After the Second World War, a discourse of Holocaust denial formulated by Maurice Bardèche began to emerge. In a letter to François Mauriac, Bardèche contended that the postwar purge of collaborators was unjust and that collaboration with Germany had been, in certain circumstances, unavoidable. He also regarded the Nuremberg Trials as biased, on the grounds that the victorious Allied powers were unlikely to administer fair treatment to the defeated nations. From this perspective, he wrote Nuremberg, or the Promised Land, to call for a revision of the grounds for conviction in the war crimes trials. But, he was convicted of advocating crimes against humanity and was sentenced to one year in prison and a fine of 50,000 francs for this book. Nevertheless, he subsequently wrote Nuremberg II, or the Counterfeiters, in which he developed an even more elaborate argument for Holocaust denial. His “Defense of murder” trilogy laid the foundation for Holocaust denial discourse. His ideas then circulated in the media and extended beyond academic circles. French far-right intellectuals later described Holocaust denial as ‘historical revisionism’, a term later redefined as négationnisme by Henri Rousso.
DongKyu Shin (Sun,) studied this question.