“Eric Zemmour’s attempt to normalize Vichy aims to mask his real project: to bring down the Republic” – Le Monde

Chronic. Collision of the news: while on November 11, Hubert Germain, the last of the companions of the Liberation, who died at the age of 101, will be buried at Mont-Valérien, place of execution of resistance fighters and hostages by the Nazis during the ‘Occupation, the pre-campaign of the presidential election is shaken by a polemicist who accuses the resistance having “Pushed [la France] to civil war ” by killing collaborators, and claims that “Pétain saved the French Jews”. Repeated, such outrageous claims are not only intended to ensure a permanent presence in the media and social networks. They flatter ultranationalist circles and rancid France, exhilarated by the spectacle of a personality claiming his Jewish identity, making common cause with the heirs of the theorist of anti-Semitism Charles Maurras.

But, above all, by obsessively attacking Vichy and the history of the Occupation, unexpected subjects in a 2022 race at the Elysee Palace, Eric Zemmour sends another message: the French state and the collapse of the Republic in 1940-1944 is not a shameful period in our history. His attempt to normalize Vichy is actually aimed at masking and trivializing his real project: to bring down not only the V^e Republic, but just the Republic. “He wants to lift the Vichy taboo in order to make acceptable a project to unravel the rule of law and exclude minorities”, summarizes the historian Laurent Joly.

The very idea according to which the Constitution, keystone of the republican legal order, would not resist a shock involving the nation, is it not tragically illustrated by the vote of the Parliament which, on July 10, 1940 , by 569 votes to 80, entrusted Pétain with the power to give the country a new fundamental law, “constitutional acts” abolishing the Republic, which will pave the way for the “statute of the Jews” of October 1940, introducing the concept of “Jewish race” which had no precedent in French law?

Throw away the Constitution

Today, Mr. Zemmour does not hide it: the plan for the massive return of immigrants, supposedly “Save France” and who is “Very clear in [sa] head “, is not applicable “That if we get rid of the constraints of the European Court of Human Rights [CEDH], (…), of the Constitutional Council “, he said on the set of “We are live”, on France 2, September 11. “Get rid of the Constitutional Council” ? This amounts to throwing the Constitution of which the Council is the guardian to the dust. “ Discard “ of the ECHR? This leads to the abolition of the fundamental rights integrated into French law. Not just the one on the “Right to respect for family life”, particularly targeted since it concerns, among other things, the family reunification of foreigners. But also the article which guarantees the right to a ” fair trial “, which Eric Zemmour himself does not hesitate to use – like Nicolas Sarkozy moreover – to question the impartiality of his judges after a conviction for “provocation to religious hatred”.

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