A French Holocaust denier has been jailed for eight months for claiming that accounts of the gas chambers were “Soviet propaganda” and “made-up stories”.
Vincent Reynouard, 57, was sentenced by a Paris court on Tuesday after denying the existence of the death camps.
Reynouard made the claims in articles published by the far-right magazine Rivarol in 2024 and 2025. He also argued that “large gas chambers for a thousand people” were a “technical impossibility”.
Holocaust denial has been a criminal offence in France since 1990 under legislation that makes it illegal to dispute the existence of crimes against humanity as established by the post-war Nuremberg trials.
Reynouard has been convicted 10 times since 2006, mainly for denying Nazi crimes against humanity. He has repeatedly used written material and online publications to promote his revisionist views about the Holocaust.
Per AFP, the court ruled: “By denying the existence of the gas chambers, a symbol of the extermination of the Jews regardless of their size or capacity, the defendant is denying the existence of the Holocaust through the questioning of one of its principal methods.”
The judge said that the issue was not simply a dispute over the technical details or capacity of the gas chambers, but that questioning their existence challenged a central element of the Nazi extermination of Europe’s Jews.
Reynouard was also convicted of an antisemitic insult after describing Jewish people as “pathogenic”.
The case also involved Rivarol editor Jérôme Bourbon, who was sentenced to six months in prison. His sentence will be served under electronic monitoring at home.
Bourbon has 22 previous convictions and has faced repeated legal action over material published by Rivarol.
The court also ordered Reynouard and Bourbon to jointly pay damages to several organisations, including the Jewish Observatory of France and the League Against Racism and Antisemitism.
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