SOURCE: "Theses on Revisionism," in Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman, Columbia University Press, 1992, pp. 79-98.

In the following essay, originally published in French in 1985, Vidal-Naquet provides an analysis of the phenomenon of anti-Semitic historical revisionism.

I shall call "revisionism" the doctrine according to which the genocide practiced by Nazi Germany against Jews and Gypsies did not exist but is to be regarded as a myth, a fable, or a hoax. I shall speak of "revisionism" in the absolute sense of the word, but there are also relative revisionisms of which I shall say a few words.

The word itself has a history which is strange and would merit elaboration. The first modern "revisionists" were, in France, the partisans of a "revision" or judicial review of the trial of Alfred Dreyfus (1894), but the word was quickly turned around by their...