Bardèche, Maurice

Bardèche was born in France on 1 October 1907. A product of the educational opportunities of the Third Republic, Bardèche had received a scholarship at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. In 1932 he started teaching at the Sorbonne University. He was heavily influenced by the nationalist intellectual Maurice Barrès and the leader of the monarchist Action française (AF), Charles Maurras. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), he traveled several times to the country and wrote with Brasillach a History of the Spanish War, which supported Franco. During this period he developed his penchant for Fascism, although he didn't take a position during the German occupation. Toward the end of the war he showed his independent mind by characterizing the French Resistance's "excesses," the bombing of Dresden and post-Liberation atrocities as war crimes.

After the Liberation, he was briefly arrested for Collaborationism but quickly released, while his brother-in-law, Robert Brasillach, was executed. Bardèche was expelled from the National Education and proscribed from giving courses in the public education system. He then founded his own literary publishing house, Les Sept Couleurs (The Seven Colours), and also founded a right-wing journal titled Défense de l'Occident in 1952, where the French revisionist Paul Rassinier was a frequent contributor. His 1948 book Nuremberg ou la Terre Promise (Nuremberg or the Promised Land) was the first revisionist work on the Nuremberg show trials. It was followed in 1950 by his second revisionist work on the Nuremberg trials entitled Nuremberg II ou les Faux Monnayeurs (Nuremberg or the Counterfeiters). Bardèche died in Paris in 1998.