Faurisson, Robert

For more than 20 years, Robert Faurisson has been Europe's foremost Holocaust revisionist scholar.

He was born on January 25, 1929, in Shepperton, England. His father was French and his mother was Scottish. As a boy and young man, he attended schools in Singapore, Japan, and in France. He was educated at a Lycée in Paris, and at the renowned Sorbonne. He received his "State Doctorate" in letters and the humanities from the Sorbonne in 1972, where he also taught from 1969 to 1974. From 1974 until 1990, Faurisson was a professor of French literature at the University of Lyon II. He is a recognized specialist of text and document analysis, and is the author of four books on French literature.

After years of private research and study, Dr. Faurisson first made public his skeptical views about the Holocaust extermination story in two items published in December 1978 and January 1979 in the influential Paris daily Le Monde.

In the archives of the Auschwitz State Museum in Poland , Faurisson discovered the technical and architectural drawings of the Auschwitz morgues, the crematories and other installations. He is the first person to publicize these important documents, and to point out their significance.

Since 1978, Dr. Faurisson has presented his critical view of the Holocaust extermination story in numerous articles, in many interviews, in several books, and in stunning April 1979 debate on a Swiss television network with prominent defenders of the "exterminationist" view. Many of his scholarly articles have been published in English in The Journal of Historical Review. A four-volume collection of many of his writings, Écrits Révisionnistes (1974-1998), was published in 1999.

Dr. Faurisson worked closely on the French revisionist quarterly, Annales d'Histoire Revisionniste, during the three years of its existence. He also worked on the successor quarterly, Revue d'Histoire Revisionniste.

A cogent summary of his skeptical view of the “Holocaust” is his lengthy article, “Impact and Future of Holocaust Revisionism,” published in The Journal of Historical Review, Jan.-Feb. 2000. (It is posted online at http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v19/v19n1p-2_Faurisson.html )

Faurisson played an important role in both the 1985 and 1988 “Holocaust trials” in Toronto of Ernst Zundel. His role in those legal battles went far beyond his testimony on the stand as a witness. Especially during the 1985 trial, he spent hundreds of hours -- often working all day and very late into the night -- preparing questions used by defense attorney Doug Christie in his devastating interrogations of Raul Hilberg, Rudolf Vrba and other prosecution witnesses. Faurisson's most important contribution to the defense in the 1988 trial may well have been his key role in securing the participation of Fred Leuchter, an American gas chamber specialist. Faurisson played an important role in arranging for Leuchter's on-site investigation in Poland of supposed extermination gas chambers, and in making public the American’s remarkable findings.

Much about Faurisson’s role in the 1988 “Holocaust trial” in Toronto, Canada, can be found in the 562-page book edited and compiled by Barbara Kulaszka, Did Six Million Really Die?: Report of the Evidence in the Canadian 'False News' Trial of Ernst Zündel.

For years various government agencies and influential organizations have waged a concerted campaign to silence him. He has been obliged to defend himself many times in French courts for his forthright writings and statements. He has had to contend with numerous court convictions.

His bank account has been frozen, and court officials have repeatedly visited his home threatening him and his wife with seizure of their furniture to pay for financial "damages" imposed for his “heretical” remarks. Because of this campaign, his family life has been repeatedly disrupted and thrown into turmoil. His health has suffered terribly.

During an interview in December 1980 with the French radio network "Europe 1," Faurisson summarized the result of his historical research in one sentence of 60 French words. Here is that sentence, in English:

“The alleged Hitlerite gas chambers and the alleged genocide of the Jews constitute one and the same historical lie, which made possible a gigantic financial-political fraud, the principal beneficiaries of which are the State of Israel and international Zionism, and whose principal victims are the German people -- but not their leaders -- and the entire Palestinian people.”

That sentence, he declared 23 years later, “requires no changes.”

For these provocative words, Faurisson was brought to trial on criminal charges of racial defamation and incitement to racial hatred. In July 1981 he was found guilty and given a suspended three month prison sentence, fined several thousand francs, and ordered to pay 3.6 million francs for the cost of making public the verdict on television and in periodicals. However, in June 1982 an appeals court threw out the charge of incitement to racial hatred and eliminated the 3.6 million franc payment.

Among his other legal travails, in June 1995 a Paris court ordered Faurisson to pay a fine of $3,000 for writing Réponse à Jean-Claude Pressac sur le problème des chambres à gaz ("Response to Jean-Claude Pressac on the problem of the gas chambers"), a book that disputes claims of Second World War mass killings in German gas chambers. Henri Roques, another French revisionist, was likewise fined $3,000 by the court for distributing the work. (Roques is also the author of The 'Confessions' of Kurt Gerstein.)

On September 25, 1997, Faurisson came to trial for a statement made in April 1996 about the Garaudy-Abbé Pierre affair in which he mentioned "the imposture of the Nazi gas chambers." During the trial he told the court: "We are only three years away from the year 2000, and there are billions of people who are asked to believe in something they have never seen and don't even know how it worked!" The prosecutor asked for a new kind of sentence: either imprisonment or a fine, to which Faurisson responded by declaring: "I hereby make a commitment that I shall not buy and shall not pay for my freedom. No one has ever bought me and no one will ever buy me."

As expected, the Paris court handed down a guilty verdict. On October 23, 1997, it ordered Faurisson to pay 120,600 francs ($20,000), divided into three parts: 50,000 francs as a fine, 20,600 francs for a Jewish attorney, and 50,000 to pay for the publication of the summary of the court's judgment in two daily newspapers, as well as (unprecedentedly) in the Journal officiel de la République française. Faurisson paid the Jewish lawyer and was paying the fine in installments. However, he did not have to pay to promulgate the court judgment because, he has learned, the anti-revisionist organizations decided that they did not wish to see the publication of the words "the imposture of the Nazi gas chambers."

In December 1997 Faurisson received a summons from a Paris court official for an essay, "The Horned Visions of the Holocaust," that had been posted on a website without his prior knowledge or approval. In this piece Faurisson wrote that "The Holocaust of the Jews is a fiction." He responded to the summons with a stern letter in which he defiantly declared his refusal to "collaborate" with French justice authorities and police in the repression of revisionism.

On March 16, 1998, Faurisson had to appear before a Paris court to stand trial for a short definition of "revisionism," as inaccurately reported in a newspaper.

On April 8, 1998 Faurisson was set to stand trial in Amsterdam for the publication in 1991 in Dutch of his detailed critical analysis of the Anne Frank Diary. (This analysis has been published in various editions, including in the Summer 1982 Journal of Historical Review, under the title “Is the Diary of Anne Frank Genuine?”). The Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam and the Anne Frank Fonds in Basel, Switzerland, jointly brought the legal action. The Museum complained that it has been obliged to provide special training for its guides to respond to Faurisson's arguments, and that his critique might reduce the number of its visitors.

On October 3, 2006, a Paris court found Faurisson guilty of “Holocaust denial” for having said, during an interview with Iranian television, that “there was never” a single execution gas chamber used by the Germans during World War II. That remark, the court found, was a violation of France’s “Holocaust denial” statute, the 1990 “Gayssot” law that makes it a crime to dispute or contest crimes against humanity, as defined by the joint military commission of the victorious Allied powers that met as a tribunal at Nuremberg 1945-46. After finding that Faurisson’s remark during the interview constituted “complicity in contesting the existence of a crime against humanity,” as determined by the Nuremberg inter-Allied tribunal, the court gave Dr. Faurisson a suspended prison sentence of three months, and fined him 7,500 euros (about $9,500).

For his views Faurisson has repeatedly been a victim of physical assault. Between November 1978 and May 1993 he was a victim of ten attacks, at least nine of them carried out by Jewish thugs. None of the criminal assailants in any of these assaults has ever been brought to justice. The most savage was a nearly fatal attack on September 16, 1989, for which a group calling itself "The Sons of the Memory of the Jews" claimed responsibility.

(For more, see "Jewish Militants: Fifteen Years, and More, of Terrorism in France ,” posted at http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n2p-2_Faurisson.html , and The Zionist Terror Network, posted at http://www.ihr.org/books/ztn.html.)



Three new examples of how "Justice lies down in the conqueror’s bed" In the course of a discussion programme on the ARTE television channel last November, Robert Badinter lied outright in saying that in 1981 he had won a court ruling against me "for being a falsifier of history". I …

Ambassador Pierre Vimont Embassy of France in the United States 4101 Reservoir Road, NW Washington, D. C. 20007 February 8, 2008 Dear Ambassador Vimont, As you are undoubtedly aware by now, Holocaust revisionist scholar Dr. Robert Faurisson will probably stand trial for comments he made at the Iran Holocaust Conference …

In 1789 the French National Assembly enacted the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen,” a guiding document of the French Revolution that solemnly proclaims as “inalienable” the rights of free speech and of the press. Today French citizens are, by and large, able to express their views …

Robert H. Countess, Christian Lindtner and Germar Rudolf (eds.), Exactitude. Festschrift for Robert Faurisson to his 75th Birthday, Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2004, 138 pp. pb., $ 15.- This book, written by leading revisionists worldwide, in honor of Robert Faurisson, gives ample and sympathetic treatment to this man who …

Even before he arrived in Stockholm in late May, French professor and revisionist scholar Robert Faurisson was expecting trouble. This would be his third visit to the Swedish capital at the invitation of Moroccan-born refugee, author and revisionist activist Ahmed Rami. A few days earlier, the militant Jewish organization "Betar" …

What is usually called the "Faurisson Affair" began on 16 November 1978 with the publication of an article about me in the newspaper Le Matin de Paris. For several years I had realized that as soon as the press made public my opinions about Revisionism I would encounter a storm …

In October 1978 l'Express, a French weekly comparable to Newsweek, published an interview with Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, who had been commissioner for Jewish affairs in the Vichy Government during the German occupation, and who has lived in Spain since the war. Darquier's generally unrepentant attitude, plus his claim that …

L’Inconnue (XXX) : Robert Faurisson, depuis bientôt trente ans, vous défrayez la chronique par votre opiniâtreté dans un combat solitaire pour des idées qui vous sont très personnelles et que nous ne commenterons pas ici ; elles sont suffisamment glosées ailleurs. Je vous propose de faire connaître au public d’autres …

Introduction Pierre Vidal-Naquet is professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (School of Higher Studies in the Social Sciences) in Paris and has been a very determined adversary of mine. He has attacked me in the academic and journalistic worlds and even in the courts. Along with …

Statement on oath by John Tuson Bennett of 122 Canning Street, Carlton Melbourne Australia, barrister and solicitor of the Supreme Court of Victoria. I, John Tuson Bennett of 122 Canning Street Carlton Melbourne make oath and say as follows: I am a barrister and solicitor of the Supreme Court of …

February 12, 2014 Eric Delcroix, my former lawyer, has just reminded me that the late humorist Pierre Desproges (1939-1988), in a skit for the television show “Le Tribunal des flagrants délires” (The Court of in flagrante delirio), once portrayed me as an unnameable character, unnameable at least for the French …

Les frontières ravagées, fondées dans un immense royaume de Frénésie, les hommes voulant du progrès et le progrès voulant des hommes, voilà ce que furent ces noces énormes. L'humanité s'ennuyait, elle brûla quelques Dieux, changea de costume et paya l'Histoire de quelques gloires nouvelles.—Céline, Semmelweis, p. 1. Chronique des évènements …

Mémoire en Défense, by Robert Faurisson, 275 pp, Preface by Noam. Chomsky, La Vieille Taupe; B.P. 9805; 75224 Paris Cedex 05, 1980,FF65. Intolerable Intolerance, by Jean-Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, Eric Delcroix, Claude Karnoouh, Vincent Monteff, and Jean-Louis Tristani, 206 pp, Editions de la Différence, Paris, 1981, FF42. This review of the two …

Two papers by Prof. Dr. Butz about the persecution of Prof. Dr. Robert Faurisson in France for expressing his revisionist views.

Souvent, il semble que l'esprit s'oublie, se perde, mais à l'intérieur, il est toujours en opposition avec lui-même. Il est progrès intérieur et comme Hamlet dit de l'esprit de son père : « Bien travaillé, vieille taupe ! »—Hegel Nous reconnaissons notre vieil ami, notre vieille taupe qui sait si …

Someone has passed on to me a comment by Jean Stevenin, a lawyer of the Paris bar: "This is a continuation of the Faurisson affair!" For him, at bottom, the Garaudy/Abbé Pierre affair is (as was the Roques affair or the Notin affair) a growth, a resurgence and a continuation …

Ernst Zündel’s contribution was written on December 5, 2003, from the Rexdale, Ontario, GULag in the People’s Republic of Canada, that is, from his solitary confinement cell where he is being held as a political prisoner of conscience by the Crown authorities. His location is the Toronto-West Detention Center, 111 …

Introduction When I was asked to contribute towards the Robert Faurisson Festschrift, I recalled my own student days during the 1970s in Germany where I had regularly come across such publications. The German word Schrift means writing or a piece of correspondence. The word Fest has become part of the …

The following text was written by Theodore O’Keefe, long-time coworker of the Institute for Historical Review and former editor of The Journal of Historical Review, on occasion of Robert Faurisson’s 75th birthday: "Robert Faurisson taught revisionists the hardness of words. Molded by the exacting discipline that reading and writing the …

In August 1979, the well-established magazine "Storia Illustrata" published an interview given to Antonio Pitamitz by Robert Faurisson,[1] which has become a milestone along the road of historical revisionism. At the time, I had already started to devote myself to revisionism, and through this text with its clear, essential, …

On January 25, 1929, 75 years before this book was published, a extraordinarily courageous man was born: Robert Faurisson. When it comes to the remarkable scholarly work of Robert Faurisson, there are several matters to be kept distinctly in mind. First of all is his method. Here, this French scholar …

History loves surprises. The man, who has made maybe the greatest contribution to the unmasking of the biggest historical lie of our time, is not an historian. Nor is he a politician, even if the results of his research have far-reaching political consequences. He was the first who called attention …

An presentation by French revisionist Prof. Dr. Robert Faurisson. Length: 118 minutes 7 seconds. Among the topics treated by Pr. Robert Faurisson Comments on his 'hot reception' at the Stockholm airport and on numerous previous attacks he was submitted in France from Jewish organizations. Pr. Faurisson exposes his views on …

Great men do not need praise as much as they need an understanding of what they have done. I believe I have known Robert Faurisson longer than any other person currently active in 'Holocaust' revisionism, except for one relative of his, so it is incumbent on me to attempt to …

On December 9, 1992, the Paris Court of Appeal (Eleventh Department) rejected Professor Robert Faurisson’s appeal of an April 1991 conviction on a charge of “contesting the crimes against humanity” because of remarks about the Holocaust story he made in a magazine interview. The appeal court imposed penalties of 187,000 …

“Where are the gas chambers?,” asks an American soldier at the “Liberation of Buchenwald.” This cartoon by a prominent female artist who uses the pen name “Chard,” is from the French paper Rivarol, July 2, 1993. Not long after it appeared, French authorities summoned the artist to question her about …

Residing, it seems, at times in his native Paris, at other times somewhere in Romania and sometimes in Israel, precisely at Ashdod, right beside the Gaza Strip, the thirty-year-old French-Israeli Gregory Chelli, member of the Jewish Defense League, works, notably by means of the Internet, at making the life of …

"Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death." George Orwell Professor Robert Faurisson who attended the recent Holocaust Conference in Iran is apparently the first of the participants that could face legal punishment. French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy who recently warned the French Parliament of a resurgence of revisionist theories …

Today at 7.45 am four police officers carried out an extensive search of my house. They acted under a warrant issued by the Parisian examining magistrate (juge d'instruction) Jean-Paul Valat. Three of them had come from Paris and the fourth from the local Vichy police station. They found none of …

On September 9, 2009 the Inconnue (“unknown one”), that is, the academic Maria Poumier, revealed both her identity and her unbelief regarding "the Holocaust" or "the Shoah"; she did so in an open letter to Michèle Alliot-Marie, Minister of Justice, and Frédéric Mitterrand, Minister of Culture. On December 2, 2010, …