Chirac Acknowledges France's Responsibility for Vichy Crimes

President Jacques Chirac delivers a landmark speech at the Vél d'Hiv memorial, officially acknowledging for the first time that France bore responsibility for the deportation of Jews during WWII. The speech breaks with decades of the Gaullist narrative that Vichy was not the 'real' France. Chirac's address is a watershed moment in French memory politics and Holocaust reckoning.