Ecrits révisionnistes (1974-1998) BY ROBERT FAURISSON Chapter 1: AGAINST THE LAW

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In France, it is forbidden to question the Shoah.

In application of a law on the freedom of the press enacted on 13 July 1990, the Shoah, in its three hypostases the alleged genocide of the Jews, the alleged Nazi gas chambers, and the alleged figure of six million Jewish victims of the second world war has become unquestionable, on pain of imprisonment of from one month to one year, a fine of from 2,000 to 300,000 francs (305 to 45,800 euros), an order to pay considerable damages, and still other sanctions. More precisely, this law forbids the questioning of the reality of one or more crimes against humanity as defined in 1945 and punished in 1946 by the judges of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, a court established exclusively by the victors exclusively to judge the vanquished.

Of course, debates and controversies about the Shoah also called the Holocaust remain authorised but only within the confines traced by the official dogma. Controversies or debates which might lead to a challenging of the Shoah story as a whole, or of a part of it, or simply to raise doubt, are forbidden. Let us repeat: in the matter at hand, even doubt is proscribed, and punished.

In France, the idea of such a law, of Israeli inspiration(2), had been formulated for the first time in 1986 by a certain number of historians of Jewish origin, among whom Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Georges Wellers, and François Bédarida, gathered round Chief Rabbi René-Samuel Sirat(3). The law was passed in 1990 on the initiative of former prime minister Laurent Fabius, then a member of the Socialist government, president of the National Assembly, and himself a Jewish militant of the Jewish cause. At the same period (May 1990), a desecration of graves in the Jewish cemetery of Carpentras, in Provence, had given rise to a media exploitation which nullified all inclination on the part of opposition MPs and senators to mount any effective resistance to the bill. In Paris, about two hundred thousand marchers, with a host of Israeli flags borne high, demonstrated against the resurgence of the horrid beast. Notre Dame's great bell tolled as for a particularly tragic or significant event in the history of France. Once the law had been put on the statute books (appearing in the Journal officiel on the 14th of July, the national holiday: in the same issue, incidentally, as P. Vidal-Naquet's nomination to the Order of the Légion d'honneur), the Carpentras outrage was mentioned only, if at all, with a certain distance, as a mere reminder. Only the Fabius-Gayssot Act remained.

Under pressure from national and international Jewish organisations, other countries have since adopted, each in its turn, laws forbidding all questioning of the Shoah, after the Israeli and French examples. Such has been the case for Germany, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, and Lithuania. Still other Western countries (particularly Canada and the United Kingdom) have promised the Jewish organisations, more or less expressly, that they will follow suit. But, in reality, such a law, of specific nature, is not indispensable for the hunting down of historical revisionism. In France, as elsewhere, the practice has often been to prosecute questioners of the Shoah under other laws; according to the needs of a given case, recourse is had to laws on racism or antisemitism, the defamation of living persons, insulting the memory of the dead, attempting to justify crimes, spreading false news, and a source of cash indemnities for the plaintiffs personal injury.

In France, the police and the judiciary rigorously ensure the protection thus accorded to an official version of second world war history. According to this rabbinical version, the major event of the conflict was the Shoah, in other words the physical extermination of the Jews which the Germans are said to have carried out from 1941-1942 to 1944-1945 (lacking any document with which to assign a precise time span to the event and for good reason, as it is a matter of fiction the official historians propose only dates which are as divergent as they are approximate).