Faurisson Trial Suspended

Yet another in the interminable round of prosecutions of Professor Robert Faurisson was suddenly halted on November 15 when Faurisson and his attorney, Eric Delcroix, challenged the constitutionality of France's repressive Loi Gayssot, which makes it a crime to dispute the historicity of the Nazi Holocaust. In an appeal that will be considered by France's supreme court of appeal, the Cour de Cassation, the defendant argued that by depriving French courts of their right to consider the historical facts, the law reduces judicial prerogatives solely to determining the evidence of the “denial” and the severity of the sentence.

The current case resulted from a press release issued by Faurisson last April which hailed the evident conversion of Roger Garaudy and the Abbé Pierre [see SR #'s 34, 36, 37] to the side of revisionists “who claim that the alleged genocide of the Jews and the alleged Nazi gas chambers are one and the same historical lie.” Although the trial could have proceeded while the law itself was under appeal, to the consternation of the public prosecutor and the attorney for five Jewish organizations which are allowed to participate in the prosecution (as is common in continental law) the three judges hearing the case decided to postpone the trial until the higher court's ruling on the Loi Gayssot.

Nor was that the only bombshell Professor Faurisson dropped on his persecutors in court that day: he submitted to the court two stunning articles by a French historian, Jacques Baynac, which appeared in the September 2 and 3 editions of the Swiss (Lausanne) newspaper Le Nouveau Quotidien, in which Baynac called for an end to the legal repression of revisionism. Even more sensationally, Baynac described the chaos that Holocaust revisionism has unleashed among French intellectuals. Most sensational of all, the professed exterminationist writes that, “heartbeaking as it is to hear it or to say it,” there is no documentary or technical evidence for the existence of the gas chambers at all.

“How should we deal with the 4-million condemned to death?”
“Let’s consult the experts.”
Chard, Rivarol, 19 April 1996

What kind of hairsplitting is it, as Faurisson properly asks the court, that makes him subject to imprisonment (from a month to a year), fine (from the equivalent of $400 to $60,000) and other punishment as well for saying that there is no evidence for the gas chambers, and that therefore they don't exist; while allowing Baynac to go unmolested for “denying” the material evidence for the gas chambers, but taking on faith the stories of the eyewitnesses? Here, it seems, French justice is just a step away from trying whether the famous affirmation of faith of the early Christian Tertullian, “Credo quia absurdum” (I believe [it] because it's absurd!), would comply with the Loi Gayssot.

For all his equivocations on whether the extermination story is correct, many of which may be more prudential than sincere, Jacques Baynac has forthrightly pointed out that in the Holocaust controversy, the exterminationist camp has ceded the field of scientific, scholarly inquiry to the revisionists. He has made it no less clear that if the establishment scholars are to re-establish the scientific credibility of the Holocaust, they must allow revisionists to make their arguments, and disprove them if they can. As he writes: “…as soon as one is on scientific ground, it is forbidden to forbid revision or denial.” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

From an American viewpoint, Jacques Baynac’s two articles contain a great deal more of interest to revisionists, above all their documentation of the agony of French exterminationists in the aftermath of the Garaudy and Abbé Pierre affair. In Baynac's telling, the fuse that Robert Faurisson and Pierre Guillaume and their friends lit and nurtured through many years of work and suffering has rocked the world of politics and culture in France to its foundations. In the establishment and on the left, there is suspicion and hysteria that the revisionist doctrines are secretly spreading, in their midst; in the media, the lamentations of the Holocaustomaniacs at their inability to contain Faurisson & Co., encapsulated most succinctly in L'Evenement du jeudi's big headline all over Paris one day last spring: “Victory for the Revisionists”; across France, panicky denunciations of suspected revisionists, from France's Olympic synchronized swim team (for profaning Schindler's List! [see SR#34]) to a school teacher who innocently assigned her students a problem in calculating the duration of an asphyxiation by gas.

It was Robert Faurisson's long-standing, gallant attorney, Eric Delcroix (himself a victim of the Loi Gayssot [see SR#37]) who described Holocaust revisionism as “the intellectual adventure of the late twentieth century.” So it is; so it is.

In exchange for your contribution of $10 we'll send you a full translation of both articles from Le Nouveau Quotidien of September 2 and 3. We've seen no more devastating, fact-filled admission of the intellectual power and progress of revisionist scholarship—from an establishment historian—anywhere. [offer no longer valid; ed.]