paris

France's national scientific research agency is to try to clarify a course of action on researchers who actively promote ‘revisionist’ arguments such as denying the existence of the Nazi gas chambers.

The Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), which is split between the need to preserve academic freedom and a desire to discipline such individuals, will ask its ethics committee, COMETS, for advice, on which the agency's national committee will then act.

The question of revisionism in French academic circles has been kept simmering for some time by the revisionist activities of Serge Thion, a CNRS researcher, as well as those of several other scientists.

The issues are particularly sensitive given that France has recently been reminded of Fascist activities in its past by the trial of Maurice Papon — a senior civil servant imprisoned for collaboration in Nazi deportations — and the significant role of the National Front in recent regional elections.

Matters were brought to the boil in February by allegations in the German newspaper Berliner Zeitung, attributing revisionist arguments — in particular that the existence of the Nazi gas chambers had not been proved — to Gabor Rittersporn, a CNRS researcher working at the prestigious Marc-Bloch Franco-German centre for social sciences in Berlin.

Earlier this month, the researcher won a court case against the newspaper and cleared his name. Rittersporn, who was born in Hungary, had denied the allegations and condemned revisionism, telling the court that some members of his family, itself part-Jewish, had perished in the Holocaust.

The allegations against Rittersporn followed revelations about his membership in the 1970s and 1980s of extreme left-wing groups that favoured free expression for revisionists. He was also a member of the editorial board of La Vieille Taupe, a French publisher that has published revisionist texts, including one on the gas chambers which Thion edited.

But Rittersporn has argued that he was at the time naively defending freedom of expression, and ceased participating in these activities when he learnt they were being used to support revisionism. Etienne François, the director of the Marc-Bloch institute, said at the time that Rittersporn's past activities had been fully discussed at CNRS before his appointment, and that the agency had been satisfied by Rittersporn's explanations.

In response to the highly publicized controversy generated by the Rittersporn case, CNRS set up an expert panel chaired by Edouard Brezin, president of its executive board, to consider the issue of revisionism among academics. But Brezin says he quickly realized that such a panel had few powers to investigate the behaviour of individual researchers.

Given this lack of power, and that the urgency has dissipated with the intervening court ruling clearing Rittersporn, CNRS has decided to dissolve the panel and pass the issue to COMETS for guidance. It will then ask the CNRS's national committee, which has the power to evaluate researchers, to take appropriate action.

Brezin says he hopes COMETS will clarify the limits of academic and individual freedom for public researchers, as well as CNRS's disciplinary powers.