Parisian environmentalists oppose a Claude-Lanzmann alley, a forum denounces an “affront” to his memory

Eight years ago this brilliant and eruptive personality died, who changed the way we looked at the Second World War. With Shoaha long film released in 1985, Claude Lanzmann contributed to building a new “memory regime”, to quote the historian Denis Peschanski. The journalist and director was the subject of tributes on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of his birth, on November 27, 1925. Which is not to the taste of elected Parisian environmentalists.

Mediapart reported that the Greens dissuaded Paris town hall in mid-December from initiating a process aimed at assigning the name Lanzmann to an artery in the capital. More precisely, at the central alley of the Place-des-Martyrs-Juifs-du-Vélodrome-d’Hiver square, located on Quai de Grenelle, in the 15th^e borough. Not far from where, on July 16 and 17, 1942, the Vichy government orchestrated the Vel d’Hiv roundup.

“It’s an exercise in patience”: Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, a cinematic monument abandoned by young people

Accusation of sexual violence

Thursday, December 18, as evidenced by the provisional list of the Council of Paris, the members were to consider this name. “The debate was not sufficiently calm to vote for this deliberation”Anne Hidalgo’s office submitted to Mediapart, to justify its cancellation. The mayor of Paris, in the reasons given for the deliberation, recalled Lanzmann’s past as a resistance fighter, his “rigorous and ethical approach to history”his multiple awards and decorations.

It is not legitimate to “put the spotlight on someone accused of sexual assault, even if his work and his film, which we must continue to see, are fundamental”defended Jérôme Gleizes, vice-president of the Paris Ecologist group. In 2012, Lanzmann was briefly arrested and questioned at Tel Aviv airport after being accused of sexual harassment by a security employee. He was finally allowed to board his plane. In 2017, a Dutch journalist claimed to have been the victim of inappropriate gestures in 1985 during an interview.

Nothing that justifies this “damning cancellation”according to a column published on January 15 by The Point . “No complaint was ever filed. A fortiori, no judgment has been rendered. Members of a party thus took the place of judges to designate a culprit without those concerned having filed a complaint and to impose their ideology, without discussion, on other elected officials”we read in this open letter, signed by the essayist Élisabeth Badinter, the filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, the historian Denis Peschanski and Serge Klarsfeld, president of the Sons and Daughters of Jewish Deportees from France.

A “memorial reference”

Denouncing a « affront » made in memory of Claude Lanzmann by the Greens, supported here by the Communists, the signatories pin “a resignation or even a compromise” while the fight against anti-Semitism once again becomes central.

Denis Peschanski insists on the contribution of the author of the vibrant Patagonian hare . “It represents a form of memorial reference, which played an essential role in the recognition of the Shoah in France”reminds the Figaro the historian, specialist in the Second World War. “I fully support this column even though my relations have sometimes been complicated with Lanzmann, in particular when I published The crematories of Auschwitz de Pressacin 1993. My approach was not his”remembers the emeritus research director at the CNRS.

When he died in 2018, Claude Lanzmann was the subject of a national tribute in the courtyard of the Invalides. “We needed an artist (…) to tell the story, show it, name it, to make us touch it”greeted Prime Minister Édouard Philippe. A commemorative plaque was placed in his memory, in 2019, in the XIV^e district of Paris, where he lived for more than fifty years.