Jean-Luc Einaudi, pioneer and “moral hero”

It is history in history, that of a shadow researcher – not even endowed with an academic title – who succeeds, by dint of relentlessness, in exhuming from oblivion a killing that is unique in history. contemporary of France. We cannot say enough what the current knowledge – still incomplete – of October 17, 1961 owes to the Benedictine work of Jean-Luc Einaudi, to his indefatigable fight against the reason of State. Disappeared in 2014, the maverick historian, youth educator through post-68 Maoism, devoted nearly a quarter of a century to an unparalleled historical investigation from which he came out exhausted. Today, his career has earned him a tribute book by Fabrice Riceputi: Here we drowned the Algerians (The Stowaway, 288 pages, 18 euros).

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The pioneering work of Einaudi, The Battle of Paris (Seuil, 1991), is the great historiographical turning point around October 17. Its publication – followed byOctober 1961 (Fayard, 2001, reissue 2011) – breaks the blanket of silence on the scale of the raids punctuated with violence that the Gaullist authorities unleashed at the time against a peaceful demonstration by the National Liberation Front (FLN) in the heart of Paris. Einaudi puts forward the figure of at least “200 dead” when the official toll mentioned only three deaths. Beyond the statistical battle, it unfolds above all a chronicle as meticulous as chilling of a repression that went crescendo until October 17 with widespread recourse to drowning.

Witness of the Papon trial

Sign of the evolution of minds, the press and the public welcome him while his predecessor, Michel Levine, had aroused only indifference, in 1985, with his October ratonnades (Ramsay). In 1997, Einaudi once again made headlines in Bordeaux during the assize trial of Maurice Papon, former secretary general of the Gironde prefecture (1942-1944) implicated in the deportation of 1,500 Jews. Telescoping of history, the same Papon had supervised the 1961 repression in his capacity as the Prefect of Police then stationed in Paris. Einaudi’s testimony in Bordeaux, requested by the civil parties, is a kind of “Trial within trial”. It crosses the two memory resurgences around Vichy and Algeria.

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Papon bore him a stubborn grudge to the point of suing him for defamation following a column published on May 20, 1998 in The world. Einaudi’s article described as “Massacre” police action in 1961 acting “Under the orders of M. Papon”. The trial ended in 1999 with a double victory for Einaudi: not only was he released but the prosecution recognized the reality of the “Massacre”. During the hearings, the testimonies of two curators at the Archives of Paris, Brigitte Lainé and Philippe Grand, defying their hierarchy, lifted a corner of the veil on previously silent archives. They paid him bitterly with a long closet, auxiliaries in the shadow of the “Moral hero” (according to Mohammed Harbi) that was Einaudi.

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