Ecrits révisionnistes (1974-1998) BY ROBERT FAURISSON Chapter 12: DID THE FRENCH WANT WAR?

Cursed be war! reads the inscription on the war memorial in the small town of Gentioux in the French département of Creuse. That on the monument in Saint-Martin-d'Estréaux, in the Loire département, is longer but its assessment of the war sends forth the same cry(40). In France, the lists of the 1914-1918 war dead in our churches and on our monuments are heart-rending. Today no-one, at bottom, is able to say for exactly what reason the youth of France (just as, on its side, the youth of Germany) was thus mown down.

On the same memorials in our towns and villages there are sometimes found, in markedly smaller numbers, the names of young Frenchmen killed or gone missing during the campaign of 1939-1940: about 87,000. Occasionally one also finds those of the civilian victims; the Anglo-Americans alone killed some 67,000 with their bombarments in France. There may even be, to round out the list, the names of a few members of the résistance who died in their beds well after the war. Almost nowhere and never to be found are the names of French victims of the Big Purge (probably fourteen thousand, and not thirty thousand or, as is sometimes claimed, one hundred and five thousand) in which the Jews, the Communists, and the last-minute Gaullists played an essential role. With rare exceptions the names of soldiers of the colonial troops who died for France are also lacking, since they were not natives of the towns in question.

For France, the two world wars constituted a disaster: the first, especially by the sheer volume of human losses, the second by its character of a civil war which has persisted to this day.

When reflecting on these lists of first world war dead, when completing them with the names of those gone missing in action, when remembering the whole battalions of men with ruined faces, of wounded, maimed, crippled for life, when taking stock of the destructions of all sorts, when thinking of the families devastated by these losses, of the prisoners, of those shot for desertion, of the suicides provoked by so many hardships, when remembering also the twenty-five million deaths caused in America and Europe from 1918 by the epidemic of a viral illness wrongly called Spanish influenza, brought into France, at least in part, by the American troops(41), can one not understand the pre-1939-1945 pacifists and supporters of Munich as well as the Pétainists of 1940? What right today has anyone to speak blithely of cowardice, either in regard to the Munich accords of 29 and 30 of September 1938, or to the armistice signed at Rethondes in Picardy on 22 June 1940? Could the Frenchmen who, in those times, still bore the physical and mental scars of the 1914-1918 holocaust and its aftermath a veritable holocaust, in effect, that could they, in the late 1930s, consider it a moral obligation to hurl themselves straight into a new slaughter? And, after the signing of an armistice which, however harsh, was by no means shameful, where was the dishonour in seeking an understanding with the opponent, not in order to wage war but to make peace?