In mid-February, French President Nicolas Sarkozy became the first French head of state to attend the annual dinner of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF), the country’s Jewish umbrella organization.

Previous French presidents have always used the bogus – and entirely French – excuse of not wanting to be seen as supporting “sectarianism” in explaining why they have stayed away from the CRIF dinner. In parting with this absurd policy, Sarkozy emphasized his support for French Jews and the State of Israel.

During his address, Sarkozy pledged to intensify Holocaust education among French schoolchildren by initiating a program in which 11-year-old students will “adopt” a Holocaust victim of the same age. To a standing ovation, he explained, “Nothing is more exciting for a child than the story of a child of the same age, who played the same games and had the same dreams, but was unfortunate enough to be born Jewish in the 1940s.”

This is, of course, exciting news. An increase in Holocaust education is welcomed anywhere in the world, but in France, the epicentre of Europe’s current cultural war, Sarkozy’s words were a revelation. Considering France’s historical ambivalence towards its own Jews and the country’s struggles with a bullying Muslim population, a display of sentimentality for the Jewish story of the Holocaust is a risky political move.

Predictably, Sarkozy’s proposal has drawn angry responses. Jean-Marie Le Pen, head of France’s far-right National Front party and a borderline Nazi sympathizer, predicted that, “The poor children will feel guilty and break down,” under the weight of a Holocaust education. Echoing Le Pen, Simone Veil, a Jewish Holocaust survivor and former French government minister, claimed, “It’s impossible to ask a child of that age to relate to a dead person. It would be unbearable for them.”

This “what about the children?” argument is nothing more than a shameless ruse. Regardless of their claims, Le Pen, Veil and their ilk are not particularly interested in the psychological threat to young French kids. What they truly fear is a project that would alter the French far-right’s narrative. Singling out the greatest Jewish tragedy for intense study quite simply belies the nationalist cause.

These political manoeuvres hide a simple, undeniable truth: Holocaust education and psychological hardship in children are un-linkable. There is, in fact, documentary proof that children not only can handle learning about the Holocaust, but can also produce something constructive from what they’re taught.

Indeed, the award-winning 2004 documentary Paper Clips showed how a group young of people could be affected positively by Holocaust education.

The film shows how students at the public middle school in Whitwell, Tenn., population 1,600, were motivated to produce their own tribute to victims of the Holocaust after their principle introduced a mandatory Holocaust education class at the school. The students collected 11 million paper clips to represent the six million Jews and five million other victims of the Nazi genocidal campaign. The paper clips are housed, along with various other tributes, in a vintage Nazi transport rail car.

These children – who knew nothing about the Holocaust and, if Le Pen is to be believed, stood to be damaged by the painful experience of studying the Holocaust – were actually drawn into the tragic story and were sufficiently motivated to add their own unique perspective to the Holocaust storyline.

There is absolutely no reason to fear that learning about the Holocaust might damage children. If anything, studying the Holocaust has the potential to be a positive educational experience for today’s children, who, no doubt, will come into contact with more recent, even current, campaigns of genocide as they become more and more aware of humanity’s ugly side.

That the Le Pens of the world would put hateful, nationalist politics before the education of French children is truly appalling.