Eric Zemmour signs copies of his book “The French Suicide” at the Cercle de Lorraine-Club Van Lotharingen in Brussels, Belgium, Jan. 6, 2015. Photo by Emmanuel Dunand/AFP via Getty Images

(JTA) — A French court acquitted Éric Zemmour, a French politician, of denying a crime against humanity by saying that a French collaborator with the Nazis had saved most French Jews.

The Appeals Court of Paris last week confirmed an earlier ruling from January by a lower court that said that Zemmour, a Jewish journalist with far-right views who ran unsuccessfully for president in April, was innocent of the action, which is illegal in France.

Several left-leaning anti-racism groups had filed complaints against Zemmour over his 2019 comments saying that Philippe Pétain, whom the Nazis allowed to administer a part of France after they occupied the country in 1940, had sacrificed foreign Jews living in France to save Jewish citizens.

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The issue is divisive because it touches on the question of French complicity in the Holocaust. Multiple French presidents since Jaques Chirac have acknowledged collaboration by the French government, and public monuments honoring Petain have been removed across France. (A plaque honoring him remains in place in New York City something that local Jewish advocates want to change.)

But others dispute that history, especially in far-right circles and in some far-left ones. At least one renowned historian, Alain Michel, also advocates the theory that some of Pétain’s policies were guided by a desire to save French Jews.

The view held by Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld is more widely held. Klarsfeld has called Zemmour’s interpretation “completely false.”

Zemmour last week week announced he would be running for a seat in the French parliament in the June 12 election. He came in fourth in the first round of the presidential elections in April, and did not continue to the second and final round in which President Emmanuel Macron beat Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Party rally.

This story was originally published by  JTA.

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