Abstract

A so-called revision of the history of World War 11, which began shortly after the war, was popularized in France in the 1980s through the progressively combined action of extreme-right and former ultra-left militants. This "revision," actually a negation of the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews, has focused on what were precisely the means of this mass murder, that is, the gas chambers. Using traditional patterns of antiSemitism, this peculiar rewriting of history claims that the genocide never took place and was in fact a hoax, built up by an international Jewish plot, to extort gigantic amounts of money from the Germans as reparations. In today's France, where racism and exclusion are strongly encouraged by a growing extreme right, and where anti-Semitism progressively comes out of the silence it has been forced to keep since 1945, such a "revisionist" view could gain a certain popularity