Paris (AFP)
Several hundred French intellectuals have supported the historian Benjamin Stora, after an article in the magazine Valeurs Actuelles described as "anti-Semitic" by this specialist in the Algerian war, which the weekly defends itself.
In a message of support posted on the site of Benjamin Stora and revealed Thursday by Le Monde, more than 250 intellectuals, including Thomas Piketty, Pierre Rosanvallon, Herve Le Bras, say they "discovered with consternation the nauseating attack of Values Actuelles" in the October issue of the conservative magazine devoted to the Algerian war.
"We want to express collectively our indignation at the attack that strikes you," write these intellectuals, members of research centers of the EHESS (School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences).
The article of Valeurs Actuelles, entitled "Benjamin Stora, the official historian", evokes the "secrets of the course of this black foot ex-militant of extreme left" which "monopolizes colloquiums and TV debates". It's about his physique.
On his website, the media historian, from the Jewish community of Constantine and who grew up in French Algeria, denounced an "anti-Semitic article". What his author refutes "totally".
"I fell out of the clouds, I do not understand," told AFP journalist Bruno Larebière, who admits to having signed a "portrait against the charge" but judges "totally off topic" the qualifications of anti-Semitism.
For Benjamin Stora, it is "the portrait of a man eager for ambition and honors who is here drawn up, haunting the corridors of power". According to him, this article is "in the classic antisemitic tradition of the" court + Jews "that could be read in the far-right press at the time of the Dreyfus affair".
The historian, also a specialist in the colonial question, castigates "an attack based on a description of my physique", and an "obsession with my weight" which "suggests the expression of an enrichment, which can also be read in the antisemitic press ".
"I compared the Benjamin Stora emaciated 70s Benjamin Stora fat today: it is a parable of his social rise, that's all," defended Bruno Larebière.
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