Faurisson affair

Based on Wikipedia: Faurisson affair

When Defending Free Speech Goes Wrong

In 1980, one of the world's most celebrated intellectuals accidentally wrote an introduction to a Holocaust denial book. He didn't mean to. He thought he was defending free speech. But the fallout would keep Noam Chomsky out of France for nearly thirty years.

This is the story of the Faurisson affair—a cautionary tale about the tangled relationship between defending someone's right to speak and appearing to endorse what they say.

The Provocation

Robert Faurisson was a French professor of literature at the University of Lyon. His academic specialty was document criticism—analyzing texts for authenticity and meaning. In late 1978 and early 1979, he published two letters in Le Monde, France's newspaper of record, making an explosive claim: the gas chambers used by the Nazis to murder Jews never existed.

This wasn't a fringe pamphlet circulated in shadowy corners. This was France's most respected newspaper giving space to what historians universally recognize as a dangerous lie.

The backlash was immediate and severe. After a television interview, French courts found Faurisson guilty of defamation and incitement to racial hatred. He received a suspended three-month prison sentence and a fine of 21,000 francs—roughly equivalent to 3,200 euros today. The court also ordered him to pay for the publication of its judgment in national newspapers and on television, though this requirement was later dropped on appeal.

Enter Chomsky

By 1979, Noam Chomsky was already a towering figure in two distinct worlds. In linguistics, he had revolutionized the field with his theory of generative grammar, arguing that humans possess an innate capacity for language. In politics, he had become America's most prominent left-wing intellectual, a fierce critic of U.S. foreign policy who had risen to prominence opposing the Vietnam War.

That fall, a petition began circulating in academic circles. It defended Faurisson's right to conduct his "historical research" without harassment. It described him as "a respected professor" who had been subjected to "a vicious campaign of harassment, intimidation, slander and physical violence." It claimed that "fearful officials" had tried to deny him access to public libraries and archives.

Chomsky signed it. So did roughly 600 others, including several academics who were themselves Holocaust deniers—figures like Serge Thion, Arthur Butz, and Mark Weber.

For Chomsky, this was a straightforward application of a principle he held sacred. Freedom of speech, in his view, was meaningless if it only protected popular opinions. The real test came when defending speech you found abhorrent. He often quoted Voltaire's famous formulation: "I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write."

The Petition's Problems

French intellectuals were not impressed by Chomsky's Voltairean principles. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, a distinguished historian of ancient Greece who had also written extensively about the Holocaust, led the counterattack.

Vidal-Naquet's objection was precise. The petition didn't simply defend Faurisson's right to speak. It described his Holocaust denial as "findings" resulting from "extensive historical research." This language, Vidal-Naquet argued, implied that Faurisson was engaged in legitimate scholarly inquiry rather than deliberate falsification.

What is scandalous about the petition is that it never raises the question of whether what Faurisson is saying is true or false, that it even presents his conclusions or "findings" as the result of a historical investigation, one, that is, in quest of the truth.

Vidal-Naquet also challenged the petition's factual claims. Faurisson had not been barred from public libraries or archives. The only institution to deny him access was the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Paris—a private archive dedicated to documenting Nazi crimes. Vidal-Naquet found it entirely reasonable that an institution devoted to preserving the memory of the Holocaust would decline to assist someone devoted to denying it.

The Essay That Made Everything Worse

Rather than backing down, Chomsky doubled down. He wrote an essay titled "Some Elementary Comments on the Rights of Freedom of Expression," defending his position at length.

The essay made several arguments. First, Chomsky insisted that even if Faurisson were "a rabid anti-Semite and fanatic pro-Nazi," this would have no bearing on whether his civil rights deserved defense. Indeed, Chomsky argued, it would make defending those rights more imperative, not less.

But then Chomsky went further—and this is where he stumbled into territory his critics found indefensible:

Is it true that Faurisson is an anti-Semite or a neo-Nazi? As noted earlier, I do not know his work very well. But from what I have read—largely as a result of the nature of the attacks on him—I find no evidence to support either conclusion... As far as I can determine, he is a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort.

Chomsky gave permission for this essay to be used for any purpose. Serge Thion and Pierre Guillaume—French Holocaust deniers—promptly used it as the preface to a book by Faurisson, published in 1980. Chomsky later claimed he hadn't authorized this specific use and asked that the essay be removed, but his request came too late. The book was already in print with Noam Chomsky's name on the cover.

The Distinction That Collapsed

Chomsky insisted on a conceptual distinction that his critics refused to accept. There was, he maintained, all the difference in the world between endorsing someone's views and defending their right to express those views.

His critics argued that Chomsky had blurred this distinction himself. By calling Faurisson "a relatively apolitical liberal," by describing his work in neutral terms like "findings" and "research," by claiming to find "no evidence" of antisemitism—Chomsky had gone beyond defending a right. He had offered a character reference.

Vidal-Naquet put it memorably:

You had the right to say: my worst enemy has the right to be free, on condition that he not ask for my death or that of my brothers. You did not have the right to say: my worst enemy is a comrade, or a "relatively apolitical sort of liberal." You did not have the right to take a falsifier of history and to recast him in the colors of truth.

Was Faurisson Actually an Antisemite?

This might seem like a strange question. A man who devoted years to arguing that the Holocaust didn't happen—in a country still haunted by its collaboration with Nazi deportations—would seem to wear his antisemitism on his sleeve.

But Chomsky's position required engaging with the question directly, and Vidal-Naquet obliged. He pointed to passages in Faurisson's writings that went beyond mere denial of gas chambers:

Is it anti-Semitic to write with consummate calm that in requiring Jews to wear the yellow star starting at the age of six "Hitler was perhaps less concerned with the Jewish question than with ensuring the safety of German soldiers"?

Vidal-Naquet also noted that Faurisson had invented a fictitious declaration of war against Hitler by an imaginary president of the World Jewish Congress—a fabrication designed to shift blame for Nazi persecution onto Jews themselves.

The question wasn't whether Faurisson had the right to say these things. The question was whether Chomsky should have described him as an apolitical liberal engaged in legitimate research.

The Long Exile

The affair devastated Chomsky's reputation in France. For a country that had long embraced American intellectuals—from Hemingway to Baldwin to Sontag—the rejection was striking. Translation of Chomsky's political writings into French essentially halted, not resuming until the 2000s. Chomsky himself did not visit France for nearly thirty years.

In his own country, the damage was more contained but still significant. As the linguist John Goldsmith noted, "Unsympathetic critics used it as an opportunity to brand Chomsky with anti-Semitic labels, but even critics potentially sympathetic to Chomsky's political views felt his remarks showed lack of judgment."

Chomsky never truly backed down. In correspondence from around 1989 to 1991, he described Faurisson's prosecution as "the first time that a modern Western state openly affirmed the Stalinist-Nazi doctrine that the state will determine historical truth and punish deviation from it." He accused European intellectuals of "trying to divert attention with a flood of outrageous lies."

The comparison of French hate speech laws to Stalinist-Nazi doctrine did not improve his standing with French critics.

The Deeper Question

At its core, the Faurisson affair raises a question that still divides civil libertarians today. When you defend someone's right to speak, how do you do it without lending them credibility?

The American Civil Liberties Union faced this question in 1978 when it defended the right of neo-Nazis to march through Skokie, Illinois—a suburb with a large population of Holocaust survivors. The ACLU's position was unambiguous: we find these ideas repugnant, but the First Amendment protects even repugnant ideas.

Chomsky's approach was different. By describing Faurisson as a legitimate researcher with no evidence of antisemitism, by allowing his essay to serve as a preface to Faurisson's book, he appeared to offer more than legal defense. He appeared to offer respectability.

Writing in Tablet magazine in 2018, the journalist Paul Berman argued that Chomsky's biographers had been too quick to accept his self-presentation as a pure civil libertarian. Berman pointed to Chomsky's "oddly respectful tone toward Faurisson" and argued that he "left the clear implication that Faurisson is a scientific-minded researcher, with conclusions or findings that ought to be accorded the kind of respect that is accorded to any authentically scientific researcher."

A Pattern of Absolute Principle

The Faurisson affair wasn't an isolated incident in Chomsky's career. His commitment to absolute academic freedom extended in directions that made many allies uncomfortable.

In 1969, when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology considered whether to hire Walt Whitman Rostow—an economist who had been a chief architect of U.S. policy in Vietnam—Chomsky threatened to "protest publicly" if Rostow was denied a position. Chomsky considered Rostow a war criminal. He still thought MIT must hire him if he was qualified, on grounds of academic freedom.

As biographer Chris Knight points out, Chomsky's position had an institutional logic. MIT's president at the time, Howard Wesley Johnson, had articulated a vision of the university as "a refuge from the censor, where any individual can pursue truth as he sees it, without any interference." Johnson's motivation was partly to protect MIT's military-funded research laboratories from anti-war student protests. But the principle cut both ways: if MIT would protect weapons researchers, it had to protect war critics too. And if it protected war critics, Chomsky felt obligated to extend the same protection to everyone else—including Holocaust deniers.

Knight suggests this explains the Faurisson affair without requiring us to believe Chomsky harbored any sympathy for Holocaust denial: "It was simply a logical extension of a principle common to all Western universities—one which his management at MIT felt obliged to uphold with special tenacity in view of what its own researchers were doing."

What Faurisson Became

The aftermath of the affair offers its own commentary. Faurisson continued his career as a Holocaust denier, eventually becoming a fixture in the international network of deniers and neo-Nazis. In October 2006, he was sentenced by a Paris court to a three-month suspended sentence for denying the Holocaust on Iranian television—the same regime that was then hosting conferences questioning whether the Holocaust occurred.

France, unlike the United States, has laws criminalizing Holocaust denial. The Gayssot Act of 1990 made it illegal to question the existence of crimes against humanity as defined by the Nuremberg Tribunal. Whether such laws are wise—whether they suppress dangerous ideas or merely drive them underground and give them the allure of forbidden truth—remains hotly debated.

Chomsky's position is clear: such laws represent state control of historical truth, a principle he considers fundamentally incompatible with freedom of thought. His critics counter that some forms of speech—deliberate lies designed to rehabilitate mass murderers and pave the way for future atrocities—fall outside the protection that liberal societies should offer.

The Price of Purity

The linguist Neil Smith, in his biography of Chomsky, offered a measured assessment: "Chomsky should perhaps have foreseen the negative effect of his activity and refrained from writing the way he did. Perhaps, but on balance perhaps not. Even had he seen the furore which would erupt and the distress that would ensue, the moral doctrine of defending freedom of speech is probably higher."

This captures the dilemma. Principles, taken to their logical conclusion, sometimes lead to ugly places. But principles abandoned at the first sign of ugliness aren't really principles at all.

What Chomsky could have done differently is more obvious in retrospect than it was at the time. He could have signed a petition defending Faurisson's civil rights while explicitly condemning his views as dangerous lies. He could have refused to characterize Faurisson as a legitimate researcher. He could have declined permission for his essay to be republished in any context. He could have, at minimum, read Faurisson's work carefully before pronouncing him an apolitical liberal.

That he did none of these things suggests something beyond principled commitment. Perhaps it was intellectual arrogance—the belief that his American understanding of free speech was obviously correct and his French critics obviously confused. Perhaps it was stubbornness—a refusal to give ground once attacked. Perhaps it was simply insufficient attention to a controversy he considered peripheral to his main concerns.

Whatever the explanation, the Faurisson affair remains a stain on Chomsky's reputation among people who otherwise admire his work. It is a reminder that defending free speech requires not just courage but care—that how you defend someone matters as much as whether you defend them.

The Lesson That Keeps Recurring

Every generation seems to rediscover the Faurisson affair. In the age of social media, when questions about free speech, deplatforming, and the limits of tolerance dominate public discourse, the old controversy feels newly relevant.

The internet has made it possible for Holocaust denial and other forms of dangerous disinformation to spread with unprecedented speed. It has also made it possible to organize mass campaigns against speakers with unpopular views. The tension between fighting hatred and preserving open discourse has never been more acute.

Chomsky's defenders argue that his position, however clumsily expressed, points toward an important truth: once you establish that some ideas are too dangerous to be spoken, who decides which ideas qualify? States have historically used such powers to suppress dissent, silence minorities, and enforce orthodoxy. The cure can be worse than the disease.

Chomsky's critics argue that his position, however principled in theory, ignored crucial context: France had collaborated in the deportation of Jews within living memory. Holocaust survivors still walked the streets. Rehabilitation of Nazi ideology wasn't an abstract threat but a concrete danger. Some lies do such violence to the truth and to the victims of historical atrocities that defending the liars, however carefully hedged, amounts to complicity.

The affair offers no easy resolution. What it offers instead is a case study in how even the most brilliant minds can stumble when they prioritize abstract principle over human reality—and how a few careless words can follow you for decades.

Chomsky's one stated regret is that he didn't ask for his essay to be removed as a preface to Faurisson's book sooner. It is a small regret for such a large disaster. But perhaps that, too, is part of the lesson: when you've built your career on refusing to back down, backing down becomes almost impossible, even when you should.