The Verdun criminal court delivered its verdict this Wednesday, May 20: Jacques Boncompain, president of the Association for the Defense of the Memory of Marshal Pétain (ADMP), was fined €5,000 for publicly denying crimes against humanity. The decision, which had been under deliberation since March 4, concludes proceedings initiated following a religious ceremony held in November 2025 in the city that symbolizes the Great War.
At the end of the mass held in homage to the head of the Vichy regime, Boncompain made remarks for which he showed no remorse in court. He notably asserted that Philippe Pétain had saved 700 Jews during the Occupation, also describing him as "the first resistance fighter in France" and "the greatest servant of 000th-century France."
These are statements that LICRA and the Jewish Observatory of France fought tooth and nail.
The two associations, acting as civil parties, had demanded an exemplary sentence. Their lawyer, Mr. Bensimhon, had stressed at the hearing that claiming to have saved 700,000 Jews amounted to denying the very existence of the 80,000 deportees who died in Nazi camps, in a context of rising anti-Semitism and the gradual disappearance of the last survivors of the Holocaust.
Sentenced to death by the High Court of Justice in 1945 for national indignity, Philippe Pétain benefited from a commutation of his sentence to life imprisonment, at the initiative of General de Gaulle. He died in detention on the Île d'Yeu in 1951. His regime was directly implicated in the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews from France to extermination camps.
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