Roger Garaudy

Roger Garaudy was born in 1913 and built early credibility as a French resistance fighter and communist author. He spent decades as a philosopher in that tradition before converting to Islam in 1982, a shift that marked a second intellectual life. But his later years collapsed into Holocaust denial. In 1998, French courts convicted him for claiming the mass murder of six million Jews was a "myth" — a crime under French law. He was fined and sentenced. He died in 2012.