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- <text id=91TT0658>
- <title>
- Apr. 01, 1991: World Notes:France
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1991
- Apr. 01, 1991 Law And Disorder
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- WORLD, Page 50
- World Notes
- FRANCE
- Comeuppance For a Bigot
- </hdr><body>
- <p> The price of Jean-Marie Le Pen's inflammatory rhetoric is
- going up. When the leader of France's right-wing National Front
- party referred to the Nazi gas chambers as a "detail of
- history" in 1987, outraged Holocaust survivors banded together
- to file suit. Last year a tribunal in Nanterre ruled against
- Le Pen and fined him a symbolic one franc. But rather than drop
- the case, Le Pen appealed the ruling, asserting it was a
- "freedom of expression issue." Last week the Court of Appeals
- in Versailles not only upheld the 1990 decision but drove the
- point home by increasing the fine to a not-so-symbolic 900,000
- francs--$180,000.
- </p>
- <p> The money will be divided among the groups that filed the
- suit. In addition the court has ordered Le Pen to pay for
- announcements of the decision in 10 publications. Le Pen, who
- plans to appeal again, has called the proceedings against him
- an attack by "corrupt and hypocritical" politicians. Meanwhile,
- the cost of his verbal antics continues to mount. Earlier this
- month, a French court condemned him for an anti-Semitic comment
- and ordered him to ante up $5,000 more.
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
-
-