Robert Faurisson, the first Frenchman to be convicted of Holocaust denial, has died at the age of 89.
Over several decades he became his country’s most notorious revisionist, having contested Anne Frank’s Diary’s authenticity and defended French wartime leader Philippe Petain for collaborating with Nazi Germany.
His sister said he collapsed in his hometown of Vichy, the very city where Petain’s government set its headquarters during the war.
Faurisson was convicted numerous times from 1981 to 2016 repeating his revisionist comments and writings.
He was known for writing that gas chambers were “the biggest lie of the 20th century” and that there had been no systematic killing in Nazi camps, claiming the deported Jews had died of disease and malnutrition.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded the far-right National Front party, said he had fought for free expression.
“Faurisson is a symbol of the way free speech has been criminalised in this county,” Mr Le Pen said in a statement after his death was announced.
“The State went through great lengths to silence Faurisson for decades.”
France passed memorial laws which outlaw Holocaust denial in 1990.
Mr Le Pen, the father of the current far-right leader Marine Le Pen, has himself been convicted for saying the gas chambers were a “detail” of Second World War history.
Faurisson was also an important figure for the next generation of extremist figures, including comic Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, who invited him on stage for his show.
In 2012, former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave Faurisson an award hailing his “courage” in contesting the Holocaust.
French European Affairs Minister Nathalie Loiseau said the concept of revisionism as a whole should be buried with him.
“Robert Faurisson has died. Let’s bury once and for all hideous revisionism, without flowers and wreaths,” she tweeted.
#RobertFaurisson est mort aujourd'hui. Enterrons une fois pour toutes le négationnisme hideux. Sans fleurs ni couronnes.
— Nathalie Loiseau (@NathalieLoiseau) October 22, 2018
But the historian Serge Klarsfeld said Faurisson had unwittingly helped the fight against Holocaust denial, saying he “made the Jewish world and scientists understand that we had to carry out a deep academic work throughout the Western world to write the history of the Shoah in a very precisely documented way.”
Mr Klarsfeld, who became known as a Nazi hunter along with his wife Beate for bringing Nazi officials to justice after the war, told AFP: “As a result, there are dozens of centres studying the Shoah throughout the world, where hundreds of millions of documents have been gathered.”
