I shall approach this subject as a jurist.
One might say that the loi Gayssot (the Gayssot Act of 1990, which criminalizes the public denial of crimes against humanity as defined at Nuremberg) is perhaps not the best law, but it is a necessary one.
This debate was all the more necessary in that yesterday, in Le Monde, some of you no doubt saw the statement by Michel Tournier, who was presumably interviewed following the release of the film Le Roi des Aulnes (The Erl-King); Michel Tournier, who pronounces himself in rather astonishing terms on this loi Gayssot. Let me read you a few extracts:
“The massacre of the Jews was a historical fact; the loi Gayssot turns it into an article of faith, the denial of which becomes a blasphemy, on the same footing as the Immaculate Conception or the dogma of the Trinity.”
That is to say, Michel Tournier comes and says: “you are in the process of establishing truth by means of the law, in the same way that one asks the believer or the Christian to believe in the Immaculate Conception or the dogma of the Trinity.” A rather astonishing confusion — not when it comes from Michel Tournier, which to be honest did not really surprise me, but from figures such as Vidal-Naquet or Madeleine Rebérioux. And so, as a jurist, I shall give you a few explanations so that we may debate this loi Gayssot. First, let us clarify a problem of terminology concerning négationnisme (Holocaust denial): this movement first called itself “revisionist,” then came to be called “negationist” (négationniste). I believe the term that corresponds most closely to the reality is “negationist.” One can sum up the negationists’ position around three refusals, around three rejections, three denials. First denial: the gas chambers had no homicidal character; they were there only to disinfect persons whose state of health was extremely deficient; second denial: there was never any policy of extermination on the part of the Third Reich against the Jews; third denial: the figure of six million (victims) that has been advanced has no foundation and is altogether inaccurate.
It seems to me that the term revisionist cannot apply to this category of individuals. I believe they wanted to take up this expression revisionist in order to place themselves under the cover of a pseudo-historical revisionism, by saying that the work of historians is in perpetual evolution, in perpetual revision, and that a historian will constantly evolve in the positions he takes, in his study of the facts and documents submitted to him. So they attempted to present themselves as revisionists, but I believe the three “noes” I have just mentioned show clearly that they must be called negationists.
This denial has been, and is, punishable in France under a law of July 1990 known as the loi Gayssot. The loi Gayssot, named after the man who proposed the text, the Communist-group deputy Gayssot, is a law that has a single article, which is extremely short, which one might think is very clear, but whose very lack of clarity is precisely what gives rise to this debate. Here is what this legal text says: “Shall be liable to the penalties…” — which I shall not enumerate — “those who have contested the existence of one or more crimes against humanity as defined by Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal (I.M.T.) annexed to the London Agreement” — that is, of Nuremberg. So, to sum up, the loi Gayssot says: “you are liable to criminal sanctions from the moment you contest the existence or the reality of crimes against humanity”; but note carefully that it is not a question of this or that crime against humanity, but exclusively of those that were defined at Nuremberg — that is, the crimes against humanity committed against the Jews or against the Roma. I make this clear right away, because there exist other crimes against humanity, in particular after Nuremberg, to which the loi Gayssot does not apply. The loi Gayssot covers only the crimes committed during the Second World War against the Jews or the Roma. Let me recall what a crime against humanity is, as it was defined at the Nuremberg trials.
The loi Gayssot covers only the crimes committed during the Second World War against the Jews or the Roma.
These crimes do not, therefore, concern only the gas chambers or the crematorium ovens: they are “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and all other inhuman acts committed against civilian populations for political, racial, or religious motives.” That is the Nuremberg definition of the crime against humanity. And when, in France at any rate, one comes and contests the existence of these crimes, well, one is liable to a criminal sanction. It is true that when this law came out, a certain number of historians, intellectuals, and jurists — and I was one of them — did not fully understand its meaning: what, someone who expresses an opinion, who says “in my view the gas chambers did not exist” — that person should be punished criminally? I was somewhat uneasy with this type of law, which is rather exceptional in our French law. And then I understood, along with other jurists, that négationnisme is not simply the expression of this discourse, the expression of an opinion — namely, that the gas chambers had no homicidal character — but that in reality this discourse underlay a wholly other discourse.
And there is no other example in history of the great tragedies that have crossed humanity becoming the object of currents of contestation of this kind. There will be questions of interpretation, differences of appraisal; but never will you find, with respect to the great tragedies of history, currents of pseudo-historians tending to contest the facts. Speaking of the enslavement of Black people, no one contests the enslavement of Black people.
One can take the mass graves of the trenches of the 1914–18 war: no one will come and contest the existence of these tragedies. I believe, therefore, that in order to try to understand the reason for négationnisme and the reason the law intervened, one must take as a point of reference the evolution of what antisemitic expression has been, and consider it before the Shoah and after the Shoah.
Before the Shoah, as we all know, antisemitism had a direct, aggressive, violent expression; there was a political antisemitism and an antisemitism that one might qualify as theologico-religious. Both on the political plane and by way of religious conceptions, there was a convergence against the Jews within the framework of this antisemitism, which took the forms we know and that I shall not develop here. And the Shoah came. And I could almost say that the Shoah compromised antisemitism, and that at the end of the war one could not be antisemitic as one could have been before the war. I believe one must start from a pivotal point in antisemitic expression, between before the Shoah and after the Shoah. But at the same time another event will occur, and there will be a telescoping of these two events: the creation of the State of Israel. And this will become the focal point of a new expression of modern antisemitism. And one will find this expression with Professor Faurisson, the apostle of the negationists, the one to whom all the negationists lay claim. And whose creed I would like to recall, from 1978. Here is what he writes then:
“The alleged Hitlerian gas chambers and the alleged genocide of the Jews form one and the same historical lie, which has made possible a gigantic politico-financial swindle whose beneficiaries are the State of Israel and international Zionism, and whose principal victims are the German people — not its leaders — and the Palestinian people in its entirety.”
In this sentence one finds all the clichés of prewar antisemitism: that is, the conspiracy, that is, the politico-financial swindle: they are everywhere, the Jews, this people without a land, and who today have a land, always have the same behavior, which is to form this gigantic politico-financial swindle. We thus have, with this statement by Faurisson, which is the creed of the negationists, this new form of antisemitism.
And we shall see it with the recent Garaudy–Abbé Pierre affair, where the same themes will be taken up with even greater precision, because the negationists will want to justify their position, and to push back in time — and not only to the creation of the State of Israel or to the Shoah — a certain number of criticisms against the Jews. Garaudy, like Abbé Pierre, will come and say that the Jews are in reality executioners since antiquity, and that the fact of presenting them as victims over twenty centuries is, here again, a gigantic swindle and a gigantic lie, since — Garaudy will tell us, echoed by Abbé Pierre — in reality, look at what happened in the time of Joshua, when the Jews massacred the Canaanites; and Garaudy, like Abbé Pierre, will say: that was the first Shoah of History.
There is thus a kind of slippage in the gaze the negationists cast upon the Jews: not only was it a deicide people, but in reality it was an executioner people since antiquity. They were never victims; they are executioners. I would like to make a brief aside on this precise point: it is extraordinary that today, while the negationists who come to discuss, to divide, to fragment all the historical events, the testimonies, the documents, in order to try to say “all of that is not true,” we have Abbé Pierre — and others, of course — who refer to a document, which is the Old Testament, in order, there, to come and say: “there was a Shoah.” That is to say, that in ’39–’45,