The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  This was something I had felt before, though I had not fully understood it. I was no longer a novice when it came to television. During these years, on Channel One – there were only two television channels at the time – there was a very good programme called Dim’, Dam’, Dom’, which regularly employed the best journalists and directors. The producer was Daisy de Galard, the editor at Elle. I conducted a number of memorable interviews for Dim’, Dam’, Dom’: an interview with five nuns, for example, who answered my questions with good grace and intelligence; another, with the permission of the prefecture, interviewing five policemen, ranging from an ordinary policeman to a high-ranking officer, in which my probing questions unsettled them to such an extent that their responses were overly revealing and the segment was almost cut. The interview was meticulously scrutinized at three separate screenings by the highest echelons of the Ministry of the Interior and I was asked to make cuts, which I refused to do. Daisy – an aristocrat of great courage – supported my decision completely. This interview caused a great stir.

  I also interviewed actresses, sports personalities, singers and celebrities for Dim’, Dam’, Dom’, but every time I regretted not directing every stage of the process leading to the birth of a film. I also did a long and rather savage interview with the great couturier Pierre Cardin on the subject of ‘designer labels’. How had he made his fortune? He became more and more ill at ease under my tenacious questioning, as I forced him to talk about his origins, his childhood, his activities under the Vichy regime. When our interview, filmed in his hôtel particulier on the quai Voltaire, came to an end he was visibly relieved. The programme, which neither he nor I had watched, was scheduled for broadcast on the evening of 10 May 1968. Cardin had the good taste to invite Daisy de Galard, the director Guy Seligmann and me to dinner that night on the quai Anatole-France. Nicole Alphand, who ran his shops, was also there, together with her husband the ambassador. I personally thought the programme rather caustic about Cardin, I would have preferred not to be there, but since his friends showered him with compliments, he decided to seem pleased, going so far as to thank me and congratulate me on my talent. I had another reason for not wanting to be there: it was 10 May 1968 and, just before the programme was broadcast, there had been a newsflash about clashes between police and countless demonstrators on the place Edmond-Rostand, on the boulevard Saint-Michel and around the jardin du Luxembourg that seemed likely to degenerate into pitched battles. I left the dinner as early as I could and rushed to the Senate (at the time Judith and I were living nearby on the rue de Tournon). The great night of May ’68 – the night of the barricades – was beginning.

  I took part in numerous demonstrations, I was beaten up by the police, I was with Sartre in the main lecture hall at the Sorbonne when he was summoned to appear before the student body, acting as a people’s assembly, where, to his delight, he was heckled and addressed as tu by twenty-year-olds who thought they were the Revolutionary prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville. Although I never for a moment tried to hang back, present at many flashpoints, spending whole days in the Sorbonne, which was occupied by students, listening for hours to the long-winded orators at the Théâtre de l’Odéon, commiserating over the death of Gilles Tautin, killed in the fields surrounding the Renault-Flins factory, hating viscerally, almost instinctively, the sight of breastplated troops of riot police, truncheons raised, the mist of tear gas that enveloped Paris from grenades thrown at point-blank range, although I was constantly present, I must confess that, truthfully, I experienced May ’68 from the outside, like a curious, disinterested spectator, never believing in the realization of the incredible Second Coming in the history of mankind promised by the creative, poetic, sometimes powerfully moving slogans, most of which I subscribed to. I was of another generation; at a much younger age I had devoted myself, body and soul, to other battles, and as an adult had campaigned for other causes; in my profession, having no boss, I was unreservedly a loner, little concerned with the anti-institutional struggle that had triggered the revolt. But mostly, at the same time, something was happening within me that pushed everything else into the background. My relationship with Judith was in trouble, and I had been asked to direct a film about Israel. A millionaire’s daughter had set herself up as a film producer and, ever since she had seen my footage about the Suez Canal, she had been bombarding me with bullying messages, urging me to act.

  For me it was a dark dive into the turbulent waters of my life: just as I had eighteen years before, I set off from Marseille for Israel by boat, on a bleak November evening in 1970. I needed time to think, to work out whether I truly wanted to make this film and to decide whether I felt capable of working in cinema, never having studied filmmaking. Furthermore, and though it pained me too much to admit it even to myself, I no longer felt as close to Sartre as I once had. He still retained, until his death a decade later, my affection, my admiration and, I believe, my very real loyalty, especially after I took over as editor of Les Temps modernes – steering the journal according to what I called a ‘course of non-disloyalty’ – but after 1968, I can no longer claim to be an accurate witness to his life. I played no part in the ‘Mao’ period, I did not know his new friends, or had seen them only fleetingly, and it was difficult for me to see Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir selling La Cause du peuple on street-corners and being carted off in police vans as flashbulbs popped, even more to watch the impact of Sartre’s sartorial tabula rasa: thrown out were the suits and the ties, now replaced by tatty cardigans and shabby jackets that encouraged fifteen-year-olds to heckle him in the most aggressive way.

  Now editor of La Cause du peuple and of Libération, Sartre became on the one hand increasingly indifferent to his own journal or, on the other, attempted to use it as a propaganda tool in the service of his new passions. He insisted that Les Temps modernes publish an interminable article by Philippe Gavi about the Bruay-en-Artois affair that, without a shred of evidence and based entirely on the ideology of ‘class war’, claimed that wealthy notary Pierre Leroy and his mistress were guilty of murdering the sixteen-year-old daughter of a pit worker, Brigitte Dewèvre. This was 1972, a year in which I spent almost all my time editing Pourquoi Israël, although Jean Pouillon and I took turns editing Les Temps modernes. It was my turn when Gavi’s article arrived and I read it with bewilderment: it was entitled ‘Only a Bourgeois Could Have Done This?’ and contained at least twenty possible grounds for lawsuits, all of which we would have lost. I discussed the piece with Sartre, showing him the actionable passages. He agreed with me and then said in his usual offhand manner, ‘Correct it yourself.’ I did so; Gavi threw a tantrum and went to Sartre, who would not be moved. No one to this day knows who killed the miner’s daughter, and the case has long since gone cold. In 1974 a book was published called On a raison de se révolter [It is Right to Rebel], written by three authors, Gavi, Pierre Victor and Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre was challenged by Gavi and Victor, who could not understand why he was wasting his time writing about Flaubert – a book about a bourgeois for the bourgeois. Sartre began by acknowledging the criticisms levelled at him, but he did so tenaciously, cleverly and with a wit that his opponents, devoid of humour, did not notice, slyly returning to the attack, telling them in short, ‘Let me do the only thing I am capable of, I can’t even attend the street demonstrations any more. What do you want? You want me to be carried on a sedan chair like a figurehead? I’m too old, too old to change. If I tried to write a revolutionary novel, it would be bad, etc...’ It is Sartre’s standing up to his juvenile inquisitors that makes On a raison de se révolter a book that is not just funny, but strange, in which the writer’s refusal to drink from the Maoist fountain of youth as his co-authors suggest reminds me of the incredulous refusal of the old Boaz, in Victor Hugo’s poem ‘Booz endormi’ [‘Boaz asleep’] when he is visited by a dream that promises him youth and descendants:

  Je suis seul, je suis veuf, et sur moi le soir tombe,

  Et je courbe, ô mon Dieu!, mon âme ver
s la tombe,

  Comme un boeuf ayant soif penche son front vers l’eau

  I am alone, am widowed, and evening falls upon me,

  And I lean, O God, my soul towards the tomb,

  Just as an ox, when parched with thirst, bends his head

  to the water

  And so Sartre fought every inch of the way to go on writing the fourth volume of L’Idiot de la famille, devoted to Madame Bovary, until his failing eyesight finally forced him to give up, made it impossible to write by himself.

  For my part, I was completely consumed by Pourquoi Israël, consumed by the discovery of the staggering possibilities that filmmaking offered me, and afterwards by the immense preparatory work for Shoah. I did not read La Cause du peuple, and ignored most of the numerous interviews Sartre gave during this period to compensate for the fact that he could no longer write. I did not, therefore, read his response to the massacre of the Israeli athletes in Munich: ‘In this war, the only weapon the Palestinians have is terrorism. It is a terrible weapon, but the oppressed have no other [...] The principle of terrorism is that one must kill.’ No one mentioned it to me, not even Castor, who later confessed that she was so shocked that she had deliberately contrived a memory lapse. Thinking about it now, Sartre’s comments are hardly surprising: this was how the Algerian War had been triggered, by an attack on civilians, and though we deplored it, we did not express our indignation at Algerian terrorism, but considered it a response to secular colonial oppression, to institutionalized torture, to the killing by French forces of the prisoners known as ‘corvées de bois’, to the death of mathematician Maurice Audin, to the inhuman torture suffered by Henri Alleg recounted in his memoir La Question, to the guillotine working overtime in the prison yards of France and Algeria. Indeed, it was Sartre who, in a splendid, irrefutable and courageous article entitled ‘A Victory’, wrote the preface to La Question in 1958.

  I feel somewhat responsible for another preface, the one he wrote for Les Damnés de la terre, since I had organized the encounter between Sartre and Fanon. By the time he met Fanon, Sartre was already morally committed to writing it. I have already told of the three days Sartre, Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir and I spent together, and of Fanon’s irresistible charisma, only increased by fever and his awareness of the approach of death. Sartre was much criticized for that preface, but my feeling, rereading it forty years later, is that in agreeing to write it, Sartre did not make a free choice but rather was forced by circumstances. I witnessed on many occasions how, when he had to write something that was not his idea, he resorted to what came most easily: rhetoric. The preface is too long, at times bombastic, at times tedious; the call to violence and its glorification ring false, he clearly intended to please Fanon, using formulas such as ‘the patience of the knife’, or others that sound excessive or irresponsible when one reads them today, in the light of all the ‘nights of the long knives’ that still bathe independent Algeria in innocent blood. I did not get a chance to discuss it with Fanon, but I am not sure that he was enthusiastic about Sartre’s preface. He had wanted it because he had read Critique de la raison dialectique with the magisterial analysis of colonialism that concludes that book: a magnificent chapter of concrete philosophy, luminous without being excessive, in which Sartre marshals all the concepts elaborated in the course of this immense work, thereby attesting to their profound truth.

  But for Sartre, the pen, when necessary, replaced the sword: it is largely thanks to him that even the most extreme factions in France – all too ready to imitate their German or Italian counterparts – never progressed to actual violence. Sartre was both their supporter and their moderating influence; Alain Geismar summed up Sartre’s approach to me: ‘I’m on your side, but only up to a certain point. Don’t mess around. There is a boundary, do not cross it.’ It is true that Sartre acceded to the lawyer Klaus Croissant’s request and visited Andreas Baader, the instigator of terrorism in Germany, in Mannheim Prison. Sartre justified this visit as humanitarian, considering that solitary confinement, the silence and the blinding whiteness of Baader’s cell, amounted to torture, but he insisted, during the ensuing press conference, that his presence did not amount to an endorsement of the bloody acts perpetrated by Baader and his gang. Yet it is true that, carried away by the logic of his preface to Les Damnés de la terre, he did support Palestinian terrorism, the taking hostage of the Israeli athletes and their assassination in Munich being but a forerunner to a long series of bloody actions – the hijacking and blowing up of airliners, the appalling culmination of which took place in Entebbe, where Jewish passengers were parodically segregated by Germans enlisted under the Palestinian banner. I don’t know what I would have done had I known about Sartre’s pronouncements when they were first published. Please believe me, I found out only much later, so late that any reaction on my part would have been meaningless. In any case, I was in an entirely other world. Today, I blame myself for my irenicism: I should never have allowed the issue of Les Temps modernes on the Arab–Israeli conflict to open with Rodinson’s article, ‘Israel, a Colonial Reality?’, for I do not believe that this is, or has ever been, the case: in my films and in my writings, I have striven tirelessly to reveal the complex reality of Israel. Rodinson’s simplifications, though dressed up as ‘science’, did much harm, beginning with Sartre himself – as was already apparent during our trip to Egypt – and at times justified the worst.

  But in November 1970, on the boat from Marseille to Haifa, and in spite of my gloomy outlook, I could not imagine Munich or Entebbe. Nor did I even imagine Pourquoi Israël, since I did not know yet whether I would succeed in making the film. I did not speak to a single person during the trip, there were few passengers, and I heard on the radio that de Gaulle had died, a ‘mighty oak felled’, in Colombey, struck dead by a ruptured aneurysm. I had admired the man, fought against him, misjudged him, and his death marked the end of a world, the end of an era and, as I sailed towards the country that sheltered ‘an élite people, self-assured and domineering’, as he had referred to Israelis in a press conference three years before, I felt a very real sadness. It was tinged with joy too, when, out on the open sea, I remembered the famous cartoon by Tim in L’Express depicting a member of this ‘élite people’, wearing the striped pyjamas of Auschwitz and a forage cap, leaning in debonair fashion on the barbed-wire fence. And I realized that my boat was now following the same course as the Boats of Cherbourg, which, less than a year earlier, on Christmas Eve 1969, had made France a laughing stock by cunningly and daringly breaching the arms embargo de Gaulle had announced in the run-up to the Six Day War. The Israeli government had paid cash for twelve missile boats, but at the time of the embargo only seven had been delivered; the others were detained in Cherbourg harbour with their Israeli maintenance crews. It has to be said that the Jewish marines who piloted the boats for six days and nights from Cherbourg to Haifa, observing a complete radio blackout in order to elude the French navy, could not have carried off their coup without the help of French soldiers. In retaliation for this slight, de Gaulle had immediately declared persona non grata Admiral Mordechai Limon, who was responsible for Israeli arms procurement, and who had remained in France after the embargo. I was invited to a party thrown by the admiral on the eve of his departure, where I saw a number of high-ranking French officers and industrialists exchanging smiles of complicity: champagne flowed and, all in all, Limon’s send-off was a truly joyous one.