Far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has stirred up deep emotions over France's World War II history with comments on its collaboration with Nazi Germany, just two weeks ahead of the election.
Le Pen said yesterday, "I don't think France is responsible for the Vel d'Hiv," referring to the roundup and deportation of more than 13,000 Jews from a Paris cycling track ordered by Nazi officers in 1942.
For many -- notably Le Pen's chief rival for the presidency Emmanuel Macron -- the remarks were an instant reminder of the candidate's anti-Semitic, negationist father.
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The National Front (FN) leader "crossed a red line", Le Monde said in an editorial, while Jewish groups blasted the comments as "revisionist" and an "insult to France (which has faced up to) its history without a selective memory".
Israel also slammed Le Pen, with the foreign ministry saying "the declaration is contrary to the historical truth".
Macron said today: "It's the true face of the French far right, the face that I am fighting. If anyone still doubted it, Marine Le Pen is indeed the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen."
The candidate's father, now 88, who has described the Nazi gas chambers as a "detail" of history, has multiple convictions for inciting racial hatred and denying crimes against humanity.
Historian Laurent Joly said that in the French national psyche, the Vel d'Hiv deportation symbolises the crimes of the wartime Vichy government.
"It was the most tragic consequence of the criminal policy of Vichy, of the collaboration with Germany," Joly told AFP, noting that no German officers were present for the operation.
In 1995, more than 50 years after the fact, then president Jacques Chirac deemed that "the time had come to clearly recognise the fault of the collaborating French state, and no (subsequent leader) should contest it", Le Monde said.
Le Pen's comments went against a "national consensus on how to understand one of the most painful episodes of French history", it added.
FN secretary general Nicolas Bay today rejected claims that Le Pen's remarks could be associated with her father's negationism.
She does not dispute "what was shocking and atrocious during this period, she is only saying that France was not to blame", Bay said.
The FN's position is the same as that of wartime leader-in-exile Charles de Gaulle, "which is that France was in London. France was not Vichy", Bay said on French radio.
De Gaulle, then the leader of the Free French forces, lived in London during World War II while the Vichy regime collaborated with Nazi Germany.
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