He is a figure of the French extreme right. Yvan Benedetti, was sentenced this Tuesday in Paris to a fine of 10,000 euros for contesting crimes against humanity, because of an article questioning the results of the genocide of the Jews during the Second World War.
The spokesperson for the French Nationalist Party, an ultra-right group, will have to pay 100 day-fines of 100 euros each, an alternative criminal sanction to prison. The court also ordered him to pay 1,500 euros in damages and 2,000 euros in legal costs to the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism (Licra), which had joined as a civil party.
“A figure from Zionist propaganda”
In an article posted online in May 2020 on the “Jeune Nation” site, of which he is the director of publication, Yvan Benedetti described the 6 million deaths from the Holocaust as an “invented” figure, which “is based on a fabrication”, “ a symbolic number from Zionist propaganda”.
“Under cover of a search for supposedly historical truth, through the comments made, Yvan Benedetti expresses an outrageous understatement of the number of victims of the Holocaust” and uses “proven springs of Holocaust denial, such as the discrediting of witnesses”, underlined the Paris court. During the hearing on June 8, the public prosecutor requested three months’ imprisonment.
“The Jews, Incest and Hysteria”
Yvan Benedetti was neither present nor represented, either at the hearing or at the reading of the deliberations on Tuesday. In June 2021, he had already been sentenced for Holocaust denial, with the same sentence, for a video by far-right activist Hervé Lalin (known as Ryssen) published on “Jeune Nation”, entitled “Jews, incest and hysteria”.
A municipal councilor in Vénissieux, near Lyon, in the 2000s, he was expelled from the National Front for calling himself “anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish”. In 2012, he took the helm of L’Œuvre française, a Pétainist movement founded in 1968 and dissolved after the death in June 2013 of anti-fascist activist Clément Méric during a fight with far-right skinheads.
A next trial in December
Sentenced in 2019 to eight months in prison suspended for non-dissolution of this small group, he was also displayed among the “yellow vests”.
Yvan Benedetti is to be tried on December 2, 2022 alongside Hervé Lalin for the attack on a team from the Quotidien program during a demonstration in 2019 against the opening of medically assisted procreation (PMA) to couples of lesbians and single women.