drapery boutique
Since 1969
•Bed
in the last decade, has much
to do with the failure to con-
demn the men who carried
out the wartime persecu-
tions," says Paul Webster,
author of a a book on French
anti-Semitism, Petain's
Crime, to be published by
Macmillan next month.
The Vichy government's
complicity with the Nazis
was not even mentioned in
school history books until
1983, he notes, and no Fren-
ch citizen has ever been tried
for crimes against humanity
of the sort that resulted in
the Gestapo chief of Lyons,
Klaus Barbie, being
sentenced to life imprison-
ment.
Human rights leaders,
particularly the anti-Nazi
lawyer Serge Klarsfeld,
have successfully launched
prosecutions against three
leading French collab-
orators, including the former
Vichy police chief, Rene
Bousquet, who planned the
deportation of French Jews
to Nazi death camps.
However, the French
judiciary — which, says
Webster, has "much to ex-
plain about its own role in
condemning Jews during the
war" — has consistently
contrived to delay the start
of the trials. Nevertheless,
Webster insists that "the
Carpentras outrage can only
emphasize the urgency of br-
inging Bousquet to trial and
launching a national debate
on anti-Semitism."
Not that the French au-
thorities have neglected the
obvious manifestations of
racist hatred. Anti-Semitic
and anti-Holocaust litera-
ture has been outlawed in
France since 1972, but the
law has been honored more
in the breach than in the
observance: such material is
still openly sold in many
Paris bookstores.
Recent opinion polls have
shown that no fewer than
one in five French citizens
has negative attitudes
toward the country's
700,000 Jews, believing that
the conditions of being Jew-
ish and patriotic are mutual-
ly exclusive.
The failure of the French
establishment to condemn
and prosecute those, like
Rene Bousquet, who col-
laborated with the Nazis has
given a license to the in-
heritors of the Vichy regime
— to Jean-Marie Le Pen and
his followers; to the extreme
right-wing disciples of the
breakaway Catholic Ar-
chbishop Marcel Levebvre;
to the anti-democratic sup-
porters of Action Francaise,
an association founded at
the turn of the century by
anti-Semitic poet Charles
Maurras in response to the
Dreyfus Affair.
If the socialist administra-
tion of Francois Mitterrand
does finally decide to crack
down on anti-Semitism and
bring his countrymen face to
face with their terrible past,
he will have been moved by
events.
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