Holocaust Denial and the Left

Abstract

A TRUE STORY, SOME FACTS, AND A BIT OF COMMENTARY A number of years ago, I was fortunate – or unfortunate – enough to have a unique encounter. In a Paris drenched with summer sun, under circumstances that justify the cliche about reality being stranger than fiction, I happened to speak for five or six hours with an enterprising individual named Pierre Guillaume. Assuming that many of my readers have not heard of him, I had better say a few words about him. When I met him, Guillaume was running a bookstore and publishing house with the interesting name La Vieille Taupe (The Old Mole). Not far from the Pantheon, the burial place of the great figures of the French republic, this institution, which opened and closed and opened again over a period of many years and now no longer exists, was the principal power base of Holocaust denial in France. From the late 1960s to the 1990s, Guillaume, his bookstore, and publishing house were the main focus of the activities of the Holocaust deniers. The 1970s and 1980s were their heyday, mainly by virtue of their collaboration with the Lyon literary scholar Robert Faurisson, the best known of the French Holocaust deniers, whose writings La Vieille Taupe published.