Free Republic

Despite the French president calling for “unity” in the light of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, an almighty row broke out on Thursday after the National Front were not invited to Sunday’s Republican rally. France’s politicians were not able to show their new found unity for long. Just a day after the Charlie Hebdo shooting left 12 dead and had politicians calling for the country to unite, a row between politicians broke out after the National Front were not invited to take part in Sunday’s rally for “national unity” in Paris. For her part Marine Le Pen was furious that the...

<p>PARIS -- French libraries are said to file their nation's constitutions -- there have been more than a dozen since 1789; the current one is a relatively ancient 49 years old -- under periodicals. Now Nicolas Sarkozy, France's peripatetic new president, has created a commission on constitutional reform. The commission includes Jack Lang who, as minister of culture in 1983 under President Francois Mitterrand, staged a sublimely unserious conference on the (supposed) world economic crisis, featuring the likes of Sophia Loren, Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer.</p>

This interview appears at the new Occidentalis Blog. The interview was conducted by David Reinharc for Israel Magazine. The image is from Journaux DR - We are familiar with the way Le Pen tripped himself up on the Shoah and with his complacent attitude toward holocaust deniers. What is your position with regard to these "assassins of memory" and should those self-proclaimed historians be punished?PDV - I am, as you know, the son of a man who earned the Resistance Medal, a man who was imprisoned and tortured by the Nazis at Lübeck. Holocaust denial is an abomination and of...