The heroic revisionist scholar Vincent Reynouard, who as regular readers of this blog and Heritage and Destiny will know, was imprisoned in Edinburgh from November 2022 until his deportation to France in February 2024, has faced further efforts by the Parisian courts to silence him.
Vincent’s ‘crime’ is to have raised serious questions about the orthodox history of the Second World War, in particular the alleged homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz, and (in his most recent work) the legend of Oradour-sur-Glâne, where the Waffen-SS is accused of having killed 643 civilians.
In an article at his blog, Vincent has described the latest stages of the French state’s repressive efforts against him. Here is an English translation of his article (click here for a German translation).
On April 17 at the Paris High Court (tribunal de grand instance), I appeared before a sentencing enforcement judge (JAP). Why had he summoned me? Because France has begun an “extension of surrender” process against me. This means that after having obtained my extradition from Scotland, the French courts will ask the Scottish authorities for their consent so that two sentences and one further arrest order issued against me in France between 2017 and 2021, while I was in England, can be made enforceable.
A desire to silence me as quickly as possible
Reduced expectations
Article 695-18 of the Code of Criminal Procedure makes clear:
When the public prosecutor who issued the European arrest warrant has obtained the surrender of the person sought, the person cannot be prosecuted, convicted or detained with a view to serving a custodial sentence for any act whatsoever, prior to the extradition and other than that which motivated this process.
However, the French authorities obtained my extradition specifically over seven videos that I published on the internet between September 2019 and April 2020. They did not invoke the two sentences and the additional French court order, because if, taken together, they inflict on me fifteen months of incarceration, taken separately, each one sentences me to less than a year in prison, which makes an extradition request impossible.
Consequently, when, on February 2nd 2024, I was handed over, handcuffed, to the French authorities, an investigating judge indicted me and placed me under judicial supervision for the seven videos mentioned in the arrest warrant.
I am accused of “public denial, minimisation or relativisation of a war crime”, “publicly disputing the existence of a crime against humanity committed during the Second World War” and “public incitement to hatred or violence due to [racial or religious] origin…”. As preventive detention does not exist – or not yet – for these so-called “publishing” offences, that same evening, I walked free from the court.
I still won’t shut up
For my opponents, this was a great disappointment, because some had already assumed I would be incarcerated. When, on October 12, 2023, the Scottish justice in the first hearing authorised my extradition, the president of the National Association of the Families of the Martyrs of Oradour-sur-Glane, Benoît Sadry, proclaimed : “We can rejoice that he is coming back to be imprisoned!“
Others probably thought that after fifteen months in prison in Scotland, an extradition and an immediate indictment involving judicial supervision, I would henceforth keep silent, wishing to avoid making my case worse.
They were wrong. The very evening of my arrival in France, I gave a video interview to Jérôme Bourbon and Florian Rouanet. Then came those carried out by Égalité & Réconciliation and Nereus Osa. The apotheosis was my participation in the show Deep Geopolitics, presented by Mike Borowski, in the company of Alain Soral and Alexandre Juving-Brunet.
There are also weekly conferences, organised throughout France. I have already traveled to Nantes, Chartres, Quimper, Rouen, Montauban, Perpignan, Le-Puy-en-Velay and Lyon. Other meetings are planned, from Vannes to Strasbourg and from Dunkirk to Savoie.
Finally, I write articles published in the columns of Rivarol, on my blog with its Newsletter as well as on my GAB page.
Using the most extraordinary exceptions to the Penal Code
In June 2023, the director of the Jean Jaurès Foundation’s Political Radicalism Monitoring Centre, Jean-Yves Camus, declared: “faced with an ideologue like Reynouard, unfortunately, imprisonment is the only way to silence his propaganda.” Since February 2, 2024, my opponents have followed this advice.
Hence this “extension” approach initiated against me. It is based on article 695-18 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. As we have seen, this prevents France using the two judgments and court order (issued against me while I was in exile in Britain) as grounds for throwing me into prison.
But it also provides for exceptions. The French authorities cannot enforce these court decisions, except “when the judicial authority of the executing Member State, which surrendered the person, expressly consents”. Paris will therefore ask Edinburgh for its consent.
In my presence and in front of my lawyer, the sentencing enforcement judge admitted that this was a fairly unusual step, and that in relation to any UK court, it was a first for publishing offences.
He also underlined that the actions criminalised in the two sentences and in the court order were “old ”: these involve three publications (two videos and a book I believe) dating from 2014, 2017 and 2019, i.e. actions going back five, seven and ten years.
Let’s press on!
But no matter: my adversaries absolutely aim to gag me; after having moved heaven and earth to obtain my extradition, they will do everything to proceed against me as quickly as possible.
The “extension of surrender” provides for a hearing to be held in Edinburgh. At the end of the debates, the Scottish court will rule on whether or not to authorise France to make the three legal decisions taken against me enforceable.
My lawyer assumed that, given bureaucratic tardiness, the case would not be decided for another year. But the judge said France hoped for a Paris hearing within a week, and a hearing in Edinburgh before the summer. Yes, really, they aim to incarcerate me as quickly as possible…
Looking for a brave Scottish lawyer
We are already preparing for the hearing in Scotland. A Scottish lawyer will be contacted.
A lawyer exhausted by the revisionist fight
I will dismiss the one who defended me when I was imprisoned in Edinburgh, because I gained the distinct impression that over the months he became timid.
In November 2022, he was enthusiastic about defending me. He warmly assured me: “If we condemn revisionism and throw people in prison for this reason, then we can also restore slavery. Human rights are indivisible.”
But later he confided to me: “I received calls from many newspapers, including Israeli ones. I defend you on the basis of Law; I refuse to be your spokesperson. I want to die peacefully, in my bed.”
As the weeks went by, I noticed that together with his colleague, he adopted a minimal defense. In particular, he did not want me to speak in front of the judges. During the hearings, I was there, sitting like a fool. My destiny was at stake, but the judges ignored me and my lawyer refused to allow me to speak.
I still hear the prosecutor claiming that my videos conveyed “frightening levels of anti-Semitism”. However, my colleague had transmitted to the Defence a file which included everything I had said on the Jewish problem since 2018. It demonstrated beyond any possible dispute that I was “Judeo-indifferent”, not by strategy but by conviction.
It was time for my lawyer to produce it. He did nothing, simply responding that my videos should be judged in their entirety, not on a few extracts presented out of context. He was right.
However, instead of analysing them and quoting passages to emphasise that they developed rational arguments, without any “hatred”, he opted to engage in legal debate over whether the nature of my comments was “offensive” or “grossly offensive”. Unsurprisingly, the prosecutor called them “grossly offensive.”
Defend full freedom of expression
To give my lawyer the opportunity to respond, I sent him the judgment in Handyside v. United Kingdom (December 7th, 1976). The European Court of Human Rights declared:
Freedom of expression […] is applicable not only to “information” or “ideas” that are favourably received or regarded as inoffensive or as a matter of indifference, but also to those that offend, shock or disturb the State or any sector of the population. Such are the demands of that pluralism, tolerance and broadmindedness without which there is no “democratic society”.
I had also brought to the attention of my lawyer the preface to Robert Faurisson’s Mémoire en Défense. Written by the Jewish author Noam Chomsky, who emphasised:
even if Faurisson were to be a rabid anti-Semite and fanatic pro-Nazi […] this would have no bearing whatsoever on the legitimacy of the defence of his civil rights. On the contrary, it would make it all the more imperative to defend them since, once again, it has been a truism for years, indeed centuries, that it is precisely in the case of horrendous ideas that the right of free expression must be most vigorously defended; it is easy enough to defend free expression for those who require no such defence.
Arguments on legal technicalities are of no use in a trial for revisionism
I hoped that my lawyer would produce this material to assert my right to present, calmly and rationally, my historical and political theses, without their character being judged as “offensive” or “grossly offensive”, but even when he asserted that the use of the law sanctioning “grossly offensive” remarks was being abused in the present case, he failed to back this by citing the Handyside judgment and Noam Chomsky’s preface.
Responding to the prosecutor’s allegations, he responded timidly: “I consider that my client’s comments could be seen as offensive without being grossly so.”
At that moment, I knew that the game was lost, because instead of fighting on the ground of reason and invoking the very clear opinions expressed by people above all suspicion, the Defence had been drawn onto the ground of a subjective choice between “offensive” or “grossly offensive”? It was talking about the sex of angels… The not-so-courageous judges would quite naturally claim that my publications were “grossly offensive”.
The consequences of an uncompromising fight for the truth
Today, I am convinced that my lawyer received calls and messages that, rightly or wrongly, intimidated him. I don’t blame him, because by asserting my National Socialism, I am largely responsible for it. Of course, I explain that National Socialism is not Hitlerism: Hitlerism is one manifestation of it at a given time, in a given country, to resolve given problems. It involved numerous contingencies, such as euthanasia of the mentally-handicapped, experiments on human guinea pigs, radical anti-Judaism or the opening of concentration camps.
You can be a National Socialist without wanting to imitate everything that was done under the Third Reich. But very few people listen to my explanations. For the vast majority, a “Nazi” is a madman who wants to massacre Jews, “sub-races” and the mentally-handicapped, while he locks up opponents in concentration camps and fanaticises the young, destroys culture and reduces women to the rank of progenitors. Therefore, the simple fact of saying to a lawyer: “Are you defending a Nazi?” is often enough to intimidate him.
Hold Scottish justice accountable for its responsibilities
So I hope to find a Scottish defence counsel who will show more courage. We will inform him of the hysterical repression raging in France.
Our goal is for him to hold his country’s justice system accountable by saying: “Violating British tradition which requires offering the right of asylum to politically persecuted people, you have handed over a French citizen whose only ‘crime’ is to express historical and political opinions that displease the powerful. Are you going to commit another ignominy by authorising France to incarcerate him, following court decisions rendered in the name of a repressive law which does not exist here?”
Will we find a lawyer brave enough to adopt this strategy? And if so, will the judges back down from committing a new ignominy? Hopes are slim, even illusory. But no matter: even without hope of victory, we must fight and denounce the scandal.
Faced with the importance of the issue, I will not remain silent
Should we deduce from this that before the summer or at the start of the next school year, I will return to prison? No, because if Scotland accedes to the wishes of the French authorities, then I will oppose the two judgments and will lodge an appeal (in cassation) against the judgment. The first two cases will start from scratch and the third will be examined after several months.
During these several months, I intend to give as many conferences as possible and write as many articles as possible. I have dedicated my life to revisionism: blows and threats will neither keep me silent nor force me to recant.
Some will criticise my stubbornness. “You have already sacrificed your family in a fight that does not interest the French. People worry about the future which is played out in the present, not the past.” It is true that according to a recent survey, the French are above all concerned about crime, inflation, the environment, social inequalities and the economic situation of the country.
But if, truly, the past were irrelevant, then the authorities would leave me alone. However, as we have seen, they are struggling to silence me as quickly as possible.
This is all the more revealing since I have no support in the major media, no complicity in the academic world or any appreciable financial assistance: for thirty years, I have published my works myself and I have earned my living as a private tutor. The repression that is launched against me as a revisionist historian of the Second World War demonstrates that this period weighs on the present, and therefore on the future.
To those who doubt this, I would remind you that a brochure published by the Education Ministry warns:
the Shoah does not belong to the past. From 1945, the resurgence of liberated nations after the most absolute dehumanization that the world has ever had to endure, gave rise to new institutions.
Among these institutions is the United Nations. On September 26, 2018, their Secretary General, António Guterres, proclaimed: “The origins of the United Nations themselves are rooted in the need to learn the lessons of the Holocaust.”
Youth, first target of the guardians of Memory
Engraving the Shoah in the soul of humanity
Hence the propaganda targeting young people. At a time when the last of the wartime deportees are dying, some pass on the “Memory” to young people so that they can internalise it and pass it on in their turn. Addressing young Belgians heading to Auschwitz, the director of the War Heritage Museum , Michel Jaupart, declared:
Today, you will encounter history, and become memory-bearers […] You will be able to relate this journey to your parents, to your friends, and later to your children.
Elsewhere, a young Frenchman who became one of these “memory-bearers” confirms that he understood his mission:
Talking about the Shoah, in class and outside, raises our awareness. No one remains indifferent when I tell what I learn, and I intend to continue to bear witness, so that later my future children will in turn become ambassadors of this memory.
The journalist who reports these remarks concludes: “Holocaust survivors need not worry: young people are taking over“. This is the objective of the authorities: to perpetuate the memory from generation to generation.
In 2006, commemorating the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Israeli President Moshe Katsav stated:
Now that the stain of the Holocaust is etched into the soul of mankind forever, Yad Vashem is the faithful guardian of the path of memory for the Jewish people and all of humanity, for all time.
Technology to perpetuate memory
In order to achieve this objective, “Memory” is disseminated everywhere, partly thanks to new technologies. In Eure, a history professor announces:
We want a plaque for Jewish deportees from Eure to be placed in 2025 in Évreux. Next year, we would like to do podcasts, and we have the idea of creating a route around the city using QR codes.
The use of new technologies will make it possible to create “memory 2.0”. The Shoah Memorial explains this as follows:
The Shoah Memorial, a participant in the field of education, wishes to initiate a debate on the issues of transmission 2.0.
Writers, actors, influencers, historians, YouTubers, today have a vital role to play as transmitters of memory and spokespersons […]
By mobilizing influencer ambassadors of the young generation, through a unique 100% digital “infotainment” format, the Shoah Memorial confirms its ambition dynamically to move the lines, so as better to raise awareness among young and adolescent audiences.
Already, survivors have been filmed and reproduced in the form of holograms: not only can they repeat their testimony endlessly, but artificial intelligence coupled with voice recognition software allows people to ask questions and have them answered by these virtual people. Former deportees who have been dead for ages will therefore be able to continue transmitting “Memory”.
Memory: a propaganda weapon in the service of globalism
A teaching that is in no way neutral
But the authorities’ objective goes beyond the transmission of memories of the past. It is also — and above all — political: the authorities seek first and foremost to combat anti-Judaism. The author of an article entitled “Teaching the Shoah in a civic education approach” concludes:
This teaching, even very incomplete, of the Shoah within the framework of the civic education course […] goes beyond the issues of memory, the empowerment of future generations in the face of any new avatar of anti-Semitism being the main objective.
It is so obvious that the young recruits are aware of it. After hearing the testimony of Ginette Kolinka and visiting Auschwitz, a student from the Saint-Avold high school, Lother, declared:
She always encourages students to be the guardians of this memory which must never disappear. This is why we are committed to this project so that this memory never disappears and that Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism never take over .
Anti-Judaism is not the only target, however. The brochure Memory and history of the Shoah at school explains:
vigilance against the possible return of barbarism cannot be reduced to this corpus of knowledge and patiently built critical consciousness, which we call culture; we must also think differently about ‘otherness’, and understand cultural diversity as the very essence of humanity. An education open to the world, to outsiders and ‘otherness’ is one of the best defences against prejudice and racism.
Engaging young people under the banner of anti-racism
The final objective is therefore to use “Memory” to encourage anti-racism. The evidence abounds.
For the years 2023-2026, the “National Plan to combat racism, anti-Semitism and discrimination linked to origin” established by the DILCRAH (France’s Interministerial Delegation to Combat Racism, Anti-Semitism and Anti-LGBT Hate) provides for fifteen “flagship measures”. The first is the following:
Organise a historical or memorial visit linked to racism, anti-Semitism or anti-Gypsyism for each student during their schooling .
Beyond, therefore, the fight against anti-Judaism, “Memory” serves to recruit young people under the banner of anti-racism.
In this context, Auschwitz and Oradour are equally important. At the end of August 2020, after a revisionist inscription was painted on the Oradour Memory Center, the head of CRIF (the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions), Francis Kalifat, reacted by announcing:
There is no difference between a Holocaust denier and a denier of Oradour-sur-Glâne or a denier of another genocide. These are the same people who fuel Holocaust denial and who are entering this field today, which is a new development […] These same deniers are now attacking the very memory that constitutes the identity of France.
Train good anti-fascist democrats
Six years earlier, participating in the commemorations of the seventieth anniversary of the Oradour-sur-Glâne tragedy, Manuel Valls (then French Prime Minister) had declared:
Oradour represents a Europe that was to be destroyed to the finish, it is humanity that was to be murdered to the finish. And in this tomb of ruins that we have just visited, in this silence, the walls do not speak. They shout ! […] And behind these cries, those of the six hundred and forty-two victims, rise other cries, those of the millions of dead in the camps .
And Valls added:
Oradour is also a warning to keep fighting and never let ideologies of death flourish. We know it well, […] they have not disappeared […] Fanaticism, radicalism always have their leaders, their doctrines sowing the seeds of terror, to have no consideration for human life or civilian populations – and it is up to us, democracy, it is up to France to concede nothing, to leave no breach and to act with the greatest determination. Here and everywhere in Europe, in the entire world.
It is clear: from Oradour to Auschwitz, memories merge to give rise to anti-fascism and, beyond that, anti-racism. All this in the name of democracy. The authorities do not hide it. France’s Official Bulletin of National Education explains:
As part of its historical dimension, the teaching of the Shoah has a civic purpose and responds to a moral obligation. It is not just a question of transmitting memory and knowledge: we must give all students the elements of culture and reflection enabling them to reject all forms of racism and discrimination and to understand that, contravening the Declaration of human and citizen rights, they make democracy impossible.
Memory is therefore a tool intended to format young people in order to transform them into good democrats.
Building a morality of non-discrimination
Therefore, we will not be surprised to hear Amel, 16 years old, a young “memory-bearer”, declare on his return from Auschwitz:
It enriched me in terms of general culture, and also in a human sense, because it makes us understand the present; it’s the same as all other forms of racism, such as homophobia.
For its part, the Canopé network offers teachers educational materials to maintain “Memory” in order to fight against discrimination. They presents it as follows:
Implementing a memory project within your class or your school, building a collective memory, opening dialogue and getting students to reflect on republican values contributes preventing and fighting against discrimination.
Among the documents offered is a work entitled: Lessons of the Shoah. Its author, Gérard Rabinovitch, writes:
The purpose of this work is to attempt to outline – supported by facts exhumed, explored, recorded – how the Shoah, in its indelible lesson, calls for thoughtful perspective, alert syntheses, ethical warnings. It is not just a question of “duty to remember”, it is a question of taking stock of the fact that “Nazism constituted for the West a historical milestone and a transformative episode to which contemporary societies remain dependent”, as highlighted by the jurist and psychoanalyst Pierre Legendre.
The terrors of the 20th century, this “permanent liquidation machine” as the writer Imre Kertész calls it, mobilise historians as vigilantes of the facts; call upon political philosophy to rethink its founding questions. What is a good life? What is a good society? What is good collective action? They call for a non-soothing anthropology, demystified by evidence, and lucid by necessity.
We see that the Memory of the Shoah serves to build a morality, that of non-discrimination.
Hence the “gas chamber” placed at the centre of History. In a work intended to combat Marine Le Pen, we read:
as they indelibly mark the memory and consciousness of all humanity […] the gas chambers are at the centre of the History of the Second World War and at the centre of History.
In other words: the “gas chamber” is a heritage that all of humanity must embrace in the present, because it contributes to shaping consciences.
A repression which requires, on the other hand, mutual assistance
In such a context, the revisionists are quite naturally ranked among the main enemies to be fought. Gérard Rabinovitch writes:
Teaching the history of the Shoah, restoring the entirety of its facts, against the falsifiers, the deniers or the rhetorical boasts, is to do an educational work as well as a civic one.
But against revisionism, teaching remains insufficient; judicial repression must complete it. Under the title “Denying the Holocaust is a racist crime”, the vice-president of the Advisory Center for Jewish and Israeli Relations (CIJA), Richard Marceau, and his collaborator Emmanuelle Amar state:
Denying the Shoah is an indicator, yes, of hatred of the Jew. But it is also a troubling marker of radicalisation, for which society as a whole will one day inevitably pay the price. What begins with the Jews never ends with the Jews.
Hence the need, they conclude, to criminalise revisionism in order to protect all of society.
In Europe, this criminalisation is well advanced: many countries have adopted so-called anti-revisionist laws. The UK is among the exceptions. But by accepting my extradition, she sent a clear message: the island will not become a refuge for hunted revisionists. The relentless persecution endured by free researchers demonstrates the capital importance of the past.
I am living proof: compared to the means available to the guardians of “Memory”, I am destitute. Faced by their vocal pronouncements, I can only whisper. But this whisper is still too much. My opponents want to silence me as quickly as possible. If, truly, the past had no importance and if the official story offered all the guarantees of solidity, then such relentlessness would not exist.
Our adversaries fear revisionism because it endangers their weapons of political propaganda. By dedicating my life to the revisionist fight, I have certainly sacrificed a lot, including my family, but I fight for all the children of France and Europe, so that we stop instilling in them a false memory from which arises a morality favouring the poison of globalism. Thank you to those who support me in this mission.
