La France a enterré sa honte de l'antisémitisme (Ben Macintyre)

Ben Macintyre, auteur britannique, historien et chroniqueur pour le journal The Times:

France has buried its antisemitic shame - Decades of state denial about Holocaust collaboration have fuelled today’s incidents of neo‑Nazi thuggery

In the ragged aftermath of the Second World War, a young Jewish Frenchman named Jean-Jacques Fraenkel travelled to Nice in order to find a particular hairdresser and kill her. 

This Frenchwoman, he believed, had betrayed his mother to the Gestapo in 1943. By that time, his father had perished in Auschwitz. A year later, his mother would follow her husband to the gas chambers. 

The orphaned Fraenkel never found the treacherous coiffeuse. He was told that the Resistance had already lynched her. More likely she simply vanished, her crimes erased by a deliberate, state-sanctioned national amnesia. France did not want to remember the role its citizens had played in the Holocaust, or admit the virulent French antisemitism that underpinned it. 

“We French Jews fought two wars,” Fraenkel said a few years ago. “The first we fought alongside other French people against the Nazis, and we lost. The second, for recognition of what was done to us by our own countrymen, we are still fighting.” […] 

Today’s French antisemites are different in style from their forebears. There is an extreme Islamism that informs much of today’s anti-Jewish prejudice. The swastika-painters have not read a word of Faurisson. They do not know or care that they are the cultural heirs of the people who turned in their Jewish neighbours to the Nazis, or the antisemites who hounded the Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus at the end of the 19th century, prompting antisemitic riots across France and Émile Zola’s famous denunciation. 

Yet the upsurge of French Jew-baiting today stands in a long and ugly tradition. The founders of the Fourth Republic had a unique opportunity to root out this canker in French life but allowed it to metastasise, leaving a diseased memory. 

Lire l'article complet @ The Times