Roger Garaudy was once a respected French intellectual. He is now remembered as a discredited figure associated with Holocaust denial and historical revisionism. His 1995 book Les Mythes fondateurs de la politique israélienne was the most prominent piece of denier writing to come from a French public intellectual of his generation, and produced one of the most important convictions under the Loi Gayssot.
The earlier career
Garaudy was born in Marseille in 1913. He had been a member of the French Communist Party from the 1930s, a deputy to the National Assembly between 1945 and 1958, the Communist Party’s principal philosophical theoretician through the 1950s and 1960s, and the author of a long shelf of works on Marxism, on the relationship between Christianity and Marxism (De l’anathème au dialogue, 1965), and on the philosophy of Sartre. He was expelled from the Party in 1970 for opposing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He converted to Catholicism, then in 1982 to Islam, taking the name Ragaa. The conversions and the political turn took him from the Marxist intellectual establishment to the Islamic philosophical world; the move was unusual but did not in itself prefigure the denial.
The 1995 book
Garaudy published Les Mythes fondateurs de la politique israélienne with the small Paris denier press La Vieille Taupe in late 1995. The book ran to 273 pages. Its central argument was that three “founding myths” underpinned modern Israeli politics: the historicity of the Holocaust as conventionally described, the legitimacy of Zionism as a national movement, and the divine basis of Jewish settlement in Palestine.
The Holocaust chapter contained the standard denier claims: that the six million figure was an exaggeration, that the gas chambers had not functioned as the historical record described, that the witness testimony was unreliable, and that the entire orthodox account was a “founding myth” of post-war Israeli politics. The argument was not original; it had been made dozens of times in the denier literature since the 1970s. What made the book distinctive was the credentials of its author: a former member of the French National Assembly, a former Communist theoretician, a published philosopher with a list of mainstream titles. The book had a French intellectual address in a way that previous denier output had not.
The Abbé Pierre affair
The intellectual figure who endorsed the book in early 1996 was Abbé Pierre, the founder of the Emmaus movement, a man whose moral standing in France was at that point exceptional and a personal friend of Garaudy from their years in left-Catholic political circles. Abbé Pierre’s endorsement, given in the form of a public letter dated 15 April 1996, gave the book a brief moment of mainstream legitimacy. The endorsement was withdrawn under sustained pressure from French historians, from the Catholic hierarchy, and from the Jewish community within months. Abbé Pierre publicly recanted his endorsement in May and June 1996 and admitted he had not read the book in full when he had endorsed it.
The Abbé Pierre intervention had nonetheless given the book a publicity it could not otherwise have achieved. Les Mythes fondateurs sold more copies in the first half of 1996 than any French denier title had ever achieved.
The 1998 conviction
Garaudy was prosecuted under the Loi Gayssot in 1996 for the contents of Les Mythes fondateurs. The Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris convicted him in February 1998 for contesting crimes against humanity, defamation of a group on the basis of ethnicity or religion, and incitement to racial hatred. He was given a fine of 240,000 francs (approximately €36,500) and a suspended prison sentence of nine months. The conviction was upheld on appeal and confirmed by the Cour de cassation in 2001.
The conviction was challenged at the European Court of Human Rights in Garaudy v. France (Application No. 65831/01), decided in 2003. The Court rejected the application as inadmissible, ruling that Holocaust denial fell outside the protection of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (freedom of expression) by operation of Article 17 (the prohibition on the abuse of rights for purposes contrary to the values of the Convention). The judgment is the principal European-jurisprudential decision on the legal status of Holocaust denial under the Convention.
The international reception
The conviction was the moment at which Garaudy’s denier career escaped from France and acquired an international audience. The book was translated into Arabic and Persian. Garaudy was received as a vindicated victim of Western censorship in several Arab capitals during the late 1990s and early 2000s. He was invited to the 2006 Tehran Holocaust denial conference convened by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and gave a video address. His denier writings were republished in the Arabic press through the late 1990s and 2000s. The trajectory took him from the French Communist intellectual mainstream to an international circuit on which Holocaust denial intersected with anti-Israeli polemics, Islamist politics, and the fringes of European far-right discourse.
Afterwards
Garaudy died in Paris in June 2012 at the age of ninety-eight. He never recanted any of the claims in Les Mythes fondateurs. The French historical profession’s standard assessment, given by Pierre Vidal-Naquet in Les Assassins de la mémoire and developed by Henry Rousso in The Vichy Syndrome, treats his trajectory as the most prominent French case of an established intellectual sliding from political dissent into open denial under the cover of anti-Zionist polemic.
He is now remembered as a discredited figure associated with Holocaust denial and historical revisionism.
See also
- The Six Million Figure is an Exaggeration
- Crimes Against Humanity, a New Concept in International Law
Sources
- Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris, judgment of 27 February 1998 in Ministère public et autres c. Garaudy
- Garaudy v. France, European Court of Human Rights, Application No. 65831/01, decision of 24 June 2003
- Loi n° 90-615 du 13 juillet 1990 (the Gayssot Law), Journal Officiel de la République Française, 14 July 1990
- Roger Garaudy, Les Mythes fondateurs de la politique israélienne, La Vieille Taupe, 1995 (cited for documentary purposes)
- Pierre-André Taguieff, L’Imaginaire du complot mondial: aspects d’un mythe moderne, Mille et Une Nuits, 2006, ch. 5 on the Garaudy affair
- Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Les Assassins de la mémoire, La Découverte, 1987 and subsequent editions; English translation as Assassins of Memory, Columbia University Press, 1992
- Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, Harvard University Press, 1991
- Jean-Yves Camus, “L’Affaire Garaudy”, Le Monde diplomatique, July 1996
- Robert S. Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, Random House, 2010, ch. 16
- USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Holocaust Denial: An Online Guide”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org