GOVERNMENT WATCH : A National Confession

Credit President Jacques Chirac with the moral and political courage at last to say unequivocally what other French heads of state have refused to say for 50 years. Credit him with publicly recognizing France’s direct responsibility in the deportation of some of the 75,000 Jews--many of them refugees but the majority French citizens--who were seized and shipped to Nazi death camps during World War II.

Official French complicity in this crime against humanity has long been known and documented. Yet for decades successive governments sought to place responsibility solely on the country’s German occupiers, later adding the collaborationist Vichy regime to the roll of those guilty. Chirac, in remarks at a memorial service for 13,000 Jews who were seized in Paris in 1942 and transported to the death camps, was explicit about the actual French role. “France, the homeland of the Enlightenment and the rights of man, a land of welcome and asylum, on that day committed the irreparable.” His nation owes those victims, he said, “an everlasting debt.”

It’s seldom easy for proud nations to admit crimes or follies. Only in 1976, for example, did President Gerald R. Ford apologize on behalf of the government for the hysteria-prompted wartime internment of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry 34 years earlier. That great wrong had long been widely recognized.

In France for more than five decades it was official denial that prevailed. President Chirac, to his great credit, has made any further denial untenable.