The weight of France’s checkered World War II history still bears down on Vichy, the middle-sized city in the heart of the country that was the seat of collaboration with Adolf Hitler, reports Politico.
Locals have been fighting for years to dissociate the name of their quaint, bourgeois city with the collaborationist regime of Marshal Philippe Pétain, which enacted a law in October 1940 depriving Jews from exercising most professions, even before Hitler’s government required it.
Now, the city and Pétain’s rule have been dragged into one of the central battles in the presidential campaign.
Far-right candidate Eric Zemmour has repeatedly spurred controversy by attempting to whitewash the extent of Pétain’s collaboration. His erroneous claims appeal to ultra-nationalists who refuse to admit that not all of France’s history is glorious.
When French people hit the polls in April 2022, the stakes will go beyond simply choosing between candidates with different economic, fiscal or social policies. They will be choosing between two radically different visions of their country, their history and their values, and Vichy is the ground zero of that battle.
It is no coincidence that on Wednesday evening Emmanuel Macron will be the first French president to honor in Vichy the memory of the Jews deported by the Pétain regime and the 80 French MPs who refused to give full powers to Pétain in July 1940.
The highly political move is the closest he has gotten to openly engaging in the presidential campaign.
“Vichy reminds us of a history … I think we are better off respecting, studying history and allowing historians to build a historiographic truth based on evidence and documents, and let’s avoid manipulating it, agitating it, revising it,” Macron said Wednesday ahead of the visit, punctuating each phrase with a dramatic pause, in a clear rebuttal of polemicist-turned-presidential candidate Eric Zemmour.