At the Camp des Milles memorial site, Emmanuel Macron works for the reconciliation of memories

It is a place crumbling under the weight of history that welcomes thousands of visitors every year. A stone’s throw from a commercial area halfway between Marseille and Aix-en-Provence, in the Bouches-du-Rhône, Camp des Milles is one of the last remnants of the Holocaust era in France. The building, where 10,000 Jews were interned under the Vichy regime from 1939 to 1942 and 2,000 of them deported to Auschwitz, the only one left intact in the country, became a Memorial Site in 2012. For its 10th anniversary of the opening to the public, Emmanuel Macron goes there to reaffirm the duty of memory.

The Head of State is expected with his Minister of Education Pap NDiaye and the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin. Emmanuel Macron intends to continue the mission of reconciliation of memories that he had already set himself during his previous five-year term, indicates the entourage of the head of state. All the works that the president has opened since his first election are intended to build a unifying republican imagination, further underlines an adviser.

Macron’s response to his opponents

In his speech scheduled for 3 p.m. at Camp des Milles, the president will return to the particular history of this former tile-brickyard transformed into an internment and deportation camp during the Second World War. The objective is to reaffirm that what happened there testifies to a France which was what it should never be again, insists an adviser. It is also an opportunity to send messages to certain political adversaries, without ever quoting him. The Elysée in particular suggests that Emmanuel Macron should attack Eric Zemmour, president of Reconquest!, recalling that the Vichy regime was not intended to save Jews, even French ones.

It was Jean-Marc Ayrault, Prime Minister at the time under François Hollande, who inaugurated the Camp des Milles. A place of transmission with an educational purpose which welcomes many classes throughout the year: young people, “but also their parents”, indicated the direction of the memorial. “The public comes to discover tools that deal with questions of memory, the history of the period, but also societal and individual mechanisms, confided to Provence the director of the site at the time, Cyprien Fonvielle. “How can a society, at a given moment in its history, participate in the establishment of a genocide, or on the contrary, resist it?”