• The President of the Republic was traveling to Aix-en-Provence, at the Camps des Milles memorial.

  • This former brick and tile factory was a place of internment and deportation during the Second World War.

  • Emanuel Macron denounced the "crimes of the French state"

"The Camp des Milles, these were the crimes of the French state", insisted Emmanuel Macron during a trip to the internment and deportation camp of Les Milles (Bouches-du-Rhône), where 10,000 prisoners were held between 1939 and 1942, "one of the most complete perjuries of the Republic".

"The French State" is the name of the collaborationist regime of Vichy, in force between 1940 and 1944. The Head of State spoke on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the inauguration of a memorial on the site of this former Aix-en-Provence tile factory where the Vichy regime interned thousands of Jews, 1,800 of whom were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camps.



The red brick buildings are now a place of memory that welcomes thousands of young people to help them discover the mechanisms that tip a society towards totalitarianism and mass crimes.

"The camp of Milles, these were the crimes of the French State", hammered the president, recalling that "France in the hands of Pétain and Laval [y] is lost" by "crossing out the principles of 1789" .

“The Jews were the deliberate victims of the French state”

"It was in Les Milles that [the Republic] experienced, as in Vél-d'Hiv, one of its most complete perjuries", by "reminding us that there were camps on our soil" and that "the deportation was [also] organized" in the area that "Marshal Pétain's regime was then administering in his name".

"The Camp des Milles was not an accident of history but the fruit of a deliberate slide towards crime", insisted Emmanuel Macron again, stressing that "the Jews were the deliberate victims of the French state".

“Here is sedimented every renunciation, every fault, every crime of the French authorities”, he added.

The President of the Republic hailed the action of the memorial which "restores a political climate and dismantles the springs of the genocidal enterprise: it says why the same causes produce the same effects in other places at other times", emphasizing that "anti-Semitism, racism, any form of rejection carries within it the annihilation of all humanity, as the cloud carries within it the storm".

He particularly underlined the "perseverance" of former deportees and resistance fighters to prevent the disappearance of the site and its transformation into a foundation, today chaired by Alain Chouraki, to whom he presented the insignia of Knight of the Legion of Honor.

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  • Emmanuel Macron

  • Aix en Provence

  • Paca

  • Gingham

  • Deportation

  • Jewish

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