Another French revisionist sentenced

Vincent Reynouard gets a year in prison

French author Vincent Reynouard

France - home of the revolution which promised the world liberté, égalité and fraternité - is now subjected to laws against free speech which are being applied with increasing rigour.

The last two years have seen revisionists such as Robert Faurisson and Georges Theil repeatedly in the dock, and on November 8th 2007 the 38-year-old former teacher and chemical engineer Vincent Reynouard was sentenced to a year in prison.

M. Reynouard was also ordered to pay 10,000 euros in damages, after being convicted by a court in the eastern French city of Savernes.

The case related to Reynouard's 2005 pamphlet, Holocauste, ce que l'on vous cache (Holocaust - The Hidden Facts).

He was arrested by Belgian police in September 2005, and hundreds of copies of the 16-page pamphlet were seized.

In 2004 M. Reynouard was sentenced to six months imprisonment, with a further eighteen months suspended, for questioning the accepted version of the wartime "massacre" at Oradour.

He was dismissed from his teaching job in 1998 after his first revisionist investigations.

Following the latest sentence M. Reynouard's lawyer Eric Delcroix said that his client would be appealing and would not therefore be jailed immediately.

M. Delcroix added:
The countries of the European Union are sinking into the suppression of freedom of opinion. We are not a free country anymore.