Desecration of the Jewish cemetery and exhumation of a body, national repercussions

The Jewish cemetery of Carpentras is one of the oldest in France, connected to the Comtadin community that had lived in the Papal States of Avignon since the Middle Ages and had obtained there, uniquely in France, the right to remain after the royal expulsions.

During the night of the first of May, dozens of graves are overturned and broken, and the body of a man buried shortly before is exhumed and exposed. The desecration, by its very nature, surpasses anything France had witnessed since the war.

It provokes a national outcry and a demonstration of several hundred thousand people in Paris, led by the President of the Republic. The perpetrators, local neo-Nazi militants, would not be identified until six years later.