Vincent Reynouard, a notorious French Holocaust denier was jailed for four months by a court in Paris on Wednesday. Reynouard was convicted for posting a Holocaust denial video on YouTube in May 2017, a grave offense in France, where the denial of Nazi atrocities has been a crime since 1990.
Reynouard is well-known in Holocaust denial circles in Europe, with a far-right pedigree stretching back to his teenage years. His first conviction came in 1991, after he distributed leaflets that denied the existence of the gas chambers among high school students.
Reynouard also has ties to Catholic fundamentalist groups that deny the Holocaust, including the Society of St. Pius X, which regards Jews as “enemies of the Church.”
More recently, he was sentenced to one year in prison and a fine of 20,000 euros in 2008; one year in prison in 2015; and two months in prison in 2016 — all for Holocaust denial offenses.
Reynouard’s latest conviction follows a 17-month-jail term for his fellow Holocaust denier, Hervé Lalin.
Lalin was jailed in September for a series of antisemitic postings on Facebook and Twitter, as well as for a video he published on YouTube in 2018 — called “The Jews, Incest and Hysteria” — in which he attacked Jews as a “people of incest.”
In a recent analysis of the French far right, the newspaper Liberation identified both Reynouard and Lalin as key members of a network of propagandists dedicated to the denial and distortion of the Holocaust. Other French deniers to have sparked concern include Jerome Bourbon, Alain Soral and Yvan Benedetti.