PARIS (JTA) — France’s highest court affirmed a one-year prison sentence for a professor who questioned the Holocaust’s veracity.
The Court of Cassation rejected the appeal last week of Vincent Reynouard, who has since fled the country and is presumed escaped. It was the last of several appeals by Reynouard to the sentence imposed last year by a Caen court over a 2014 video in which he said the Holocaust may not have happened and called state commemorations of the deportation of French Jews ”manipulation of memory,” France 3 reported.
Reynouard has lost his license to teach in the public education system over repeated Holocaust denials.
Born in 1969, Reynouard studied in Caen, Normandy, and graduated as a chemical engineer. He then taught mathematics at professional secondary schools. In 1997 he was dismissed as a teacher by the French Education Minister after the discovery of revisionist texts on the hard disk of the computer he used at school. Since then Reynouard has survived on his writings, videos and other work as an independent historian.
Reynouard is a traditionalist Catholic who is sympathetic to the legacy of Third Reich Germany and National Socialism. Married in 1991, he and his wife are the parents of eight children.
Reynouard has written:
"Historical revisionism belongs to no one. Its findings are the fruit of traditional methods of inquiry where scientific expertise assists in the appraisal of testimonies and in documentary research. They will be obvious to any honest individual, whether on the political left or right, [religious] believer or atheist ...
"... Its implications extend well beyond the historical scope. The stakes involved, gigantic ones, are political and even theological. If some refuse to see this - because of blindness, cowardice or mistaken strategy - our adversaries, for their part, have understood quite well. They know that a sudden bursting through of the historical truth about the period 1914-1946 would call into question the world order founded at Nuremberg in 1945-1946 ...
"The way ahead, therefore, is all laid out for us: we must continue to repeat the truth, the whole truth, including the truth about what's at stake in this struggle. Far from being merely a sterile quarrel between devotees of the past cut off from present-day realities, the fight for historical truth is, on the contrary, the continuation, on the intellectual level, of the war whose armed phase ended in 1945 with the defeat of the Axis forces. And it's clear that this conflict, having begun not on September 3, 1939, but on January 30, 1933, is the modern form of the eternal struggle between Light and Darkness. In the twentieth century, National Socialist Germany embodied - doubtless imperfectly but successfully all the same - the very last attempt to return to a well-ordered society, that is, a society respecting the natural order.
"This is the reason why, even after the Third Reich was completely crushed militarily, the war continued, and has continued up to today. Our opponents in this never-ending fight have a weapon of mass destruction: the alleged 'Holocaust.' Since 1945, this lie has prevented any dispassionate debate on National Socialism and, more generally, on societies that respect natural order. 'We know where that led! ...' is how people constantly respond to those who, against the 'Rights of Man' and their natural offspring: the unleashing of all selfish inclinations, dare speak of order, the Common Good, wholesomeness, moral standards, safeguarding the genetic heritage, the birth rate, rights of kinship ...
"The German homicidal gas chambers never existed. Yes, 'the Holocaust' is a myth. For my part, I add: Yes, Hitler embodied the hope of Europe in the face of the ruinous ideals of 1789; Yes, we must take up the best of what National Socialism comprised in order finally to surpass it and forge a doctrine that will be able to save our Old Continent."
"Even to the death fight for truth, and the LORD your God will battle for you".Sirach 4:28