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JTA — It wasn’t the first time that a French
president acknowledged his nation’s Holocaust-era guilt, but
Emmanuel Macron’s speech Sunday was nonetheless groundbreaking in
format, content and style.
Delivered during a ceremony at the Vel d’Hiv
Holocaust memorial monument exactly 75 years after French police
officers rounded up 13,152 Jews there for deportation to Nazi death
camps, the 35-minute address was Macron’s first about the Holocaust
since the centrist won the presidency in May.
Evocative and more forthright than any of the
speeches on the subject delivered by Macron’s predecessors, his
address “relieved the feeling of isolation” experienced by many Jews
due to anti-Semitism today, according to Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur
of the Liberal Jewish movement in France.
Macron’s speech “made me proud to be French and
Jewish,” she said.
Here are six significant ways that the address
differed from those of previous French presidents, including in
scope; the unusual role played at the event by Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; its references to present realities,
and Macron’s emotional delivery.
Monsieur le Premier Ministre
It was the first time that an Israeli head of
state attended the annual commemoration for the Vel d’Hiv
deportations of July 16-17, 1942, named after the Velodrome d’Hiver
stadium that used to stand near the monument.
Netanyahu was invited despite objections on Muslim
websites, by the Communist Party and the party of the far-left
leader Jean-Luc Melenchon — although the invitation came from the
CRIF federation of French Jewish communities and not by the Elysee
Presidential Palace, as reported by some French media. The Elysee,
which organized the event, did not object publicly to Netanyahu’s
attendance and facilitated it.
The arrival of Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, in a
motorcade whose limousines sported gold-fringed Israeli flags
electrified the predominantly Jewish audience of 1,200 people.
Holocaust survivors in their 80s and 90s approached the monument
railing to catch a glimpse of the Israelis as others reacted with
thunderous applause.
They oohed and applauded as Netanyahu delivered
the first part of his speech in French, which he speaks with a thick
accent and some errors, but understands without requiring
translation. And they nodded as he urged Macron to stand with Israel
and fight “the cancerous spread of militant Islam” and “hate that
starts with the Jews but never ends there,” as Netanyahu defined it.
But their enthusiasm for Netanyahu was dwarfed by
the deafening applause they gave Macron when he responded to
Netanyahu.
Anti-Zionism and the reinvention of
anti-Semitism
Addressing Netanyahu, Macron assured the Israeli
leader and listeners that “we will continue our fight against
terrorism and the worst kinds of fanaticism,” adding: “So yes, we
will never surrender to the expressions of hatred; we will not
surrender to anti-Zionism because it is a reinvention of
anti-Semitism.”
Articulated in recent years by Manuel Valls, a
former prime minister of France, Macron’s statement was the first
time an incumbent president in France equated anti-Zionism – a
fairly popular sentiment in France – with anti-Semitism. It
triggered several emotional yelps from the audience and applause so
vigorous, it caused the tarp strung up over the monument plaza for
security reasons to vibrate.
There was another wave of applause when,
unusually, Macron and Netanyahu hugged publicly after Netanyahu’s
speech.
Deeper, farther
Much of Macron’s speech was devoted to
establishing France’s complicity in the murder of 25 percent of its
Jewish population during the Holocaust and deconstructing apologist
views on the subject.
Speaking plainly and avoiding metaphors, Macron
sounded less like a politician than a historian or a prosecutor who
is committed to factual accuracy.
In the first admission of Holocaust culpability by
a French president, Jacques Chirac in 1995 said that “Frenchmen, the
French state assisted the criminal folly of the occupier,” resulting
in a failure to uphold the nation’s values and an “irreparable
crime.”
And Francois Hollande in 2012 said the roundups
were a “crime committed in France, by France.”
But the Macron address delivered Sunday “was a
precedent-setting speech that went deeper, on a pedagogic level,
than addresses that preceded it by French presidents,” said Serge
Klarsfeld, a historian and one of France’s leading researchers on
the Holocaust.
Macron’s speech was the first presidential address
that named individual collaborators who helped the Nazis kill Jews,
including René Bousquet, a police chief who was indicted for
planning the Vel d’Hiv roundups, but died in 1993 before his trial.
“France organized the roundups,” Macron said. “Not
a single German participated.” And so France “in almost every aspect
organized the death” of the victims.
More jarringly to many French ears, he said the
collaborationist Vichy government “was not replaced overnight” by
the free French government that succeeded it after the country’s
liberation in World War II.
“Ministers, civil servants, police officers,
economy officials, unions, teachers” from the Vichy government were
all incorporated into the post World War II government that replaced
it, Macron said.
By touching on France’s perceived failure to purge
itself of collaborators and their legacy, Macron differentiated
himself from all of France’s presidents after Francois Mitterrand.
Klarsfeld praised Macron for pointing out how Mitterrand and postwar
leader Charles de Gaulle “remained silent on the historical truth”
about collaboration “in favor of appeasement and reconciliation.”
Macron said he “does not judge” his predecessors
who remained silent on the issue.
During his speech, Macron said “It is very
convenient to view Vichy as a monstrosity, born of nothing and
returned to nothing.” But it is “false. We cannot base any pride on
a lie.” Rather than weaken the French nation, as argued by National
Front politicians, admitting its guilt “opened the path to
correcting” its faults, Macron said.
Refuting revisionists
Speaking about the Vichy puppet government, Macron
deconstructed the main revisionist talking points put forward by the
French far right led by the National Front party under Marine Le
Pen. In April, Le Pen argued that the government’s actions in World
War II do not represent France as a nation.
“I reject the attempts to absolve one’s conscious
by those who claim Vichy wasn’t France,” Macron said. No other
French president had said this in these terms.
L’affaire Halimi
Responding to repeated pleas by French Jews –
including at the Vel d’Hiv event during a speech by CRIF President
Francis Kalifat – Macron for the first time commented on the death
of Sarah Halimi.
Halimi, a 66-year-old physician, was killed by a
Muslim neighbor, Kobili Traore, who shouted about Allah before he
killed her. Halimi’s daughter said that Traore had called her a
“dirty Jew.” Yet in what CRIF considers a “cover-up,” the indictment
filed against Traore last week does not categorize the killing as a
hate crime.
In his address, Netanyahu counted Halimi among
other French Jews murdered in recent years by Islamists.
Macron replied: “Despite the denials of the
murderer, the judiciary must as soon as possible provide maximum
clarity on the death of Sarah Halimi.” Klarsfeld said it was a
strong message that will “probably induce change” in how Traore is
tried.
Emotion
A rational and analytical thinker with a
background in banking and economics, Macron surprised many of his
listeners with the apparent intensity of his intonation and body
language during the speech.
“Above all, the speech was special for his
palpable emotion,” Horvilleur said.
Vision
Like many others Horvilleur, the Liberal rabbi,
was “deeply moved” by Macron’s remarks at the end of his speech
about how the children deported from Vel d’Hiv informs how he views
his role as president.
Children “who wanted to go to school, graduate,
find work, start a family, read, watch a show, learn and travel,” he
said. “I want to tell those children that France has not forgotten
them. That she loves them. That their tragic fate demands of us
never to give up to hate, rancor or despair.”
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