Resistance and collaboration were shaken almost daily, French intellectuals were prepared to believe what Rousso calls "the negationist message" which "immersed itself in the reinterpretation, the revision, of the history of the 1940s that had been under way for a decade...

...In the mid-1960s, Minister of Culture Andre Malraux, at the request of the Resistance organizations, promoted the idea that the ashes of Jean Moulin, the hero of Lyon, be transferred to the Pantheon...

...So-called Holocaust "revisionists" also exist in America and Britain, where they are taken as seriously as sightings of Elvis...

...At least on the left, obsession with France's collaborationist past threatened to overshadow the accomplishments of the Resistance...

...However, if the collective memory of an event is shaped "by all representations of that event," this implies that "historical truth (and not just the truth of historians) is in essence relative, changeable, and subject to constant reinterpretation...

...The precipitous collapse of the Gaullist myth also helps explain why the Faurisson Affair became a public sensation in 1979...

...In the context of the Darquier interview, the broadcast of the U.S...

...Under de Gaulle, Resistance became a grand abstraction, fetishized and installed "in the Pantheon of republican values...

...For Finkielkraut, the legal doctrine formulated by the allies between 1942 and 1945, that individuals could be prosecuted for "the criminal exercising of the power of the state," was nothing short of "a momentous judicial event" —even if it simply brought the classical tradition of the rights of man to bear on national sovereignty...

...Remy publicized a December 1946 conversation in which the General is supposed to have remarked that "it was not a bad thing that France should have two strings in her bow, one in the hands of de Gaulle, and the other in the hands of Main, provided both would be in accord with the sole benefit of the nation...

...Yet, if the charges are extended to include "other" crimes, the defense can legitimately introduce into evidence crimes committed by the French—indeed by all Western nations...

...But even if that were not the case, one torture does not excuse another, no more than the failure to prosecute one crime precludes the prosecution of another...

...Since the 1970s, however, revelations of the extent of French complicity with Nazism and Recent French Struggles with the Past Vichy, the notorious Faurisson Affair, and the trial of Klaus Barbie have contributed to making French struggles with memory into a national obsession...

...hence the Resistance equals France...

...Most quickly forgotten were those who belonged neither to Vichy nor the Resistance—the survivors of the deportations: "The return of victims from the Nazi concentration camps was the event most quickly effaced from memory...

...Verges's record of defending victims of colonialism somehow went together with his shadowy connections to neo-Nazis, like the Swiss millionaire Francois Genoud (who financed Barbie's defense...

...Her study is warranted, she asserts, not by any need to refute the "denier's" specious arguments, but by the fact that Holocaust denial "has increased in scope and intensity since the mid-1970s...

...For all of these, Gaullist pomp could be a powerful instrument...

...He never directly engages Mayer's insistence on the primacy of antiBolshevism (rather than anti-Semitism) in the hierarchy of Nazi intentions or his view that the "Judeocide" was a compensation for the halting of the German crusade against the Soviet Union...

...One of the few weaknesses of Rousso's account is that it pays far less attention to how the left fell prey to "the Vichy Syndrome" than it does to the reemergence of the right...

...Indeed, during the fierce debates over the Algerian War "analogy became a way of laying claim to a political heritage," even if the alignments were sometimes new...

...Once again, the Holocaust appeared to be overshadowed...

...Initially the court chose to exclude the Resistance claims, since the statute of limitations and the London Charter (on which Nuremberg was based) specifically excepted from crimes against humanity those illegal acts committed against a military organization, which, it held, were covered under the heading of "war crimes...

...In the heyday of the cold war, the right found its footing as former collaborators were amnestied...

...There is no place for either the absolute self-righteousness of a memorializing history or for the absolute historicism that guarantees, as Walter Benjamin once put it, that "even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins...

...Recently, John Toland, the prolific historian, has lent his name to the publications of the Institute for Historical Review in Torrance, California, U.S...

...In June of last year Rene Bousquet, former general secretary of the interior and chief of the Vichy police, was murdered in the doorway of his Paris apartment...

...Rousso's admiration for de Gaulle's symbolic sixth sense is often so great—even as he reveals Gaullist memory to be a synonym for forgetting—that he finds it difficult to explain why the General's myth exploded after May 1968...

...However, the incident was only the last chapter in the story of how Bousquet was able to escape justice for so long...

...If Lipstadt strikes an urgent note, Vidal-Naquet's approach is cool, ironic, and in the end, melancholic...

...The attempt to exonerate Barbie by turning anticolonialism against antifascism was not merely a flop, it was the denouement of the disintegrating political culture of the extreme left...

...As the distinguished medievalist Jacques Le Goff observes, until only recently " 'history and memory' were practically fused in the commemoration of the past...

...Their aim was to "wipe out Nuremberg" by putting the West on trial, by declaring the Jews "chosen martyrs," and by saying, on behalf of non-white "humanity," that "your disaster is not its business...

...The moral heroism of the Resistance was displaced by the moral cowardice of collaboration...

...This point is best illuminated by Assassins of Memory, a collection of essays documenting the decade-long battle of Pierre Vidal-Naquet, an eminent classicist and a leading figure in the opposition to the Algerian War, to expose the stratagems of France's " revisionists . " In 1980 Vidal-Naquet published "A Paper Eichmann," to this day one of the most effective responses to Holocaust denial...

...Not surprisingly, historian Pierre Nora, editor of a multivolume history of French national memory (Les lieux de me moire) has acknowledged "the return of the event...

...His answer, of course, is that denial offers neither a "true narrative" nor an authentic revision, but simply a fraud, a "parody of History...

...A former socialist and communist, Rassinier was an authentic member of the Resistance who was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to the Buchenwald and Dora camps...

...Similarly, Finkielkraut warns that we are approaching a "fatal deadline of historicization," after which ethical claims to justice can no longer be processed...

...However disturbing such a collage of protorevisionism might be, it does not in my view amount to an urgent threat, nor does it prove Lipstadt's assertion that "deniers" are making inroads into the "mainstream" or the American educational establishment...

...In the late 1940s and 1950s, the widely shared myth of a national resistance to Nazi barbarism was able to keep fiercely competing memories of the Occupation and the Liberation from erupting into public awareness...

...The need to uphold the delusion of a transparent and conspiratorial world order is the common coin for many of those—both on the left and the right—who ultimately found their way to the "revisionist" enterprise...

...In 1972 a national scandal erupted when Prime Minister Georges Pompidou pardoned Paul Touvier, head of the notorious Milice (militia) in Lyon, at the same moment that Klaus Barbie, Gestapo chief in that city, was arrested in Bolivia at the request of the French government...

...In a 1987 postscript to his 1981 article "On Faurisson and Chomsky," Vidal-Naquet notes that Chomsky has since "somehow disavowed not his text, but the use that had been made of it with his agreement as a preface to Robert Faurisson's book...

...The Jewish organizations insisted that Barbie be tried solely for the deportations of Jews, fearing that once again the Resistance would be commemorated at the expense of the extermination...

...Consider for example the strange itinerary of the "founder" of French Holocaust denial, Paul Rassinier...

...Since the early 1930s Annales historians relentlessly exorcised event-oriented political history, substituting problemoriented, demographic, social, and ethnographic history...

...In this regard, Finkielkraut may ultimately credit Barbie's lawyers with too much success...

...Unlike Lipstadt, who pursues a straight-ahead case against the conspiracy of the "deniers," Vidal-Naquet recognizes that rival claims to memory and history generated in this century prevent the historian from simply juxtaposing mythology, or even memory, to history without acknowledging the problematic nature of these concepts...

...In 1959, two cartoonists working for the newspaper Pilote reinvented the immortal Gaul in the character of Asterix, who conquers the Goths and slugs it out with Gallo-Roman collaborators...

...The right 254 • DISSENT Assassins of Memory insisted on invoking Vichy in its battle to keep Algeria French, while some former members of the Resistance, like Georges Bidault, described the anti-independence movement as a revival of national resistance...

...Recalling his own stance against military terror in Algiers, Vidal-Naquet sums up the logic of Barbie's defense: "But if one [that is, the French State] refused to admit that the crimes of the French army were crimes—without statute of limitation— against humanity, then one would also have to forgo trying Barbie . . . at least for equivalent crimes...

...Vidal-Naquet offers a modified historicism: "the present may transform the image of what the past was," but there still remains an unchanging "past in its reality...

...His death was the ultimate postponement of a long-delayed trial for crimes against humanity, scheduled to begin sometime this year...

...Mehlman suggests another explanation for Vidal-Naquet's wistfulness...

...Had it taken place, it might have provided the opportunity to publicly put the Vichy regime on trial and openly discuss the involvement of the French administration in anti-Jewish laws and in the deportations of the Jews to the Nazi death camps...

...Much of the credit, he says, goes to Marcel Ophuls's The Sorrow and the Pity (1970), the first film "about the memory, as distinct from the history, of the Occupation...

...During the 1950s, the memory of the Occupation became "a vast reservoir of symbolic references upon which the political parties drew...

...Yet Vidal-Naquet recognizes that the Barbie case makes it possible to conclude that there are "insurmountable contradictions, no doubt, for anyone dreaming of a coherent system of justice...

...Even before the trial began, two different versions of memory, two different versions of justice, were at odds...

...After World War II Barnes pursued the same line...

...The Bousquet story underscores the fact that France continues to be uniquely haunted by the problem of history and memory...

...Vidal-Naquet's battle with the so-called revisionists prompts him to reflect on the "test to which revisionism puts the historian...

...He SPRING • 1994 • 259 Assassins of Memory asks how one can "situate the 'revisionist' enterprise" once the historian acknowledges that writing is neither "neutral nor transparent" and that "events are not things...

...Ironically, the very universalism that briefly triumphed at Nuremberg threatened to become the Lyons trial's undoing...

...Ophuls's film offered a counter-myth to the official Gaullist version, exposing a France more divided by internal schisms than united by the struggle against the foreign occupier...

...The only reputable scholar to have defended Faurisson (contributing a notorious Preface to his Memoire en defence) remains Noam Chomsky, who still denies ad nauseam (most recently in a celebratory documentary film) that he did anything more than defend Faurisson's civil rights...

...His chapters on the revival of "Petainism" in postwar France are fascinating, as are the connections he draws to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the chief beneficiary of "Petainist" nostalgia...

...The parable of the "two strings" reconciled two national memories, one of defeat with honor, the other of victory with compassion...

...Yet France's recent struggles over memory have exhibited not the disappearance of events—as the Annales once anticipated—but their stubborn persistence...

...Vidal-Naquet's rather overcast reflections, written in 1987, stand somewhat apart from his elegant and lucid polemics written during the heat of the Faurisson Affair...

...Though Arendt did not deny that it was right for an Israeli court to judge a crime whose chief victims were Jews, she believed that Eichmann should be tried for "crimes against humanity" before an international tribunal...

...In a bizarre parody of the "Affair," the obsessive marshalling of "facts," "statistics," and "doubt about the authenticity of evidence" has been the modus operandi of "deniers...

...At the very moment that the anticolonialist left was collapsing, the defense took the logic of anti-imperialism to its most grotesque conclusion...

...Faurisson's supporters radicalized the logic of an ideology that already effaced the barbarity of anti-Semitism by insisting that Nazi policies had been based on political and economic motives rather than on racial ideology...

...The "betrayed hope of Nuremberg" paradoxically becomes, as it did in Lyons, an argument for exoneration...

...As she put it: "The very monstrousness of the events is 'minimized' 258 • DISSENT Assassins of Memory before a tribunal that represents one nation only...

...Contemporary history becomes as flat as the medieval map of the world...

...In a statement issued at the time of the affair, Pompidou asked if the time hadn't "come to draw a veil over the past, to forget a time when Frenchmen disliked one another, attacked one another, and even killed one another...

...The fabrication of a usable version of the Occupation was not just the preoccupation of statesmen, intellectuals, and anciens combatants...

...Chronicling the intense conflicts that erupted in France during and after Vichy—between the sense of defeat and the false pride promoted by Marshal Main, between collaboration and resistance, between liberation and reconstruction— Rousso considers "it not unreasonable to refer to them collectively as a civil war...

...These recent works on French struggles to preserve memory from its potential assassins remind us that at best historical writing can strive not for objectivity but for a constant negotiation between contextualization and resistance to the manipulation of memory for political ends...

...From the outset, Barbie's arrest provoked a legal dispute over two distinct visions of justice and two distinct historical memories: that of the Jewish descendants of the children of Izieu deported by Barbie, and that of Resistance fighters—most notably the hero Jean Moulin—tortured and put to death by the Gestapo chief...

...The historical failure of "crimes against humanity" to be applied after Nuremberg, and beyond the single crime against the Jews, was turned against the Nuremberg principle itself...

...de Gaulle equals France...

...Instead of aligning themselves with resistance to terror—as did two Algerian intellectuals who protested their tactics—they declared European humanity to be indiscriminately terrorist in their effort to exonerate the terrorist in the dock...

...Its lasting effect was to establish permanent divisions, which coexisted uneasily with officially sanctioned commemorations of national unity...

...Deconstruction's critical reading and dismembering of texts has had little influence on the "scientific" style of argument pursued by "deniers...

...Vidal-Naquet and Lipstadt are both aware that their books might offer legitimacy to a slander not open to discussion...

...To have done this with style and historical depth is the remarkable achieveSPRING • 1994 • 253 Assassins of Memory ment of Henry Rousso's The Vichy Syndrome...

...The ceremony "Gaullized" Moulin and demonstrated the axiom of the Gaullist myth of the Resistance: the Resistance equals de Gaulle...

...Moreover, in the past, members of the Resistance had always preferred the status of combatants to the status of "victims...

...Though left-wing French "deniers" have made common cause with neo-Nazis and right-wing racists, American Holocaust denial flowed directly out of right-wing isolationism and anti-Semitism...

...The impulse to equivalence is nevertheless the same: without the extermination of the Jews, Nazism disappears in a haze of tyrannical regimes...

...This may only partly result from the stereotypical difference between a combative American professor of religious studies and a world-weary French historian apres le combat...

...As the defense sought to exploit these dilemmas, the Barbie case rapidly became, in Finkielkraut's words, "not an exemplary continuation of the Nuremberg Trials," but a "mockery...

...The Barbie case threatened to unleash the opposite danger, that a tribunal that included both Jewish victims and members of the Resistance, each representing distinct memories and crimes, might make the charge of "crimes against humanity" evaporate in the mist of comparison...

...The point, he grudgingly admits, is not that Verges's totalitarian antiracism won the day, but that he was "rejected as a fanatic...

...If the Nuremberg principle was applied only once, and to a project of annihilation so vast that it defies comparison, it leaves us powerless in the face of genocides that go unrecognized (like the Armenian massacre) because no state will prosecute them...

...by Vidal-Naquet's close associate Arno Mayer, did not take its toll "on the Frenchman's spirits" because—and despite its strong antirevisionist statements—Mayer appeared to offer a "carefully hedged concession" to the deniers in his remark that "sources for the study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable...

...De Gaulle, as Rousso notes, "gave voice to ambiguities in a past that was being made to suit the present situation...

...If de Gaulle was not prepared to take that step in public—in fact he disavowed it—the Remy Affair revealed his private acquiescence...

...This difficulty, he says, does not apply, since the crimes of the French army were "against the laws of the republic, whereas those of Himmler and Eichmann were in conformity with Hitler's principle...

...In the Lyons courtroom, anti-Semitism blended with the anticolonialism of fools...

...The state promoted the memory of a nation united against a foreign occupier while the left continued to battle against the remnants of Vichy and collaboration...

...Lipstadt's search for climatic conditions favorable to the spread of denial occasionally leads her off course...

...Rassinier's aim, as Alain Finkielkraut put it, was to blur the distinction between victims and executioners in order to "fit one war into the other...

...The pro-Arab stance of French foreign policy in the 1970s reawakened the slumbering issue of wartime anti-Semitism and the cooperation of Vichy in the deportations of the Jews...

...The Faurisson Affair became a crisis for the left also because it underscored the myriad ways that antifascism had obliterated the memory of the victims of the deportations and the extermination camps...

...Memories of Vichy were also stirred by the Darquier Affair, a scandalous interview given by the ruthless former head of Vichy's Office of Jewish Affairs, Darquier de Pellepoix, who maintained, among other things, that "at Auschwitz only the lice were gassed...

...This opportunity was exploited with gusto by Barbie's defense team, composed, not incidentally, of Verges, who is of French-Vietnamese descent, a Congolese lawyer, and an Algerian lawyer...

...By the early 1970s the "mode retro" for the war years was in its heyday...

...Barnes subsequently became an avowed Germanophile and an indefatigable isolationist...

...The competing claims on history exacted by states, courts, public memorials, veterans' groups, films, educational institutions and even by historians contribute to what Rousso calls the "diversity" and "intensity" of "collective memory...

...They agree that no debate can take place between "revisionists" and "exterminationists...

...The Supreme Court of Appeals, however, overthrew a lower court decision and decided in favor of the broader definition demanded by the Resistance organizations...

...By creating confusion over what crimes were to be included in the charge, the court itself may have intensified rather than dispelled the ambiguity of the Nuremberg principle...

...But Toland is not an academic, and Lipstadt's fear of an insidious spread of denial arguments in the halls of academe seems unwarranted...

...In that essay he explained part of the attraction of Holocaust denial for the sectarian "old Moles" (La Vielle Taupe was the name of their Paris bookstore and publishing house) who adopted the Lyon professor...

...260 • DISSENT...

...Deborah E. Lipstadt traces Rassinier's career as well as those of several American Holocaust "deniers" (a term she prefers to "revisionists") in her informative Denying the Holocaust...

...It is important to distinguish between revisionism and the kind of extreme relativism that does not deny the Holocaust but "compares" it into oblivion, as did Ernst Nolte's notorious statements during the German historians controversy of 1987...