Robert Faurisson was once a respected academic. He is now remembered as a discredited figure associated with Holocaust denial and historical revisionism. His career as a denier began in the 1970s with two articles in Le Monde denying the existence of the Auschwitz gas chambers, and ended fifty years later with a string of French criminal convictions, professional disgrace, and the contempt of the historical profession.
The early career
Faurisson was born in Shepperton, Middlesex, in 1929 to a French father and a Scottish mother. He took French citizenship and made his career in France. He was appointed to a teaching post in modern French and contemporary literature at the University of Lyon 2 in 1973, having previously taught at the lycée level. He had published academic work on Lautréamont, Rimbaud and Céline, the last of these a public exercise in textual close reading of an antisemite many French academics preferred not to teach.
He had no training as a historian. He had no expertise in German, in archival research, or in the technical or military history of the Second World War. The career he built as a Holocaust denier was conducted entirely from outside the historical discipline, on the strength of textual close-reading techniques applied to documents he could not read in their original language and to physical evidence he could not assess.
The 1978 and 1979 Le Monde articles
Faurisson’s first public denial pieces appeared in Le Monde on 29 December 1978 and 16 January 1979. The first was a letter; the second was an article published under the headline “Le problème des chambres à gaz”. The article made the claim that defined the rest of his career: that the gas chambers at Auschwitz had not existed, that the Hitler regime had not had a programme of exterminating the Jews, and that the witness testimony to mass killing was unreliable.
The publication of these pieces in Le Monde, France’s newspaper of record, gave Faurisson a public platform he would not have obtained from any specialist publication. Le Monde followed his article in February 1979 with a collective response from thirty-four French historians, including Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Léon Poliakov and François Furet, titled “La politique hitlérienne d’extermination: une déclaration d’historiens”. The historians’ statement laid out the standard documentary basis for the existence of the extermination camps and concluded:
One must not ask oneself how, technically, such a mass murder was possible. It was technically possible because it took place. Such is the obligatory point of departure of any historical inquiry on the subject.
Vidal-Naquet developed the historical case against Faurisson in Les Assassins de la mémoire (1987), the principal French scholarly response to the denial movement and a book that has remained in print ever since.
The Chomsky preface
In 1980 Faurisson published Mémoire en défense contre ceux qui m’accusent de falsifier l’histoire, a self-justification volume that included a preface by the American linguist Noam Chomsky. The preface had been provided as a generic free-speech defence; Chomsky had not read the book. The Chomsky text became the single piece of mainstream-credentialled material the denier movement produced from outside its own ranks. Chomsky has spent the four decades since defending the gesture as a free-speech matter rather than an endorsement of Faurisson’s claims, and has explicitly denounced Faurisson’s denial of the Holocaust on multiple subsequent occasions. The preface remains in the book.
Lyon 2 and the loss of teaching duties
Faurisson’s denial campaign at Lyon 2 had become impossible to manage by 1991. He had been the subject of physical assaults on the campus, of student boycotts, and of pressure from the French Ministry of Higher Education. Lyon 2 transferred him to research duties in 1991, removing him from teaching contact with students. He retained the salary and the title of professor until retirement in 1995. He held no academic post thereafter; his subsequent self-publications and conference speeches were made as a private citizen.
The Gayssot Law and the prosecutions
The Loi Gayssot of 13 July 1990 made the public denial of crimes against humanity, as defined by the London Charter of 1945, a criminal offence in France. Faurisson was the first person prosecuted under it, in 1991, for an interview he had given to the magazine Le Choc du mois in which he had denied the existence of the gas chambers. He was convicted, fined, and given a suspended sentence. He was prosecuted on similar charges repeatedly through the 1990s and 2000s. The convictions accumulated; the fines were paid by his denier supporters; the conduct continued.
His most public conviction was in 2007, after a 2006 appearance at Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Tehran Holocaust denial conference. The Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris convicted him in absentia for his Tehran statements and for an interview he had given in connection with the trip. He was given a three-month suspended sentence and a fine of €7,500.
The Leuchter Report and the Zundel trial
Faurisson was the principal academic-credentialled adviser to the American execution-equipment designer Fred Leuchter, whose 1988 chemical-sampling visit to Auschwitz produced the so-called Leuchter Report. Faurisson supervised the visit, edited the report, and gave evidence in support of it at the second Ernst Zundel trial in Toronto in 1988. The Leuchter methodology was later forensically dismantled by Robert Jan van Pelt in evidence at the Irving v. Lipstadt libel trial in 2000, by Jean-Claude Pressac in Les Crématoires d’Auschwitz (1993), and by the Institute of Forensic Research in Kraków in the corrective Markiewicz study of 1990.
Faurisson’s slogan, repeated in dozens of speeches and writings from the late 1970s onwards, was “no holes, no Holocaust”: the claim that the Birkenau Crematorium II gas chamber roof had no apertures through which Zyklon B could have been introduced, and that therefore the homicidal gassings could not have occurred. The claim was tested forensically by Daniel Keren, Jamie McCarthy and Harry Mazal in the 2004 paper “The Ruins of the Gas Chambers” in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Three of the four roof apertures were identified and documented in the partially-collapsed roof slab at Birkenau. The slogan does not survive contact with the ruins.
Afterwards
Faurisson continued to publish through small denier presses and online platforms until his death in 2018 at the age of eighty-nine. He never recanted any of his claims. The standard scholarly assessment of his work was given by Pierre Vidal-Naquet in Les Assassins de la mémoire and has not been disturbed since: that Faurisson conducted a sustained campaign of denial without any of the linguistic, archival or methodological qualifications such an undertaking would require, and that his persistence was a function not of historical inquiry but of political conviction.
He is now remembered as a discredited figure associated with Holocaust denial and historical revisionism.
See also
- Ernst Zundel
- The Leuchter Report Proved No Gas Chambers
- Crimes Against Humanity, a New Concept in International Law
Sources
- Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Les Assassins de la mémoire: “Un Eichmann de papier” et autres essais sur le révisionnisme, La Découverte, 1987; English translation as Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust, Columbia University Press, 1992
- “La politique hitlérienne d’extermination: une déclaration d’historiens”, Le Monde, 21 February 1979, signed by 34 French historians including Vidal-Naquet, Léon Poliakov and François Furet
- Loi n° 90-615 du 13 juillet 1990 (the Gayssot Law), Journal Officiel de la République Française, 14 July 1990
- Robert Faurisson, Mémoire en défense contre ceux qui m’accusent de falsifier l’histoire, La Vieille Taupe, 1980 (with the Chomsky preface)
- Noam Chomsky, “His Right to Say It”, The Nation, 28 February 1981, and subsequent statements
- Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Free Press, 1993, ch. 1 and 8
- Daniel Keren, Jamie McCarthy and Harry W. Mazal, “The Ruins of the Gas Chambers: A Forensic Investigation of Crematoriums at Auschwitz I and Auschwitz-Birkenau”, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 18, no. 1, 2004
- Jean-Claude Pressac, Les Crématoires d’Auschwitz: La machinerie du meurtre de masse, CNRS Editions, 1993
- Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial, Indiana University Press, 2002
- Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris, judgment of 3 October 2006 in the Faurisson Tehran case
- USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Combating Holocaust Denial: Robert Faurisson”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org