For more than 30 years, French scholar Robert Faurisson was known as an intrepid, intellectually formidable, and courageous critic of the familiar Holocaust narrative. His extensive writings and many lectures, which were based on considerable research and study, enraged powerful enemies who waged a fierce, relentless campaign to silence him.
Regarded as Europe’s foremost Holocaust revisionist scholar, he was perhaps most renowned, and notorious, for his view that there was no systematic mass extermination of Jews in gas chambers during World War II. On the basis of controversial “Holocaust denial” laws that selectively criminalize dissident views on this emotion-laden subject, French authorities repeatedly brought him to court, where he was punished with fines and prison sentences.
Following his death, a tribute to this “intrepid and indomitable man” was published in the French periodical Rivarol. “... Robert Faurisson threatened powerful interests,” wrote Jérôme Bourbon. “Those of the State of Israel and international Zionism whose power, durability, immunity and impunity are essentially based on the Holocaust Dogma. Those of the Allies and the sacrosanct crusade of the democracies against the Axis forces. Those of leftists of all stripes for whom it is necessary that the nationalist regimes of the inter-war period in Europe are absolute evil, but not Communism in all its forms, Leninist, Stalinist, Maoist, Trotskyist.” Faurisson not only “threatened the ideological foundations of the world order resulting from the last war,” Bourbon continued, “but he challenged a real religion, or rather a counter-religion, Holocaust worship ... The death of this giant, of this monument, is an irreparable loss. We have not finished measuring how much he will miss. For how many men are there today of his temper, his erudition, his talent, his bravery, his tenacity? And yet even without him the fight for historical truth must continue.”
Robert Faurisson was born on January 25, 1929, in Shepperton, England. His father was French and his mother was Scottish. As a boy and young man, he attended schools in Singapore, Japan, and in France. He was educated at a Lycée in Paris, and at the renowned Sorbonne. He received his “State Doctorate” in letters and the humanities from the Sorbonne in 1972, where he also taught from 1969 to 1974.
From 1974 until 1990, Faurisson was a professor of French literature at the University of Lyon II. He was a recognized specialist of text and document analysis, and was the author of four books on French literature.
After years of private research and study, Prof. Faurisson first made public his skeptical views about the Holocaust extermination story in two items published in December 1978 and January 1979 in the influential Paris daily Le Monde.
In the archives of the Auschwitz State Museum in Poland, Faurisson discovered the technical and architectural drawings of the Auschwitz morgues, the crematories and other installations. He is the first person to publicize these important documents, and to point out their significance.
In the years after 1978, Dr. Faurisson presented his critical view of the familiar Holocaust extermination narrative in numerous articles, in many interviews, in several books, and in stunning April 1979 debate on a Swiss television network with prominent defenders of the “exterminationist” view. He worked closely on the French revisionist quarterly, Annales d’Histoire Revisionniste, during the three years of its existence. He also worked on the successor quarterly, Revue d'Histoire Revisionniste. Many of his scholarly articles were published in English in The Journal of Historical Review. A four-volume collection of many of his writings, Écrits Révisionnistes (1974-1998), was published in 1999.
