Thousands of French Jews were transported from the stadium to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Credit:AP Now enter Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front, who is making a run for the country's presidency in elections to be held on April 23. "I don't think that France is responsible for the Vel d'Hiv," she declared on French television on Sunday. "I think that in general, more generally, if there were those responsible, it was those who were in power at the time. This is not France." In remarks that elicited outrage across the French press, Ms Le Pen went further: "France has been mired in people's minds for years. In reality, our children are taught that they have every reason to criticise her, to see only the darkest historical aspects." "I want them to be proud to be French again."

For Ms Le Pen, of course, the past is dangerous territory. For years, her principal political obstacle has been convincing her critics that she has sufficiently distanced herself from the fraught past of the National Front, a far-right, extremist fringe coalition her father founded in the mid-1970s and that - in the current anti-establishment climate - she could now carry to power for the first time. Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, now 88, once referred to the Nazi gas chambers as a "detail of history." In a country that deported approximately 76,000 Jews in total throughout World War II, the elder Le Pen's remarks banished the National Front to the political wilderness for decades. In the eyes of many, it became a synonym for racism and anti-Semitism. In response, Marine Le Pen has insisted she is not the ideological heir of her father. For one - in an epic family drama of Shakespearean proportions - she expelled her father from the party in 2015, after he repeated, once again, his infamous provocation about the gas chambers. In an interview with The Washington Post last month, Jean-Marie Le Pen reiterated that he does not regret the remark - only the "persecution" he suffered as a result of having said it.

Marine Le Pen, by contrast, has condemned anti-Semitism and has reached out to Jewish groups in recent years, offering her support mostly in what she has portrayed as a mutual fight against what she has dubbed Islamist extremism. Less explicitly, she rarely uses her surname in campaign materials, and the National Front's traditional logo is conspicuously absent from her campaign's new visual identity. But things still seem to be happening with a regular frequency that undermine her attempts to "de-demonise" the National Front. Aside from Ms Le Pen's remarks about the Vel d'Hiv, a party official in the south of France was caught on camera last month denying the Holocaust last month. "I don't think there were that many deaths," Benoît Loeuillet, the official, said. "There weren't 6 million. There weren't mass murders as it's been reported." He was later expelled from the party. And then there is what critics have dubbed as Ms Le Pen's dog-whistle anti-Semitism, the use of phrases and people that evoke certain stereotypes she does not have to explicitly define.

There is, for example, her frequent invocation of Patrick Drahi, a Franco-Israeli telecommunications magnate who, in her campaign speeches, she often faults with running an international financial conspiracy to elect her principal opponent, Emmanuel Macron. Mr Macron, for his part, was a former investment banker at Rothschild, a financial institution founded by Europe's most famous Jewish family. This is another of Ms Le Pen's favourite criticisms to levy - not merely what Mr Macron used to do, but where he used to do it. Jewish groups condemned Ms Le Pen's latest remarks - delivered, as it happens, one day before the start of the Jewish holiday of Passover. "Through these remarks, Marine Le Pen is part of the Vichy and collaborationist tradition of her father and the founders of the National Front," said the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF), France's largest Jewish advocacy organisation in France, in a statement. The Vichy government was a collaborationist regime that controlled France's unoccupied zone after Nazi Germany invaded France in the summer of 1940. "Marine Le Pen demonstrates to those who doubted that she has inscribed the National Front outside the realm of the Republic."

The Washington Post