One of the most popular comedians in France is Dieudonné—an antisemitic, hate-spewing lunatic fond of dressing up in Nazi uniforms.

When the curtain rises, he is greeted with roars and whoops by a packed, multi-racial audience, which is young, trendy, intellectual and left-wing. Many of them have come straight from the latest demonstration against the government’s new jobs law for the young.

Much of Dieudonné’s show - “Le Depot du Bilan” (The Bankruptcy) - is surreally funny. ...

All through the show, however, something else intrudes, something darker and more sinister. Dieudonné is obsessed with Jews. All races, even his own mixed black and white origins, get a gentle mickey-taking in his show. When Jews are mentioned - and they are mentioned over and over again - the tone becomes more aggressive, even violent.

In one skit, Bernard-Henri Lévy, the Jewish-French philosopher, haggles with a street potato seller. Dieudonné/Lévy says: “How can you ask me to pay so much when six million of us died in the Holocaust?” Roars of delight from the audience. There is also a Hitler-in-his-bunker sketch which is moderately funny until the closing line: “You will see, in the future, people will come to realise that I, Adolf Hitler, was really a moderate.” ...

Dieudonné proceeds by the kind of nudge-nudge, coded provocation that has long been the stock in trade of the anti-Semitic far right in France. He had been prosecuted 17 times for inciting racial hatred, or denying the Holocaust, but had won every case before his recent condemnation. If you put a few of his comments together, however, the Dieudonné message becomes pretty clear.

On Beur FM, a radio station directed at young people of North African origin, he said in March last year: “In my children’s school books, I ripped out the pages on the Shoah. I will continue to do so as long as our pain is not recognised.”

In December 2003, he appeared on a French chat and comedy show dressed as an Israeli West Bank colonist and ended his skit with a Nazi salute and shouted: “Israel-heil”. In his statement announcing his intention to run for the presidency, he launched an attack on the French Jewish association CRIF (Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France). It was, he said, a “Zionist organisation of the extreme right that gathers all our leaders at the beginning of the year to share with them a roadmap or an agenda for the year ahead”.