Emmanuel Macron sent a clear message to the far-right presidential candidate to warn against “manipulating” history, Eric Zemore Symbolic visit to Vichy.
After the German occupation in 1940, Spa Town was chosen as the puppet regime of Marshal Philippe Petain, which cooperated with the Nazis and ensured the deportation of Jews to death camps. Zemore claimed that Petain saved the French Jews, which angered historians.
On Wednesday, Macron talked about the shadow of World War II over France’s increasingly tense and divided election campaign, although he will not announce his re-election until early next year.
His presence in the town is to confront the 63-year-old Zemmour, a far-right television expert, Incite racial hatred. Last weekend, Zemur launched his April presidential election campaign, vowing to “save” French civilization from immigrants.
To the anger of historians, Zemur has repeatedly stated that Vichy protected the French Jews. He said on the radio: “This is my struggle with repentance and guilt. The French people will always feel guilty.”
Jacques Chirac became the first president in 1995 to fully recognize the role of France and the French government in rounding up Jews to concentration camps during the “criminal stupidity” of Nazi occupation. After the war, Petain was sentenced to death for treason and commuted to life imprisonment.
French historians strongly condemned Zemore. The historian Jacques Semelin wrote in Le Monde that Zemur’s remarks about Vichy “have no historical basis.”
Macron’s visit to Vichy is the first official visit by a French president to Vichy since 1978 to talk about the town’s history. Before planning to visit the monument to the deported Jews, Macron told the local radio station France Bleu that “History is written by historians” and that “respect it and understand it” is a good thing, allowing historians to build on The truth in documents and past traces. He said that history should not be “manipulated”, “incited” or “modified”, and France should respect those who struggle to make it free.
Macron stated that he would celebrate the bravery of the 80 parliamentarians who opposed the granting of Petain’s plenipotentiary vote in 1940.
Zemmour is the son of a Jewish Berber born in Paris. He emigrated from Algeria in the 1950s and was called a dangerous racist and Holocaust denier by French Attorney General Eric Dupont-Moretti. On TV this week, Zemur disagreed that he was a denier of the Holocaust and said that his opponents called him a racist in order to belittle his campaign and his supporters.
Macron’s embarrassment during an official visit to Vichy shows that the government is stepping up its offensive against Zemur. Although the debater with no election experience performed strongly in the polls this fall, he is still considered a strong contender for the first round of voting. The two finalists will enter the second round on April 24. Current opinion polls show that Macron is most likely to win.
Government spokesperson Gabriel Attal said on Wednesday: “In public debates, several views on French history are opposed to each other. We are the work of historians, based on facts, documents, and research. It is not based on personal whim and the will to use it in politics. Those who erased past crimes defended future crimes to some extent. Instead, we must learn from all the complexities of the past, including our history The darkest page.”
On Thursday, Macron’s economic minister Bruno Le Maire and Zemur will hold a debate on French Channel 2’s prime time.
