On July 17, 2022, French President Emmanuel Macron gave a speech to mark the 80th anniversary of the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup, the mass arrest of Jews by French police in Paris in July 1942. Without mentioning the obvious context of the German occupation, he underscored, emphasizing French responsibility, that “not a single soldier of Nazi Germany took part in the roundup of July 16 and 17, 1942. All of this stemmed from a will and a policy poisoned by antisemitism, initiated as early as July 1940.”
Faced with what they called the “silence” of the “official historians” in the face of this “manipulation of history,” three historians, including two amateurs, decided to use this speech as the starting point for a book published the following year. Written by Jean-Marc Berlière, a respected historian of the French police, along with René Fiévet, an economist, and Emmanuel de Chambost, an engineer, Histoire d’une falsification: Vichy et la Shoah dans l’histoire officielle et le discours commémoratif (“History of a Falsification: Vichy and the Holocaust in Official History and Commemorative Discourse”) took aim at “these ‘court historians’ and presidents of the Republic, all busy making the French feel guilty,” and aimed to “restore the complexity to a question that cannot be reduced to a purely Vichyite initiative.”
In July 2023, historian Laurent Joly, a specialist in the Vichy regime who also found the memorial discourse riddled with approximations and anachronisms, published a lengthy, detailed critique of the book in the Revue d’histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, tracing its “intellectual genealogy.” “(…) Such a book does not come out of nowhere. It is part of a history of the historiography of Vichy and the crimes of collaboration, which for decades have inspired a whole literature seeking to minimize their gravity, up to the recent provocations of [far-right politician] Eric Zemmour.”
The Comité de vigilance face aux usages publics de l’histoire (CVUH), a non-profit organization fighting against the misuse of history in the public sphere, also published a note signed by feminist historian Michèle Riot-Sarcey, which referenced Joly’s article.
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