En five years of press review, I have forged intimate, joyful and fruitful relationships in my readings, with titles that wake up the old journalist. Point is one of those journals which command my esteem, by its taste for science and its lucid enthusiasm not to despair of the world. I often quote it with jubilation.
It was in the name of these joys that last Thursday I regretted, in lively terms, perhaps too much, that Point welcome without distance the words of Michel Houellebecq that I consider untruthful. It is in the name of this esteem that I take the liberty of clarifying my thoughts and responding to the philosopher Bérénice Levet. It is not about me, nor about France Inter, which my comments cannot summarize and whose listeners know that it is not the fantasy of Mrs. Levet. It’s just the fragile truth and a dead philosopher that mattered.
No, Jean-Paul Sartre never called for the killing of white men, as claimed by Mr. Houellebecq, and Mrs. Levet after him.
The devil lie hides in a detail.
READ ALSOEXCLUSIVE. Michel Houellebecq responds to the accusations
Madame Levet, to confuse me, quotes a famous sentence of Sartre while amputating it, and this amputation distorts it.
According to her, in her preface to Wretched of the earth of Frantz Fanon, Sartre would write this: “In the first phase of the revolt, it is necessary to kill: to kill a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to eliminate at the same time an oppressor and an oppressed: a dead man remains and a free man. This quote is truncated. Sartre writes that: “Because in the first phase of the revolt, it is necessary to kill: to kill a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to suppress at the same time an oppressor and an oppressed: there remain a dead man and a free; the survivor, for the first time, feels national soil under the soles of his feet. »
This is not insignificant. The amputated version of the sentence gives it the air of a proclamation, when it is only one element of a long reasoning to which it is linked by “Car”, a coordinating conjunction. The end of the sentence clarifies its meaning: Sartre exposes the inhumanity of colonialism and affirms that the violence of the colonized against the colonist, at the time of the revolt, restores him to his destiny.
No “racial intention in Sartre”
We can be shocked by this interpretation. But the philosopher does not call for or incite murder, and there is no racial intention in him: the European, in Daddy’s Algeria, was the citizen of an iniquitous system, including the Muslim, the ‘Algerian, was the subject.
In 1961, Frantz Fanon will die. This Martinican psychiatrist is committed to the independence of Algeria, and beyond that to the rebirth of colonized peoples, whose alienation and liberation he analyzes. Sick, he asked Sartre, whom Claude Lanzmann presented to him, for a preface for his latest book, so The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon will not see the posterity of his work. He will remain as an intellectual founder of Third Worldism. He will also have laid bare the racism that colonization nourishes even in the Faculty, where a psychiatric authority described the Muslim North African as “a primitive being whose essentially vegetative and instinctive life is above all regulated by his diencephalon”. We were French, that too. It is to this “we”, French then and perhaps today, that Sartre speaks in the preface he wrote for Fanon.
READ ALSO“Am I going to ask the white man of today to be responsible for the slave traders of the XVIIe century ? » ” […] we too, people of Europe, are being decolonized: this means that by a bloody operation we are extirpating the colonist who is in each of us. Let’s look at each other, if we have the courage […]. We must first face this unexpected spectacle: the striptease of our humanism. Here it is, quite naked, not beautiful: it was only a lying ideology, the exquisite justification of pillage; his tenderness and his preciousness endorsed our aggressions. »
Sartre’s text is accessible on the Web; you can also buy or download Fanon’s book. Sartre and Fanon join the Aimé Césaire of Discourse on Colonialismwho in 1950 wanted to “reveal to the very distinguished, very humanist, very Christian bourgeois of the XXe century that he [portait] in him a Hitler who is unaware of himself”, whom Hitler “had applied to Europe colonialist methods to which until now only the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the Negroes of Africa belonged”.
Sartre, Fanon and Césaire candidly describe our atrocious history. Sartre pushes it to its ultimate logic: the liberating violence of the colonized, which he understands and integrates, and tells us, Frenchmen of the time, that we brought it. From the point of view of the French dead, the reasoning is atrocious, and so far from Camus who looks more like us. But it is not the call to murder that is attributed to Sartre.
Death in any case did not wait for him.
When Sartre writes, it has been seven years since All Saints Day in 1954 that the FLN has been killing in its war of independence. A young 22-year-old Pied-noir, Laurent François, shot dead in front of a country gendarmerie while giving the alert, and a 23-year-old teacher, Guy Monnerot, killed in the attack on a bus, were among the first to be killed. a bloody litany. France has been killing, repressing, exploiting, torturing and degrading in Algeria for even longer. We know that. In 1961, France still ignores it, or pretends to ignore it. It is good to read a dated text, in the proper sense of the term, for what it says and was, without manipulating it to our contemporary illusions.
It is up to us, journalists, to refute this pathological vision and to postpone the apocalypse.
I wondered if Houellebecq disguised Sartre through negligence or trickery. I suspect a skill in this cultivated man, who resonates with the idea carried by the extreme and ultra-right that France would in turn be “colonized” by immigrants and their children, by conquering Islam – and then the ” Bataclan l’envers” would, from a Sartrean point of view, be a just insurrection. It is up to us, journalists, who scrutinize reality and weigh ideas, to refute this pathological vision and to postpone the apocalypse; in doing so, we will respect each other.