Idealism Beyond Borders: The French Revolutionary Left and the Rise of Humanitarianism, 1954-1988 1107069580, 9781107069589

Table of contents :
Cover
Half title
Series
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I Idealism beyond borders
1 A revolution in aid: the creation of sans-frontiérisme
2 Aiding the revolution: influences on tiers-mondisme
Part II Violence and morality
3 The struggle for international justice: tiers-mondiste engagement on the outskirts of May
4 Complicity, conscience, and autocritique: reconfiguring attitudes to political violence
5 A rhetoric of responsibility: Vichy, the Holocaust, and suffering in the third world
Part III Ethics and polemics
6 Idealism beyond borders: the turn to sans-frontiériste spectacle
7 Controversy in a humanitarian age: attacks on tiers-mondisme in the 1980s
Conclusion
Notes
Index

Citation preview

Idealism beyond Borders

This is a major new account of how modern humanitarian action was shaped by transformations in the French intellectual and political landscape from the 1950s to the 1980s. Eleanor Davey reveals how radical left third-worldism was displaced by the ‘sans-frontiériste’ movement as the dominant way of approaching suffering in what was then called the third world. Third-worldism regarded these regions as the motor for international revolution, but revolutionary zeal disintegrated as a number of its regimes took on violent and dictatorial forms. Instead, the radical humanitarianism of the ‘sans-frontiériste’ movement pioneered by Médecins Sans Frontières emerged as an alternative model for international aid. Covering a period of major international upheavals and domestic change in France, Davey demonstrates the importance of memories of the Second World War in political activism and humanitarian action and underlines the powerful legacies of Cold War politics for international affairs since the fall of the Iron Curtain. Eleanor Davey is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in the History of Humanitarianism at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, University of Manchester.

Human Rights in History Edited by Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, University of California Berkeley Samuel Moyn, Harvard University This series showcases new scholarship exploring the backgrounds of human rights today. With an open-ended chronology and international perspective, the series seeks works attentive to the surprises and contingencies in the historical origins and legacies of human rights ideals and interventions. Books in the series will focus not only on the intellectual antecedents and foundations of human rights, but also on the incorporation of the concept by movements, nation-states, international governance, and transnational law.

Idealism beyond Borders The French Revolutionary Left and the Rise of Humanitarianism 1954–1988

ELEANOR DAVEY University of Manchester

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107069589  C Eleanor Davey 2015

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2015 Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library isbn 978-1-107-06958-9 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Bob and Alice, Joan and Alan

Naître juste après Vichy, tu sais, ça donne des envies d’épopée . . . Olivier Rolin, Tigre en papier, 2002

Contents

Acknowledgements

page viii

Introduction

1

part i idealism beyond borders 1 2

A revolution in aid: the creation of sans-frontiérisme Aiding the revolution: influences on tiers-mondisme

19 50

part ii violence and morality 3 4 5

The struggle for international justice: tiers-mondiste engagement on the outskirts of May Complicity, conscience, and autocritique: reconfiguring attitudes to political violence A rhetoric of responsibility: Vichy, the Holocaust, and suffering in the third world

81 112 144

part iii ethics and polemics 6 7

Idealism beyond borders: the turn to sans-frontiériste spectacle Controversy in a humanitarian age: attacks on tiers-mondisme in the 1980s Conclusion

Notes Index

181 215 248 257 327

vii

Acknowledgements

This research has been supported by a number of institutions over several years, including Queen Mary University of London, the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London, the University of Manchester, and the British Academy. I would also like to thank the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, for its hospitality during part of this research. I am grateful to MSF France for granting me access to their archives and specifically to Odile Hardy and Christine Pinto for their assistance. Thanks are also due to Laurence Binet, Rony Brauman, Claire Brière-Blanchet, and Michaël Neuman for their generosity in sharing their reflections; Rony and Michaël also took time to comment on some earlier incarnations of parts of what follows, from which I benefitted greatly. I am grateful to Virginie Alauzet for welcoming me into the resource room of the Croix-Rouge Française and to Isabelle Polisset-Whitehouse and Virginie Troit for their assistance. For his help with the translation of dozens of revolutionary and humanitarian phrases, I would like to thank JeanChristophe Plantin. For their contribution to the final stages of this book, many thanks to Samuel Moyn, Michael Watson, and the CUP reviewers and team. Earlier versions of some of this work also appeared in French Historical Studies and the European Review of History. To Julian Jackson, I am entirely indebted – for countless hours of reading, the almost equally numerous hours of discussion, and for the acuity and style of his contribution in both. In different ways, Alex Fairfax-Cholmeley has also been utterly irreplaceable. For support and advice during this project’s development as a PhD and its transformation since, I am grateful to Robert Horvath, Jeremy Jennings, Colin Jones, and Georgios Varouxakis. Through their own work and as much viii

Acknowledgements

ix

valued colleagues Peter Gatrell and Bertrand Taithe have challenged, advanced, and enriched my own reflection on these ideas and the process of getting them into shape. I have learned enormously from (and thoroughly enjoyed) discussions with Adriano Aymonino, Emily Baughan, Ludivine Broch, Roland Burke, Juliano Fiori, Arjan Hehenkamp, Stephen Hopgood, Daniel Lee, Alan Lester, Ed Naylor, Robert Priest, Rosa Salzberg, Andrew Smith, and Benjamin Thomas White. For offering patience, perspective, and fortification (as he would say), I will always be thankful to Pierre Fuller. Along the way I was privileged to have worked and debated with the wonderful people of ODI’s Humanitarian Policy Group and would particularly like to acknowledge for their inspiration and friendship Véronique Barbelet, Jennifer Benson, Tania Cheung, Samir Elhawary, Wendy Fenton, Matthew Foley, Clara Hawkshaw, Simone Haysom, Francesca Iannini, Ashley Jackson, Hanna Krebs, Simon Levine, Irina Mosel, Sara Pantuliano, Clare Price, Eva Svoboda, and David White. I would also like to warmly thank John Borton for many thoughtful and stimulating conversations about humanitarianism and its history. My work as a historian, my belief in academic practice, and my engagement both in the world of ideas and with ideas of the world have been influenced beyond measure and to my great benefit by Robert Horvath, Colin Nettelbeck, and Charles Sowerwine. I would also like to recognise the late David Philips, whose passion and precision inspired all who learned from him. Finally, for the various forms that their advice, encouragement, and forbearance took, I am deeply grateful to my friends and family. Special acknowledgement is due to my parents, Philip Davey and Deborah Trengove, and sister, Megan Davey, whose love and support throughout have been fundamental.

Introduction

In 1954, the year that Vietnamese fighters routed the French at Dien Bien Phu and the Front de Libération Nationale began its bloody campaign to free Algeria, a tiny bookshop called La Librairie de l’Escalier opened in the Latin Quarter of the French capital. Within a few years, this bookshop – in a new site and with a new name – had become the single most important source of material about liberation struggles and revolutionary politics around the world and a significant player in the anti-colonial movement within France. As La Joie de Lire, the bookshop became a meeting place for idealists and activists across the left spectrum. Discussion groups gathered there to debate the passage of events in what was then called the ‘third world’ and the theories of a newly influential set of third-world thinkers. Economics and political theory occupied shelves alongside poetry and literature; the stock burned or was reduced to pulp in attacks from right-wing militants and riot police. Anti-capitalist students loitered there for hours, leafing through the books, or simply stealing them, so that by the early 1980s despite its iconic status the business was going under.1 From a certain point of view (though not the personal), this did not matter. François Maspero, its owner, had never really considered his venture as a business. La Joie de Lire had been intended as ‘part library, part discussion space, part shop’ and it was: militants of multiple generations experienced it as a place for the meeting of minds and ideas, a site of refuge from the exactions of the authorities, a temple with an almost devotional function. The bookshop and the publishing house Maspero went on to set up in 1959 were emblematic of the embrace of the third world by militants in 1

2

Introduction

post-war France. They were instrumental in the spread of the awareness about and influence of third-world intellectuals, activists, and politicians. It was Maspero who brought the ideas of Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro to France, who published Jean-Paul Sartre’s call for violent uprising against colonial rule, and who helped document the French government’s use of torture in Algeria. Maspero conceived of his role as showing his readers that ‘in a given part of the world, people you do not know are fighting for their survival and it is not only in Paris, Washington or Moscow that important things are happening, that the future of the world is made’.2 In 1954, when Maspero’s idea began to take form, this message could not have been clearer. This period saw the surfacing of ‘tiers-mondiste’ movements, which had at their core the belief in the ‘third world’ as the motor for worldwide revolution.3 The concept of the third world itself was a product of this moment. As a political ideology in France, tiers-mondisme (thirdworldism) emerged at a time when most European Communist movements were either stagnating or discredited and the third world seemed to offer a renewed hope for the revolutionary project. The struggles for independence in Algeria and Vietnam, the Cuban Revolution of 1959, and the Cultural Revolution begun in China in 1966 stood in seeming opposition to events like the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 or the French government’s use of repression and torture in Algeria, with the acquiescence of the parliamentary left. Rejecting the capitalist model as exploitative and oppressive, adopting a utopian ideology, yet under the sway of charismatic leaders and thinkers, tiers-mondisme emerged as, in Robert Malley’s words, ‘the belief in the revolutionary aspirations of the ThirdWorld masses, in the inevitability of their fulfilment, and in the role of strong, centralised states in this undertaking’.4 Another cornerstone was anti-Americanism. The whole was captured by Sartre in the mid 1960s: Europeans . . . must pay attention to, show interest in, prove their solidarity with all the Vietnamese, the Cubans, the Africans, all the friends from the third world who are achieving life and liberty and who prove precisely each day that the greatest power in the world is incapable of imposing its laws, that it is the most vulnerable, and that the world has not chosen it as the centre of gravity.5

The fascination for third-world revolution manifested itself in theoretical, literary, and cultural forms and crossed multiple generations of French intellectual actors. Though the number of active members of tiers-mondiste groups was relatively low – the Maoist movement, for instance, had at its peak in 1971–2 approximately 7,000 militants across

Introduction

3

all tendencies – the influence of the ideology was diffuse and diverse and its generational impact significant.6 However, the fervour of revolutionary zeal faltered as it became more difficult to ignore the abuses of post-colonial third-world rulers. Concurrent with the tiers-mondiste phase of disillusionment emerged the radical humanitarianism of the ‘sans-frontiériste’ movement, which did not provide an answer to failed revolutionary hopes so much as another model for engagement with the third world and an original expression of humanitarianism. A French Red Cross mission during the Biafra–Nigeria War (1967–70) contributed to the genesis of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in 1971, giving the movement its name. The dominant model against which MSF eventually defined itself was that of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which emphasised the principles of neutrality and discretion. In contrast, the sans-frontiériste movement has been characterised by the practice of speaking out, known in French as ‘témoignage’ with its connotations of bearing witness. For Bernard Kouchner, one of the volunteers in Biafra and a prominent early spokesperson of the sans-frontiériste movement, the use of the media constituted a strategy of activism he dubbed the ‘loi du tapage’ (law of hype).7 The public presence of organisations of the sans-frontiériste model and their ‘florid expressions of humanitarian intent’ have thus been distinguished from the quieter style of British and other agencies.8 Sans-frontiérisme was not without precedent, nor was it entirely unique in its channelling of progressive hopes into humanitarian politics, but it did come to represent a new phase in the history of emergency aid. Far from being, as Paul Berman would have it, ‘one more ’68-style uprising against the hierarchies of command-and-obedience in a well-established institution’, the innovation in humanitarian practice initiated by French activists in the early 1970s profoundly altered the field of international aid.9 The impact of the sans-frontiériste model has been immense. MSF was the first organisation to specialise in the practice of emergency medical assistance during situations of crisis, such as conflict and natural disasters. In historian Bertrand Taithe’s words, ‘the concepts of urgences, humanitarian medical intervention, and ingérence all originated from the ideas of a handful of medical practitioners, yet they have contributed more than any other set of ideas to the reshaping of French diplomatic and international discourse over the past twenty years’.10 The ‘Without Borders’ ethos and epithet gained traction in France and abroad, influencing a generation of humanitarian organisations as well as other transnational organisations. Its privileging of the entitlement of affected populations to

4

Introduction

access relief over the principle of state sovereignty has also found international resonance. Yet the roots and early phases of this narrative remain inadequately contextualised and poorly linked to historiography of the period. This study demonstrates how and why the sans-frontiériste movement, before it refashioned international diplomacy, attracted the attention of many of France’s most prestigious intellectuals and influential publications. Unsympathetic readings like that of Kristin Ross have reduced those she called the ‘humanitarian “parachutists”’ to ‘ex-gauchistes concerned with distancing themselves from a militant past or with avoiding coming to terms with the disappointments of May’.11 Such views are predicated on the notion of backlash, not least because of the influence of disillusioned revolutionaries who by the mid 1980s were insisting that ‘we fought the wrong war’.12 Indeed, this is the dominant way that the relationship between third-worldism and radical humanitarianism has been cast. It is also the way that political and ideological activism and humanitarian action tend to be cast: as opposed forms of engagement, one partisan, and the other neutral; one about changing a ship’s course, the other simply about plugging its leaks. In this view, it was only when one ambition failed – when the revolutionary dreams finally sank – that the other, more modest and yet more practical, could emerge in its place. The attacks on tiers-mondisme in the 1980s, in which sans-frontiériste activists were amongst the most aggressive participants, undoubtedly lent credence to this view. They bear examining for a moment here, despite their more detailed coverage later in the book, because of their lingering influence on portrayals of the relationship between the two movements. The peak of these attacks came in February 1985 with the inaugural conference of the short-lived Fondation Liberté Sans Frontières (LSF), a think tank founded by the then leaders of MSF, Claude Malhuret and Rony Brauman. The theme of the conference was ‘Third Worldism in Question’, a topic that made space for a number of critiques of left-wing ideology and its supposed connection with development thinking in the aid world. At this time, Malhuret and Brauman were by their own admission on an anti-communist campaign that drew on their experiences amongst refugees fleeing communist regimes but was largely conducted through interventions back in France. The conference met with outrage and condemnation from those who didn’t share its organisers’ views, described at the time as a Reaganite ‘ideological war machine’, ‘suicidal’, a ‘moral and intellectual swindle’.

Introduction

5

Many publications of the second half of the 1980s, which might otherwise appear as historical studies of tiers-mondisme, or sans-frontiérisme, or both, are in fact part and parcel of these events. A case in point is the work of Claude Liauzu, the celebrated historian of colonialism. Liauzu’s work on tiers-mondisme began with an examination of its origins in interwar anti-colonialist movements. In 1987 he published a monograph on the rise, decline, and remnants of tiers-mondisme in which he endeavoured to provide an informed perspective on the vitriolic exchanges of the previous years. Liauzu insisted that the very notion of the third world was ‘a classification device produced by the West for non-Western realities’ and was at pains to explain that attacks on tiers-mondisme in the mid 1980s, were, like tiers-mondisme itself, rather more an expression of intellectual dynamics in France than of realities elsewhere. Yet his position was one of a participant in the polemics as well as a professional observer of them. Several other publications on tiers-mondisme in this period which might seek to present as historiography also fall foul of the convention against conflict of interest.13 Returning to these anti-tiers-mondiste debates allows a more nuanced reflection on their construction and significance. More recent scholarship has insisted upon the extent to which attacks on tiers-mondisme were in fact constitutive of the concept, with the term ‘tiers-mondiste’ (as distinct from the concept of the third world which informed it) gaining ground in the phase of its purported decline. What was described as tiers-mondisme from the second half of the 1970s onwards was until that point often allowed to exist in institutional and intellectual plurality: as Maoism, Castroism, support for Vietnam, publication in Le Monde Diplomatique, anti-colonialism, and so on.14 This thoughtful argument makes clear why the process by which revolutionary hopes declined is so complex to trace: because they were not one hope, but many, and there was not one tiersmondisme but many distinct albeit allied tiers-mondiste engagements. However, acknowledging this basic dynamic should not pose an obstacle to considering how the historical interactions and eventual convergence of these different threads have influenced ideas of the third world, even if this convergence appears mostly in hostile characterisations. Moreover, most of the movements within the tiers-mondiste constellation were as much about political imagination as they were about a concrete reality in the third world – a point that should not be obscured by recognition of their plurality. Finally, just as tiers-mondisme is not a monolith or a reality independent of its construction by commentators, sans-frontiérisme also offers more complexity than definitions might imply and is more

6

Introduction

dependent on a political imaginary than is often acknowledged. The concept of sans-frontiérisme is inseparable from, but not the same as, the practices that take place in its name. In sum, they may be invented categories, and not necessarily applicable at all points in the stories that follow, but we must work with these terms with their limitations acknowledged. A surge of scholarship on different facets of third-worldism and humanitarianism alike make a return to their respective and connected narratives timely. An influential account and required reading for the study of activist networks is Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman’s Génération, in which tiers-mondiste ideas are seen to inflect the militancy of much of the soixante-huitard cohort.15 Attention devoted to particular strands of militant activity has revealed the depth of conviction and commitment that tiers-mondiste ideologies inspired, with notable examples including Jeannine Verdès-Leroux’s work on French supporters of Fidel Castro and Christophe Bourseiller’s charting of the Maoist universe in France. Julian Bourg and Richard Wolin have brought this universe within sight of English-language readers, while other francophone works have addressed elements of Maoism that go beyond the focus of this study.16 None of them, however, have tackled the relationship with humanitarianism, which went to the heart of the 1980s debates. Conversely, studies of sans-frontiérisme have often tended towards hagiography in the manner of Olivier Weber’s study – a kind of humanitarian counterpart to Génération – or Anne Vallaeys’ detailed biography of MSF itself.17 Peter Redfield, Elsa Rambaud, Renée Fox, and Didier Fassin, amongst others, have brought the critical eye of anthropology and sociology to the organisation’s evolution.18 The historiography of humanitarianism in France and in general continues to have only limited interaction with that of other global ideologies. This book therefore describes two activist movements in France, tiersmondiste and sans-frontiériste, and the process by which one came to displace the other as the dominant way of approaching suffering in the third world. These concepts and their related variants are abstract and contested, but considering their evolution helps understand how the frameworks and narratives we apply in our interpretations are constitutive of reality. Activists in both modes were idealist and revolutionary in their approach to the question of the suffering of others. Both models of engagement drew inspiration from past resistance to oppression and struggled with the memory and legacy of political violence. Both had their utopian aspects and interpreted events through this lens. Nonetheless, the shift between them represented a profound transformation of ideological

Introduction

7

and intellectual paradigms in France and a crucial chapter in the rise to prominence of Western humanitarianism. If it seems incongruous that a history of humanitarianism should be so bound up in revolutionary aspirations, it should not. That it will feel so for many illustrates what Tony Judt called the ‘disconcertingly alien character of the past’ as viewed from the twenty-first century.19 The failure to see the past as connected to the present – not necessarily to identify with it, but to be aware of its legacy – has shaped many analyses of humanitarianism. An overemphasis on watershed moments such as the Al Qaeda attacks of 11 September 2001, or the collapse of the Soviet Union ten years earlier, has contributed to a sense of perpetual present and discouraged the search for links between recent humanitarian thinking and longer political and intellectual processes of change. Looking at the French case, this study argues that the sans-frontiériste model has been shaped more and more enduringly by its tiers-mondiste precursors than has generally been acknowledged or understood. Part legacy, part continued dialogue, the relationship between the two was synchronic as well as diachronic. Why should this matter? At the most basic level, given the influence of sans-frontiériste ideas in the current international humanitarian system, their context and evolution merit far greater attention in English literature. Progress has certainly been made since Tim Allen and David Styan remarked in 2000 that ‘it is quite extraordinary how little recognition there has been among English language analysts of the importance of French thinking in shaping the new humanitarian agenda’.20 Like the earlier analysis of David Rieff, Michael Barnett’s wide-ranging account of the history of humanitarianism acknowledged the importance of the ‘complicated currents’ that influenced the formation of MSF and the sansfrontiériste approach, and recent scholarship has begun to challenge the foundational myths of the movement, notably the representation of the Biafra–Nigeria War.21 However, the fact that MSF is now often seen as eschewing transformative politics in favour of emergency priorities (despite its push for change through initiatives like the Access Campaign) tends to work against a more complex understanding of their historical positions. In fact, as an organisation and as individuals, these doctors without borders – not all of them doctors, by the way – have debated the dilemmas of humanitarianism with reference to the organisation’s past, its experiences of the politics of aid, and its concepts of morality in politics.22 History in such debates is not an antiquarian interest but a living influence.

8

Introduction

There remains, in sum, a need to properly examine the different paradigms that have influenced the development of sans-frontieriste ideas, notably the related trajectory of revolutionary thinking and the importance of the memory of the Second World War. The latter’s role is one of the key motifs throughout the story that follows, for the memory of the 1940s – Holocaust, Occupation, and Resistance – was instrumental in motivating and inflecting the sense of responsibility for the suffering of others among sans-frontiéristes and tiers-mondistes alike. Memories of the Holocaust shaped responses to political violence in the post-war period in a number of countries and have been seen as integral to the eventual rise of human rights and humanitarianism.23 But the experience of Occupation, exemplified by the collaboration of the Vichy regime with the German occupiers, was also crucial to French understandings of responsibility to others. For radicals of the post-war period, inaction in the face of suffering and injustice, especially but not exclusively that caused by political violence, was cast as an act of collaboration – or more specifically a failing commensurate to collaboration. One of the results was the desire to create a different world, an internationalist mindset that drew upon longer French political traditions but also reflected a sense of outrage at the moral vacuum of the Occupation period. In another’s voice: ‘You know, to be born just after Vichy, that really creates a need for an epic . . . So, selling coffee and guns in Abyssynia, leading an army of camel drivers along the Red Sea, a squadron above the Tereul Sierra, an assault team in Havana, dying next to a Berlin canal – these were the confused horizons of our ambitions’.24 These horizons framed not only the desires of what came to be called tiers-mondisme but also the references of sansfrontiérisme. In Britain and North America, where the experience of the Second World War was different, the practice of humanitarianism has not been so explicitly linked to the memory of the war nor has this memory featured as heavily in historical accounts. Secondly, when thinking about why this history matters, we must remember that the intellectual history of Western humanitarianism – its conceptual context and development – has a bearing upon its practice in the present. Analysis of the international humanitarian system in the early twenty-first century has been dominated by considerations of contemporary geo-politics and such phenomena as the political and economic ascent of China, India, Brazil, and other players in the so-called global South, or the tense relationship between Islam and the West. Despite frequent mention of the critical juncture that these phenomena have wrought, the system remains unable to reflect upon itself as a product

Introduction

9

of the same twentieth-century forces that brought them about. In focusing on the geo-political import of the end of the Cold War, analyses of the humanitarian system often have little to say about the profound paradigm shift that took place during the Cold War, that is, the displacement of the ideological confrontation between left and right and the rise of the ideology of human rights. This habit is related to the dominance of Anglo-American accounts of humanitarianism – accounts written from the perspective of countries where the revolutionary tradition was weaker and radical politics more marginalised. It also speaks to the way the discourse of ethical politics has sought to present as universal and timeless, a tendency challenged by recent scholarship on the construction and evolution of human rights as an ideology rather than a norm.25 By treating sans-frontiériste humanitarianism as an intellectual phenomenon and tracing its relationship to tiers-mondiste forms, this study highlights its place in the collapse of the Marxist project and the associated model of Sartrean intellectual engagement. In the second half of the twentieth century, the left-wing revolutionary ambition – engendered by France’s Revolution in 1789, revitalised by the Paris Commune and the October Revolution, yet flagging due to the perceived inadequacies of the French proletariat and Communist Party – weakened as a succession of radical left-wing regimes fell into tyranny and repression. The 1970s were a crucial phase in the abandonment of the concept of revolution by left-wing thinkers, in part due to the publication of The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s magnum opus on the Soviet labour camp system, which fed into the rising emphasis on ethics in French politics after May 1968. Scholarship on this shift has offered a rich, complex, and at times contested account of the domestic and international influences involved and their impact on political and intellectual engagement in France.26 However, studies to date have neglected the prominent place of humanitarian ideas and practices after the dismantling of the revolutionary Marxist framework in France. Although Julian Bourg recognised the new form of humanitarianism as one of the most important facets of the ethical paradigm in French politics, his study did not take in its origins or development.27 Likewise, Sunil Khilnani highlighted the importance of anti-totalitarian nouvelle philosophie in the 1970s without exploring the convergence and cooperation between the nouveaux philosophes and the sans-frontiériste activists, who shared many concerns and causes.28 Robert Horvath, in contrast, has drawn attention to the way in which French anti-totalitarians contributed not only to the ascent of human

10

Introduction

rights but to ‘the radicalisation of modern humanitarianism’ and ‘the genesis of a new humanitarian agenda’.29 His primary focus, however, was upon the role played by Eastern European dissidents in the dismantling of the revolutionary privilege. Others whose primary interest has been in radical engagement, such as Kristin Ross and Paige Arthur, have viewed humanitarianism in a limited manner through the lens of the other’s decline.30 By elaborating the relationship between sans-frontiérisme and tiersmondisme, therefore, this study examines a previously under-represented component of the shift from revolutionary ideology to the advocacy of human rights and demonstrates how responses to the third world were central to the transformation of French intellectual and political engagement. It also underscores the importance of the memory of the Second World War within, and not simply alongside, this transformation: through an examination of the relationship between tiers-mondisme and sansfrontiérisme we can see how important this memory was to the rise of ethical paradigms and the ways in which an emerging collective memory of atrocities was internationalised by those who drew upon it for the purposes of new forms of resistance. The structure of the book is designed to provide an introduction to the two movements before examining the several confluent debates that indicate, together, the way in which the ideas of tiers-mondisme and sansfrontiérisme rose, fell, and interacted. What emerges is a sort of collective conversation about the nature of suffering, justice, and responsibility, crystallised around the question of the third world and its relationship with the West. Part I considers how these sets of ideas channelled a form of idealist internationalism and places their emergence against each other as well as within a broader historical backdrop. The first chapter discusses the emergence of the sans-frontiériste movement out of critiques of humanitarianism in the 1960s, notably Biafra and Bangladesh, and the central importance of témoignage. It explores the importance of memory as a trope in sans-frontiériste debates as well as the disputed nature of the memory of this period. Chapter 2 turns to the foundations of tiersmondisme, notably the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62). It elucidates two of the models for action that influenced the militant imaginary of this period: the Republican mobilisation for the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and anti-fascism during the Second World War. These chapters begin the process of showing how the memory of the Holocaust, in

Introduction

11

creative tension with other memories of the Second World War in France, provided an interpretive lens for contemporary politics. They demonstrate that, to take Samuel Moyn’s term, the paradigm of humanitarianism that emerged in 1970s France to respond to suffering shared its Holocaust tropes with certain radical political movements of the previous decades.31 The remaining chapters are arranged roughly chronologically. Part II shows how questions of violence and morality were transformed in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapter 3 addresses the way that the campaign for justice attracted the attention of tiers-mondistes in the late 1960s and early 1970s. An international group of intellectuals, dominated by the French contingent, established the International War Crimes Tribunal to examine whether the US was guilty of war crimes in Southeast Asia. Concurrently, another campaign with justice as its theme emerged in France when Régis Debray was imprisoned in Bolivia. French and foreign intellectuals mobilised on Debray’s behalf, defending both his revolutionary engagement and his right to the protection of law. The chapter compares this campaign with that on behalf of Heberto Padilla, a poet imprisoned in Cuba, which represented the beginning of the abandonment of Castro’s increasingly authoritarian regime by hitherto faithful fidéliste intellectuals. Chapters 4 and 5 chart the progress of the changes in attitudes to political violence during the 1970s. The fourth chapter documents the challenge to a perceived tiers-mondiste belief system that occurred across the 1970s: after the Padilla Affair and The Gulag Archipelago, a discourse of self-criticism emerged from the circles of militants coming to terms with a new perspective on their own engagement. Many of these repentant tiers-mondistes participated in a series of exchanges in 1978–9 around the inflammatory claim that ‘African socialism will only ever be totalitarian’, indicating the changing parameters of transnational engagement in this period. Chapter 5 explains why the progression of public debate about revolutionary violence and the third world must be understood in the context of the evolving collective memory of the Second World War. A crucial moment came with the Palestinian terrorist attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics, which prompted French Maoists to re-examine their own militant engagement. After this, the plight of refugees from Cambodia and Vietnam was framed by constant reference to the Holocaust memory. The chapter indicates the importance of this memory in responses to mass violence in the third world – responses which increasingly included humanitarian ideas and practices – and the growing prominence of humanitarian activists, speaking explicitly as humanitarians, in public debates.

12

Introduction

Part III indicates how ethics of humanitarianism, increasingly debated by participants as the sans-frontiériste movement grew, were shaped by a series of polemics around radical political ideology. Chapter 6 examines tensions between responses to the Iranian Revolution and two highprofile sans-frontiériste missions on behalf of people in Southeast Asia, as well as between the two missions themselves. It opens with the analysis of Michel Foucault’s support for the Iranian Revolution, which put him at odds with some of his allies in the humanitarian movement. Foucault’s political engagements, which constituted one of the defining features of the last decade of his life, showed that support for revolutionary movements could coexist with advocacy of sans-frontiériste action. The first of the humanitarian campaigns was the Bateau pour le Vietnam in 1978–9, headed by Kouchner when he was still the dominant figure at MSF. Following fierce arguments within MSF at the time of this campaign, Kouchner was forced out of the organisation and went on to found Médecins du Monde (MDM). The second initiative was the Marche pour la Survie du Cambodge in 1980, staged by Kouchner’s successors at MSF in an attempt to gain access to Cambodian territory. This march has not received the same amount of scholarly attention as the Bateau pour le Vietnam but it was one of the first of its kind, a publicity stunt with a sansfrontiériste goal, staged out in the field rather than on the streets of the French capital. The final chapter examines the fortune and effect of tiersmondisme after the rise in importance of humanitarianism. It returns to the hostile exchanges around LSF, showing how they converged with the mobilisation for Ethiopia in the mid 1980s. Ethiopia became the greatest humanitarian campaign of its era and a period of international isolation for MSF because of its outspoken criticism of the Ethiopian government. It was also a time of major internal difficulties for the newly international MSF movement and a key moment for debates about the responsibilities aid can carry inside a system of human rights abuses. This crisis, the final major episode featured in the book, engendered new reflection on the nature of humanitarianism and marked the entry into maturity of the sans-frontiériste movement. In establishing the boundaries of the study, given the scale of the question at its heart, exclusions and omissions have been inevitable. It is clear that a project of this nature, situated in a past so recent, could have proceeded by the use of interviews with participants. Instead, because my objective was to take stock of the evolution of ideas as expressed collectively and as part of an evolving debate, I have eschewed the kind of élite oral history that this approach would entail. It must be remembered

Introduction

13

that, while activists of all stripes may have constituted small and at times isolated groups, their ambition was in no way inward-looking or insular. The public debate, therefore, rather than the private memory, has been the focus of my research. Nonetheless, some interview materials and the consultation of published interviews, autobiographies, and memoirs acknowledge the need to consider the motivations of engagement and the meaning with which it was endowed for individuals. I have generally preferred conceptual relevance over fidelity to an individual trajectory. That is to say, when someone has been a noteworthy participant in debates about the third world at a certain moment and, for whatever reason, absent from this particular stage before or afterwards, the spotlight will remain with the debates rather than the individual. A case in point is Robert Linhart: the talented and conspicuous leader of the Maoist group Union des Jeunesses Communistes (marxisteléniniste) (UJC(ml)) prior to 1968, Linhart suffered a breakdown in that year and participated in remarkably little public debate from then on.32 Furthermore, potential narratives expanding out of the intellectual universes of tiers-mondisme and sans-frontiérisme have had to be minimised or sidestepped. For those considered tiers-mondistes, this has meant concentrating on those groups whose numbers and public profiles were greatest. For the sans-frontiéristes likewise, this has meant concentrating on the leaders of the most prominent organisations, and above all Médecins Sans Frontières. This organisation, described by aid commentator David Rieff as ‘the conscience of the humanitarian world’ and its most important nongovernmental organisation (NGO) and by Miriam Ticktin as ‘nearly synonymous with humanitarianism in the contemporary world’, is without doubt the single most influential incarnation of the sans-frontieriste movement.33 Its leaders have consistently been at the forefront of humanitarian debates in France as well as internationally. Operationally, too, its position is dominant: while in 2010 only 5 per cent of international NGOs within the humanitarian system were French in origin, the MSF movement (as its different sections are collectively known) was amongst the top five organisations worldwide in terms of budget and reach.34 Other organisations, such as MDM and Action Internationale Contre la Faim (AICF, now known as Action Contre la Faim), were of course also significant players in the development of sans-frontiérisme and feature prominently at various moments in this book. However, in history as in today’s practice, they remain less powerful than MSF and less likely to be identified as the quintessential ‘French’ organisation. In general, therefore, they and

14

Introduction

other organisations such as Aide Médicale Internationale (AMI), Secours Populaire Français (SPF) or the French chapter of Amnesty International, for example, as well as the other national sections of MSF itself, have received intermittent attention as dictated by the movement of debates. A few further explanations are needed regarding what follows. Multiple actors in the constellation of groups that concerned themselves with conditions in the third world have been given only limited space. The place of Catholic engagement in the tiers-mondiste and sans-frontiériste movements has received only partial treatment. Although focused more on development than the emergency medicine of MSF and the sansfrontiériste movement proper, organisations like the Comité Catholique Contre la Faim et pour le Développement (CCFD, now known as CCFDTerre Solidaire) represent a fascinating point of overlap between thirdworldist and humanitarian activism, and much remains to be said about the contribution of the French Catholic left to debates about the third world.35 Gauchiste groups that were not broadly understood as tiersmondiste, even if they advocated revolution in the third world and contributed to some of the third-worldist campaigns, have by and large not been included. The most important of these were the French Trotskyists of the Fourth International, for whom support for ‘the emancipatory struggle of the colonial peoples against imperialism, even when this struggle is directed by nationalist and bourgeois-democratic elements’, as in the Algerian case, was an official position.36 I have also given limited attention to Communist satellite organisations or publications, in keeping with the antagonism between the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) and the far left in this period.37 Another major exclusion from the core study of this project is the events that come under the banner of May ’68. The student revolt of May, which amplified into June and attracted millions of workers to strikes and protests, was one of the most significant events of the second half of the twentieth century in France. Disputes over the causes and implications of 1968 have been vivid ever since. The problem is, as Julian Jackson noted, emphatically one of an ‘excess’ of interpretations rather than an insufficiency of them.38 The vast territory covered by Philippe Artières and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel’s collection on 1968 indicated the multiplicity of elements that informed and were affected by the contestatory movements. So it is no surprise that, in the immediate aftermath of the crisis, the radicals at Partisans celebrated the eruption of a revolution they had no longer expected in France, nor that the medical journalists at Tonus – who would before too long sign the founding charter of MSF – asked

Introduction

15

what implications it would have for the medical profession.39 However, it is not the intention of this study to situate its analysis by the compass of ’68. Of course, no history of radical left-wing engagement in France could ignore the May–June events. The crucial role played by tiers-mondiste ideas has already been roundly emphasised, by Ross amongst others. Nonetheless, I have chosen to set these events at the periphery of my narrative rather than at its centre; I am in no way seeking, as Philippe Ryfman has already, to answer the question of whether sans-frontiérisme was a product of May.40 Quite the opposite: in declining to emphasise May ’68, this book echoes the experience of many key tiers-mondiste and sans-frontiériste actors, who were either absent from France during the upheavals or considered them a distraction from the epochal events in the third world. Debray was already imprisoned in Bolivia for his revolutionary activities. Maspero, the tiers-mondiste publisher, was in Havana when the protests began. Foucault was in Tunisia and far more affected by the uprisings there in March than those in France in May. Guerrilla volunteer Pierre Goldman, whilst present in Paris, was dismayed by what he considered the ‘ludic and masturbatory forms’ of the students’ campaign: ‘the unhealthy tide of a hysterical symptom’.41 (Debray agreed with him.) Goldman quit France before the dust had settled on the barricades, heading for Venezuela; so too did Kouchner, who had engaged as a Red Cross volunteer in Nigeria. Neither of them saw May as a revolution. The Maoists of the UJC(ml), some of whom would go on to become leaders of the post-May far left, intentionally avoided taking part because of their ideological reading of the path to revolution. Nouveau philosophe Bernard-Henri Lévy, like many of the Ulmard Maoists, neither participated in events nor saw them as particularly momentous. One significant exception to this trend was Alain Geismar, a leader of the Mouvement du 22 mars at Nanterre, who was central to several tiers-mondiste and certain sans-frontiériste campaigns in the 1970s. Sartre, too, enthusiastically embraced the student protests despite his declarations about the paramount importance of events in the third world. This book speaks of ideas and causes. They are abstract, constructed. Because of this focus, it has neglected the voices of the literally millions of people who experienced discrimination, injustice, and violence in the events that the book, indirectly, narrates. Although ideas and causes respond to this suffering, they filter and distort it. They are no substitute for the words and lives of individuals. In acknowledgement of this fact,

16

Introduction

some scholarship on humanitarianism (and indeed much humanitarian advocacy, albeit with additional motives) draws attention to individual stories to restore a human scale to the narrative. We know, this seems to say, that to approach these events analytically is to add somehow to their cruelty. At risk of failing to recognise the lesser evil, I have not done so. I am unsure how I would go about it, and I do not want to find myself picking an illustrative life-and-death story in the same way I note a good quote. By the same token, the book does not dwell on the personal lives of the individuals it discusses. I was once advised, more or less in passing, to seek out the ‘blood on the carpet’ in my study. By this was meant the personal stories: the loves, hopes, disappointments, friendships, and fallings-out that accompany and often help to drive the evolution of activist engagement. It is certainly beneficial to acknowledge that the focus on ideas excludes some of these personal factors and risks overstating the intellectual aspect of engagement. Buying books (or stealing them), as we all know, does not necessarily mean reading them. However, the lives of militants and aid workers are only evoked in this book, not thoroughly explored. I find there is enough blood in the events that prompted their engagement already – even if it is abstractly conveyed. Finally, though this may well be a redundant caution, there is of course far more to Médecins Sans Frontières than the version of its origins presented here and I would encourage readers to embrace the different insights offered by studies of and by MSF using a range of methodologies. It is with the utmost respect for the daily endeavours of humanitarian work that I have written this account. The history of ideas may appear to be at the limits of utility for this work and the difficulties that its practitioners encounter. Nonetheless, in tracing some of the debates that have shaped the development of modern humanitarianism I hope to have made some contribution to our understanding of the form it takes today and what it might bring to the challenges of tomorrow.

part i IDEALISM BEYOND BORDERS

1 A revolution in aid The creation of sans-frontiérisme

Any search for historical studies of humanitarianism in different forms must cast a wide net. It will take in studies of war, famine, natural disasters, and mass violence, of displacement due to those and other causes, of disease and public health, of poverty. It might include civil disasters, industrial accidents, and individual persecution. It will encompass a range of activities, from ‘stuff in trucks’ – food, blankets, soap – being offered to those in need, to emergency medicine and public health, hygiene and sanitation, nutrition, temporary shelter (which might be used for decades), camp management, education in emergencies, livelihoods and psychosocial support, legal assistance, communications services, efforts to limit the impact of violence, reconstruction, rehabilitation, caring, giving, learning, lobbying, campaigning, denouncing, and toiling at times without respite and without recognition. Those doing the work may be operating in any number of fields or disciplines, come from anywhere on the globe (humanitarianism is not a Western phenomenon), be acting under the auspices of a wide range of organisations whose motives may or may not reflect their own, and may be paid, unpaid, or paid tax-free. All this, of course, says little about the individual lives and choices of those ‘distant strangers’ that humanitarianism is supposed to be about. Capturing their experiences historically presents a set of challenges of its own. Until recently, the history of humanitarianism as an academic field had a very modest profile. It covered a wide ground and relevant studies were not necessarily identified as treating ‘humanitarianism’ (understandable, given how usage of that term has changed as its circulation increased). Recently, in step with although perhaps slightly behind the curve of human rights history, relief and development work has been subject 19

20

Idealism beyond borders

to more sustained and critical historical investigation. While full-length studies remain relatively few, our picture of past humanitarian endeavours is growing in detail and scope. This work is also finding audiences amongst analysts and practitioners whose desire to improve action in the present has led to an engagement with historical views. However – as in many domains of memory – mythologies, received or partial truths, and simplifications retain a powerful influence over perceptions of the past. The founding mythology of sans-frontiérisme is an illustrative example. Every account of the movement or its leading organisation includes some version of this story. Dan Bortolotti summarised it neatly and knowingly: a group of young French doctors goes to work in a Red Cross hospital in the breakaway Nigerian state of Biafra in 1968. They are appalled by what they see – hundreds of thousands of children dying from malnutrition – and believe they are witnesses to a genocide. Although the Red Cross requires the utmost discretion from its volunteers, the French doctors, led by the charismatic Bernard Kouchner, cannot remain silent. They angrily tear their Red Cross armbands from their sleeves and denounce the Nigerian government. On returning to France, they organize a committee to raise awareness of the genocide and, later, a group of doctors devoted to emergency medical aid. Around the same time, a Paris medical journal publishes a call for volunteer doctors to help the victims of earthquakes and floods. The two groups eventually come together in 1971 to form Médecins Sans Frontières.1

Like others, Bortolotti sought to nuance this account by adding in contextual detail, emphasising the confusion and compromises of the early years, highlighting the gap between the romantic account and the reality. Thinking of the myth as inaccurate is less useful than considering why it has been so tenacious. Of course, as an organisation with a social mission and a committed membership, MSF projects a strong identity and an origins narrative is part of this. Memory has a double function, reaching back into time and projecting forwards, so the founding myth both reflects and sustains the romantic and rebellious image of MSF. Individuals associated with MSF or with sans-frontiérisme more broadly have worked hard at times to purify and amplify this narrative. It serves a purpose – perhaps a worthy one. But beyond this purpose, it is able to endure because it rests upon two misconceptions about the history of which it is part. Firstly, it is often assumed and sometimes explicitly claimed that the idea of MSF can be traced to one precise moment in time. The wish to see the ‘birth’ of MSF as a result of experiences in Biafra encapsulates this view.2 Secondly, the humanitarian status quo that sans-frontiériste

A revolution in aid

21

thinking would challenge is often taken as more stable and complete than was really the case. The ICRC model was not a straw man, but it was certainly not ironclad either. It is useful to remember that what came before sans-frontiérisme was, like the process of the latter’s articulation, more complex and contingent than it is often portrayed. Situations of conflict have undoubtedly dominated sans-frontiériste operations but the accent on urgences in times of war has always been tempered by other forms of action. Natural disasters have been considered part of MSF’s mandate since its first charter, and there were two brief missions responding to earthquakes in the early years of the sansfrontiériste movement (in Peru in 1970 and Nicaragua in 1972). Within only a few years of its creation, MSF publicised its intention to address the health needs of impoverished populations.3 As Redfield has shown, over time the organisation has sought to accommodate a conception of ‘crisis’ incorporating longer-term operations in situations of chronic suffering, ill-health, or deprivation.4 Notwithstanding these qualifications, MSF has retained an association with emergency missions in conflict settings in both its historical mythology and public perception. The emphasis on situations of conflict contributed to the significant overlap between sites of interest to tiers-mondistes and the new generation of humanitarians, as did the lingering political radicalism of large parts of the sans-frontiériste movement. Beyond the story of MSF’s origins, the Biafra–Nigeria War remains fraught terrain for history and memory alike. Alex de Waal called the war a ‘formative experience in contemporary humanitarianism’ that retained ‘the totemic status of a heroic lost cause, even a heroic debacle’.5 Even as scholarship on the war advances, attempts to draw ‘lessons’ from its experiences have been problematic, and memories and interpretations of the war remain highly contentious. Yet ‘Biafra’ remains a touchstone reference of modern humanitarianism, one of few past mobilisations that are routinely invoked when discussions turn to history. It is often used as a turning point in the development of modern humanitarianism, particularly by French authors. Its place in the founding myth of MSF has an important role in this prominence. But experiences in Biafra had a lasting impact on others who took part in the campaign and on many facets of humanitarian action. The mobilisation for Biafra also led to the founding of Irish NGO Africa Concern (now known as Concern Worldwide), validated the role of NGOs and faith-based organisations in large-scale relief, and profoundly challenged the structures and practices of the ICRC amongst others.6

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Idealism beyond borders

This chapter reflects on how the sans-frontiériste movement emerged as a revolutionary contribution to the history of humanitarianism. The first section sketches an outline of humanitarian history, conceived in terms of evolving responses to the suffering of others. The second section explores the founding moments of sans-frontiérisme, including the Biafra–Nigeria War and the East Pakistan/Bangladesh crisis. It discusses the stakes of relief operations in Nigeria and the French contributions and contemporary debates about Biafra and the East Pakistan crisis. The third section examines the way that Biafra has figured in writing on sans-frontiérisme by members of the movement as well as scholars. It focuses in particular on the themes of genocide and témoignage and draws attention to the role of memory in shaping the image of this period in MSF’s history.

the suffering of others How you interpret the history of humanitarianism depends, of course, on what you take humanitarianism to be. The word itself has changed in meaning over time; different groups – those in the humanitarian sector, academic researchers, or the general public, for instance – use it in different ways, and often the implicit undertones are as important as the explicit meaning. In the humanitarian sector, humanitarian action is conceived of narrowly. Since the 1990s, the international aid field has tended to understand humanitarianism as assistance provided during emergencies, governed by the principles of humanity, impartiality, neutrality, and independence. These attributes were affirmed by UN General Assembly Resolution 46/182 (passed on 19 December 1991), which established key international aid architecture. It was around this time that many operational agencies turned their ‘emergency’ teams into ‘humanitarian’ departments.7 These parameters distinguish humanitarianism from related sectors of practice such as welfare and social reform, development work, and peace-building. Some would question whether state-sponsored activities can constitute humanitarian action, or whether civil emergency response within state borders (as opposed to across them) should qualify. The tendency to refer to ‘charity’ at home but ‘humanitarianism’ abroad reflects this attitude. Historical accounts, however, have argued for a different understanding. Craig Calhoun asserted: ‘Humanitarianism took root in the modern world not as a response to war or “emergencies” but as part of an effort to remake the world so that it best served the interests of humanity’.8 This is best understood not as a claim about what kind of humanitarianism

A revolution in aid

23

got there first – short-term relief or long-term change – but as a way of articulating the inclusion of different types of care under the umbrella of acting for humanity. Responses to war were amongst these efforts to look out for humanity, not distinct from them. Facing the same question, Michael Barnett proposed the concepts of ‘emergency’ and ‘alchemical’ humanitarianism. The former described relief for those facing immediate threats, rejecting political activism and adhering as much as possible to the principles of neutrality, impartiality, and independence. The latter, by way of analogy with the transformative ambitions of alchemists, placed less emphasis on principles and more on incorporating political processes, seeking to address the root causes of suffering as a way of saving those at risk.9 Indeed, early histories of ‘humanitarianism’ included reformist and even revolutionary movements in the list of relevant achievements. One published in 1906 cited the French Revolution and ‘the fall of Japanese feudalism’, as well as calls for better conditions for workers and the poor, educational advance, prison and penal reform, the temperance movement, charity organisations, the formation of local and national trade unions, and cooperatives.10 Another published in 1915 included the abolition of slavery, animal welfare, and legislation to improve the conditions of the working class and reduce poverty.11 The narrative of humanitarian history that has dominated to date takes us from the abolitionist movement to the founding of the International Committee of the Red Cross (1863) in reaction to trauma on the European battlefield.12 Acknowledging the debt to colonialism, it notes attempts to alleviate suffering during the First and Second World Wars (1914–18 and 1939–45), the impact of decolonisation afterwards, and discusses the significance of Russia (1920s), Spain (1930s), Biafra (1960s), Bangladesh (1970s), Ethiopia (1980s), and Somalia, Rwanda, Yugoslavia (all in the 1990s). If it ventures a little further, the story may include events like the response to and aftermath of Partition (1947) or the rise in Islamic relief of various kinds after the 1973 oil crisis, phenomena which had major implications for global humanitarianism but are regularly left out of the historical narrative of humanitarianism.13 It features organisations such as the Save the Children Fund (SCF, founded in 1919), CARE (1945), World Vision (1951), Concern Worldwide (1971), the United Nations agencies (1940s and 1950s), and their predecessors in the League of Nations era (1920s and 1930s). This story allows us to perceive the coalescing of an international system in the interwar period and the emergence of development thinking in the post-war decades; it highlights how aid navigated the ideological divisions of the Cold War and the

24

Idealism beyond borders

anxiety of humanitarians since September 11. It facilitates recognition of strands of action, like natural disaster response or refugee protection or emergency nutrition. Nonetheless, linearity can be misleading. As all authors acknowledge, many different humanitarianisms have always coexisted – so describing their evolution in a teleological way can underplay past complexity even as it overstates current consensus. This is true both of the broader narrative (or narratives) and of the experience of individual players within it. The culture of debate in MSF is famous, but it is not the only humanitarian organisation to host arguments over what action is appropriate, where assistance is most needed, what form it should take, or when it can be withdrawn. These arguments take place because today’s organisations are not the inheritors of one strand of the humanitarian narrative, but of multiple moments in that history. And not just collectively, but individually: each organisation, no matter the conditions of its founding, bears the influence of multiple conceptions of humanitarianism. No matter its target or timeframe, humanitarian action is a profoundly political act – a gesture that may not necessarily have its first move in politics, but which because of its selective interventions in situations of inequality, suffering, and abuse, cannot be anything but political. If humanitarianism has been political, so too has its history. All histories, this one included, have their biases and blind spots. Those in the denunciatory tradition – the practitioners of ‘pointless iconoclasm’ as I once heard it called – are arguably not much more lucid than the hagiographers and eulogisers. Both approaches make up with vigour what they lack in complexity. Most, however, are somewhere in between. The historiography of humanitarianism is a rapidly proliferating field. There are as yet few general scholarly histories of humanitarianism – Barnett’s Empire of Humanity (2011) is certainly the best known and arguably most ambitious of the handful of candidates, which also include Philippe Ryfman’s Une histoire de l’humanitaire (2008), the influential although superseded Anatomy of Disaster Relief by Randolph Kent (1987), and various shorter contributions. Large-scale accounts of particular aspects of humanitarianism are more common, including work on colonial systems, laws of war, food aid, displacement, emergency medicine, and military intervention. Some (a small but growing number), will appeal to readers interested in moving beyond a Western focus or framework. Another distinct field of scholarship explores the histories of specific organisations, including religious groups and faith-based

A revolution in aid

25

organisations, international agencies, NGOs, and members of the Red Cross/Red Crescent Movement. The latter, and above all the ICRC, has gradually come to occupy the ‘master narrative’ of humanitarian action.14 ‘Gradually’, because this dominance could not have been assumed from its early years. The first conflict to which the Geneva Convention applied, where the ICRC was active, and in which both sides had Red Cross societies, was despite their best efforts a mess of violations and manipulations.15 Carlton’s 1906 history of humanitarianism did not even mention Red Cross actions in wartime and on the eve of the First World War the ICRC still considered itself an actor with a primarily moral influence.16 Its capacity grew enormously during the First World War and again, notwithstanding subsequent criticisms of its silence at Nazi abuses, during the Second World War. It has faced territorial challenges since the interwar period from the League of Red Cross Societies (now called the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, IFRC) and in the post-war period from NGOs. Amongst the drivers of early humanitarian initiatives, including the founding of the ICRC, were new communication and transport technologies. The telegraph, railroads, and popular press brought information into metropolitan lives as never before. Information about atrocities against civilians or accounts of soldiers’ suffering on the front lines travelled faster and were no longer controlled by official sources. New audiences arose: newspaper circulation in Britain, for instance, went in little more than fifteen years from a total of 100,000 daily readers across all papers, to 150,000 readers for the Daily News alone.17 This had profound implications for contracts of responsibility of various kinds; new engagements arose as certain situations came to be perceived as changeable and therefore their continuation intolerable.18 States could no longer rely on the public’s ignorance nor could citizenry claim it as their defence. Yet in few humanitarian initiatives of any kind has the ‘suffering stranger’ been truly, entirely strange. At times the affective bridge has been provided by intermediaries: east-coast US cities sent several shipments of relief to famine-stricken Cape Verde in the 1830s after American sailors who had spent years trading with the islands brought back news of their devastation.19 The connection may take the form of ideological solidarity, seen in the long tradition of left-wing humanitarianism, including the Soviet-sponsored International Red Aid network and relief provided to the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War, with an ongoing legacy in organisations like Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA).

26

Idealism beyond borders

Religion has influenced not only the impulse to take action but also the way that communities affected by crises have been identified as in need of or eligible for assistance; missionary orders cared for others on the basis of explicit or implicit proselytism, and many faith-based organisations were founded to respond to the needs of a specific religious community (Lutheran, Catholic, Jewish, Islamic) before extending their hand to other groups. No matter how responsibility for suffering has been conceived or what form the reaction has taken, the image of the beneficiaries has always been mediated in one way or another. In this light, knowledge of the plight of others appears as a necessary but not sufficient condition for the decision to act on their behalf. Compassion in its organised forms, as Keith David Watenpaugh has argued, is a factor of narratives of empathy, channels of proximity, and how well the political and moral needs of those offering assistance correspond to those who might be calling for their help. In the case of famines that struck Middle Eastern cities in the early years of the First World War, it meant that Jerusalem and Beirut received assistance from US organisations, while Baghdad did not. Watenpaugh’s account of this episode highlights that factors beyond the practical (access, security) determine which groups are ‘transformed into objects of humanitarianism’.20 The representations that make this transformation possible reflect the historical and cultural referents of their audience as much as, if not more than, the reality they are claimed to convey.21 They have their own emotional and practical implications. In today’s fundraising, private donations to natural disasters appeals are typically much higher than those for conflicts.22 People can be imagined out of the sphere of action as much as they can be imagined into it. The imagination that helps to drive humanitarian action is also inwards facing: it conveys an image of the self as well as an image of the other. It can also accommodate what might appear to be contradictory influences. In the case of sans-frontiérisme, the set of references had a dual nature, both specifically French and broadly internationalist. ‘Action – Devotion – Medicine’ were the three elements that Xavier Emmanuelli, first-generation member of MSF and one of its former presidents, identified as inspiration for sans-frontiéristes. Each of these elements had its own symbols and stars: ‘for action, the reference is Tarzan, Cyrano and Rambo, a zest of Albert Londres, an evocation of Tintin. Devotion, Mother Theresa, Abbé Pierre, and the inescapable Henri Dunant. For medicine indisputably Schweitzer, against a background of Africa, hospital, solitude, Nobel Prize’.23 The models and precedents that nourished

A revolution in aid

27

the sans-frontiériste vision could thus be romantic and literary, colonial, humanist, medical, or charitable. Many of the acknowledged antecedents of sans-frontiérisme were individuals perceived to have introduced an element of innovation or revolution into seemingly intractable situations, creating new concepts or ways of acting.24 In some cases, the emulation was active; in others – and most notably as regarded the Red Cross – the inspiration drawn from predecessors was offset by a conscious repudiation of their methods. Emmanuelli’s list is a reminder that tiers-mondiste politics is by no means the only historical antecedent that can shed light on sansfrontiériste engagement with the third world. Missionary and colonial doctors have also loomed large in the French humanitarian imaginary, a point already underlined by Redfield.25 Rony Brauman, for example, evoked the tropes of colonialism that unconsciously permeated his earliest engagement: ‘the good white doctor, the benefits of science, the modernising ideal’.26 Another key figure comparable to Albert Schweitzer was Eugène Jamot, a military doctor who pioneered the use of mobile teams of doctors to treat sleeping sickness. Their precedents once again became topical when, from the mid 1970s onwards, the combined effect of chronic under-resourcing and the resurgence of conflict saw diseases such as sleeping sickness return to the forefront of public health concerns.27 Conversely, the sans-frontiériste movement is not the only incarnation of humanitarianism to bear the influence of political engagement. For instance, left-wing beliefs played a role in the early days of British NGO Save the Children, founded in 1919. SCF’s ‘apolitical’ rhetoric was a conscious tactic: children were presented as outside of politics, as ‘extra-national figures’, and the involvement of key SCF members in British left-wing circles and radical internationalism were downplayed.28 At Oxfam, founded in 1942 in the name of famine relief, political differences drove tensions over different conceptions of the role of aid. In the early 1960s, for instance, advocates of lobbying against inequality declared that ‘The war against hunger is, after all, a political war. It must be fought on that level’.29 The move into more explicitly political terrain, however, crystallised tensions between radicals and conservatives within Oxfam and brought increased external scrutiny. In his study of Amnesty International, Stephen Hopgood described its historical pathways, contemporary character, and most influential ‘keepers of the flame’ as often influenced by the politics of the left, as well as by internationalist values and in some cases religion. Amnesty’s apolitical ethos demanded that this common left-wing orientation be subsumed into even-handed

28

Idealism beyond borders

campaigning on behalf of prisoners of conscience.30 Historians of the ICRC even pointed to elements of its appearance, back in the 1860s, that dovetailed with that of the International Workingmen’s Association: ‘different aspects of the same social phenomenon gave rise to the movements of indignation and pity from which they both stemmed’. But their comparable valuing of individual lives, mobilisation of ‘ordinary’ citizens, and international architecture were similarities that only went so far, and the Committee took steps to ensure it would not be confused with the International.31 To different degrees, humanitarian engagements outside of sans-frontiérisme also channelled aspects of radical ideology and transformative ambitions.

nigeria, pakistan, and nascent sans-frontiérisme ‘Eight witnesses of the last battle of the Biafran people, that is all that Europe, which is responsible for this war, which nourished it with silence and weaponry, could contribute to the final act’.32 As this outraged cry suggested, the lack of effective support for the Biafran independence movement was a source of anger and anguish for activists, predominantly doctors and journalists, who had been exposed first-hand to the suffering. Similarly, the crisis in Pakistan, which began as the Nigerian conflict was ending, troubled Cold War alignments and intensified criticisms of humanitarian action by the very people involved in its practice. The Republic of Biafra, corresponding roughly to a state of the same name in eastern Nigeria, proclaimed its independence on 30 May 1967. In the immediately preceding years, the promise of Nigeria’s independence in 1960 had given way to a series of coups reflecting regional power struggles and a string of violent attacks on Igbos living in northern Nigeria. From July 1967 when the Federal Military Government (FMG) engaged the Biafran secessionists until 12 January 1970 when the latter officially surrendered, the conflict continued at a variable intensity although always at high human cost. Estimates of the number of deaths during the conflict range from one to three million.33 After a slow start, coverage of the conflict in the international press and television media alternated between more classic war reporting and a concentration on its human costs and the humanitarian mobilisation.34 With the secessionist region blockaded overland and at sea by mid 1968, the advent of famine in Biafra – with its associated, archetypal images of starving children – made possible the conflict’s transformation into a major humanitarian cause.

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Biafra was at its time the largest relief operation ever attempted and the Uli airstrip was for a short while the busiest in Africa.35 The Biafran leadership under Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu refused food relief brought overland through Federalist territory on the grounds it could be tampered with, justifying this position by Lagos’ supposed ambition to wipe out the Igbos and claiming to have evidence of the use of poison.36 Within a year, the ICRC was feeding approximately 1.2 million people in feeding centres, as well as 800,000 people in refugee camps, and a further 20,000 were in hospital care; a large proportion of the recipients of aid were children.37 Like other cases since in which a humanitarian campaign has appeared to fill the vacuum of a political solution to conflict, the mobilisation was profoundly ambiguous. Nearly twenty years after he first called the relief effort in Biafra ‘an act of unfortunate and profound folly’ that contributed to the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, the aid worker and analyst Ian Smillie reiterated that it ‘prolonged the war for eighteen months’ and ‘transformed a potential country into little more than an object of pity’.38 According to contemporary reports, foreign relief workers were rebuked by officials wanting to know ‘why don’t you find some starving White people to feed?’39 But this was not only about pity and resentment. In June 1969, the FMG released a policy stipulating that relief to Biafra be provided ‘such that the rebels cannot abuse it for arms trafficking or other military purpose or for political, psychological and diplomatic advantage’. It insisted that ‘The Federal Government is most anxious to remove relief supplies and human sufferings from the arena of political and diplomatic intrigue and propaganda’.40 The government’s concerns were well placed: the humanitarian effort was used throughout the conflict by the Biafran leadership for political and military ends. The abuse was so flagrant that it has been described as ‘one of the most insidious examples of the manipulation of suffering and humanitarian action to gain international legitimacy’.41 The airstrip that was maintained by and for the relief effort was also used to fly in arms. (The Biafran response to accusations that relief flights were being used to hide arms deliveries was blunt: supply of arms by air predated the relief flights and continued even when the latter were temporarily suspended, it said – no ‘cover’ was needed.42 ) All relief flights – roughly 7,800 of them – were taxed.43 According to one aid official, the inflated exchange rate applied to relief programmes and charges for services brought in approximately $3.5 million for the Biafran government.44 This income allowed Biafra to purchase weaponry in pursuit of its war effort.45

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The relief effort internationalised a conflict that many states, the UN, and the Organisation of African Unity (OAU, forerunner of the African Union) otherwise treated as a civil matter. All had their reasons. After a bruising experience in the Congo crisis a few years earlier, which cost the life of Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN was reticent to intervene in another post-colonial conflict. Lobbying to have a debate about Nigeria in the General Assembly was predictably unsuccessful and pro-Biafran campaigners learned, in the words of one US activist, ‘the UN is about nations. It’s not about splinter groups within nations’.46 The same attitude drove the OAU approach. Established in 1963, the OAU’s membership of African states had no interest in encouraging secessionist movements on the continent. The only African countries to officially recognise Biafran sovereignty were the Ivory Coast (now Côte d’Ivoire), Gabon, Tanzania, and Zambia. Despite being accused of neo-colonialism and complicity in genocide, Britain supported the FMG, as did the Soviet Union – whose importance as a backer was partly a result of British hesitation early in the conflict. France did not go as far as officially recognising the Republic of Biafra but was by no means displeased with the destabilisation of a British zone of influence and used the relief effort accordingly. President Charles de Gaulle was directly involved in the decision to mount a mission of the Croix-Rouge Française (CRF). Arguably, supporters of the FMG and Biafra alike had reason to focus on the relief effort: the former in lieu of political pressure on the government and the latter because relief served the secessionists’ campaign. The urgency was certainly apparent to those on the ground. In the words of Pascal Grellety Bosviel, one of MSF’s cofounders and whose first mission was to Yemen for the ICRC in 1964, ‘I do not know a single person who went to Biafra and was not struck by the horror of the situation and the courage of the locals’.47 In these days took place the first conversations about a different humanitarianism. Bernard Kouchner later recalled the basic conditions and extreme pressure in which doctors in Biafra worked: ‘the miserable petrol steriliser couldn’t produce and often we finished our late-night sessions bare-chested, wearing only a pair of gloves’.48 Patients would be treated, only to return again injured or emaciated within weeks or even days of their release. Hospitals and other civilian sites were bombed to such an extent that the Red Cross emblem appeared to be a target instead of a source of protection (Biafran statements described this as ‘the Nigerians’ preference for civilian targets’).49

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Roughly fifty French volunteers travelled to Biafra between September 1968 and January 1970. Volunteers mobilised by the Croix-Rouge Française worked to support the ICRC, running a hospital at AwoOmamma.50 While the volunteers were integrated into an ICRC mission, CRF deliveries of relief and medical supplies were managed independently because, in the words of the CRF president, ‘it seemed more promising to benefit from our advantage in being able to establish a base in [former French colony] Gabon’.51 According to the CRF’s summary at the war’s end, over 17 months it had organised 439 flights, 3,075 tonnes of food and medicines, 51 doctors, 2 pharmacists, 7 medical students, 5 nurses, 2 first-aid workers, and 2 administrators.52 The medical mission was headed by Max Récamier, whom the CRF later singled out to praise for his leadership. Kouchner volunteered several times: first in September–October 1968, again in December of the same year, and finally in October–November 1969. At the end of September 1968, two missionaries and two Yugoslav doctors, ICRC volunteers at Okigwi, were killed by FMG forces; this incident was crucial in ending the reticence of the French doctors who had already begun to consider public statements about the ravages of the war on the Biafran people.53 In November 1968, Récamier and Kouchner published an article in Le Monde describing the suffering in Biafra and calling for international intervention. It began with a classic establishing shot of the ‘first contact: expressions of friendship from the Biafrans bustling around the plane. Humid heat, dark night, broken by flashlights’. They described their work, the ‘war surgery where you must do the most urgent thing first’, treating civilians wounded by the bombs of their own government, in a race against blood loss, gangrene, and tetanus. Récamier and Kouchner also described the struggle against famine, in cooperation with local aid workers, missionaries and church organisations, NGOs, and Red Cross societies. The doctors concluded with a call for political action: ‘what is being done now allows the children to survive. Their future depends on political solutions’.54 In the months that followed, more accounts of the ravages of war in Nigeria would be published by French volunteers, including by Grellety Bosviel who also campaigned on behalf of Biafra on his return to France.55 An anonymous ‘doctor K.’ was also quoted in Fraternité Matin, published in Libreville, Gabon, calling for a revision of the Geneva Conventions. Vallaeys, who cited this article, had not established the identity of the young doctor it referred to, though hinted it could be Kouchner.56 The creation mythology of Médecins Sans Frontières is bound up in these acts of witnessing and témoignage.

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Like others who called for action on Biafra’s behalf, Récamier and Kouchner identified the survival of the people living in the enclave with the future of Biafra as a political entity. They described Biafrans as ‘a people enduring the terrible ravages of this war with courage and determination’. The notion of Biafrans as ‘a people’ was characteristic of rhetoric that, whether it conflated ‘Biafrans’ with ‘Igbos’ or – as official Biafran statements insisted – included other ethnicities in a Biafran or ‘Eastern’ identity, constructed this group as a nation in waiting and under threat.57 It informed the creation by French doctors and journalists of a committee to campaign against the ‘genocide’ in Biafra, an act which contravened the ICRC’s expectations of its personnel and reflected the militant reference points of those involved. As Brian McNeil has shown, the international community’s refusal to act decisively against this perceived threat also pushed some campaigners towards advocating Biafran selfdetermination. Denouncing the shortcomings of the so-called ‘humanitarian ritual’ was integral to this escalation of campaigning strategy.58 With the Biafran enclave languishing and what would be the final Federalist offensive launched in late December 1969, it had little effect. French partisans of intervention condemned the role played by humanitarianism in the conflict. Yves-Guy Bergès, a foreign correspondent for France Soir, lamented that ‘we can easily play the game of charity and relieve our conscience for the price of a pack of cigarettes’.59 These critiques intensified after the Biafran capitulation in January 1970. Writing under the name of J.-C. Bercail, the Algerian-born journalist and essayist Jean-Claude Guillebaud concluded bitterly that Biafra died because ‘global opinion has invented itself a new face. The smiling and snivelling face of an irresponsible lady patroness’. He condemned the way the humanitarian approach allowed foreign powers to ease their consciences while avoiding acknowledgement of the political origins of the crisis, leading in turn to a propaganda battle as the two sides competed for sympathy. Journalists became ‘some sort of dealers in horror’ who were not permitted to explain that ‘Biafra needed something other than fine sentiments and powdered milk. That there was a monstrous hypocrisy in thus prolonging a conflict without being capable of internationalising it’.60 Kouchner also weighed in: ‘a lot was promised to the Biafrans, but if we sometimes allowed them to die less thin, we never really helped them’.61 The experience in Biafra thus gave rise to a critique of the role of humanitarian action in general, not simply of the conduct of the ICRC. Three closely linked themes were perceptible in debates about humanitarianism in Biafra: the limits of traditional neutrality, the mixing of political

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and humanitarian registers, and the ethics of engagement versus charity.62 Acknowledging this broader critique relieves some of the pressures on the question of whether French doctors and journalists broke with the Red Cross model specifically because of what they witnessed and experienced. A critical reflection on the role of aid in the Biafra–Nigeria War was a significant factor in the invention of sans-frontiérisme. But it was not the only one. A second crucial episode contributed to the development of new ways of thinking about humanitarianism in France. This was the crisis in East Pakistan – or Bangladesh, as it would shortly become. The Bhola cyclone that hit the Ganges Delta region on 12 November 1970 caused hundreds of thousands of deaths in East Pakistan and the inadequate response of the federal government, based in West Pakistan, intensified pre-existing discontent. After the sweeping victory of the Bengali nationalist Awami League in the 1970 elections, the ruling military regime reacted fiercely, initiating an unheralded armed strike against the East Pakistani capital on 25 March 1971. Hundreds of people were killed and large-scale property destruction occurred over two days. News of the Dhaka massacres and the use of torture provoked widespread organised resistance, leading to thousands more deaths in the days following the initial attack. Bangladesh proclaimed its independence on 10 April 1971 but the civil war continued until mid December, when Indian military intervention pushed the balance in favour of the Bangladeshi forces.63 By then some 10 million refugees had fled to India, roughly two-thirds of them accommodated in more than 800 refugee camps.64 Like Biafra and later Cambodia, the violence in Bangladesh prompted frequent use of the term ‘genocide’ in public discourse, although it was not used by governments in their own statements about the events.65 The language of genocide was widespread in international press coverage, with the accusation backed by some international lawyers, and famously forming the basis of dissent by US representatives in Pakistan at their own government’s policy towards the violence.66 As was the case in Nigeria, Cold War geopolitics troubled international responses to the war in Pakistan and inhibited a revolutionary endorsement of the Bangladeshi cause. The single most common government policy was non-interference in Pakistan’s domestic affairs. However, India officially and effectively supported the East Pakistani side from the outset and its Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union (9 August 1971) obliged the Soviets to follow suit. By logic of opposition to Moscow, China and the US supported Pakistan in the

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UN Security Council and the organisation found itself neutered by superpower rivalries. Guillebaud (around this time also campaigning on behalf of Biafra) later remembered this manoeuvre – and in particular China’s participation in the suppression of another third-world independence movement – as one of the moments of disillusionment with tiers-mondiste revolutionary causes.67 In this climate, solidarity with Bangladesh was more likely to justify itself by reference to human rights abuses than political aspirations. Events like Ravi Shankar and George Harrison’s ‘Concert for Bangladesh’ of 1 August 1971 followed this pattern and were precursors for the great fundraising spectacles of the 1980s. In France, moves towards a new emergency medical association had been progressing. In 1970 some of the doctors who had been to Biafra created the Groupe d’Intervention Médico-Chirurgical d’Urgence (GIMCU). Bringing together approximately fifty doctors, it put its members at the service of pre-existing organisations while harbouring ambitions for a different style of humanitarian action.68 It also ran courses in emergency medicine at the Hôpital Saint-Antoine in Paris. Doctors and nurses who had signed up to GIMCU contributed to missions during civil conflict in Jordan and following an earthquake in Peru. Without a responsive and flexible mechanism, and held up by red tape, the GIMCU mission to Peru arrived too late to be of assistance.69 These early lessons about the international deployment of medical assistance came against the backdrop of domestic advances for emergency medicine. In 1960 the Elément Médical Militaire d’Intervention Rapide (EMMIR), which provided French army units for international emergencies, was established. The French ambulance corps, the Services d’Aide Médicale Urgente (SAMU), was officially accredited in 1972, and various prototypes had been in operation since 1956. Xavier Emmanuelli was amongst those who participated in these initiatives and around the same time made contact with the GIMCU doctors.70 Despite a large international relief effort, the small group of volunteer doctors in France never managed to reach Bangladesh. Having responded to the preliminary call of the Red Cross at the time of the 1970 floods, they found themselves awaiting an authorisation which became increasingly less likely as the political violence intensified. The attitude of the volunteers, as Jacques Bérès remembered it, was that ‘we will kill two birds with one stone: we will intervene alongside the survivors of the tidal wave and, if necessary, in aid of the victims of war’.71 The CRF would not give them the opportunity and this aborted mission has been recorded in all accounts of the sans-frontiériste movement as a failure. In contrast,

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Secours Populaire Français did send a mission to East Pakistan at the time of the cyclone and became one of the first organisations to be active in the refugee camps in India.72 The multifaceted challenges posed by the crisis in Pakistan (buffeted by the cyclone and tidal wave, devastated by civil war, and confronted with millions of internally displaced persons (IDPs) as well as refugees in India) were not easily met. Political manipulation and difficulties accessing the affected regions showed up inadequacies in humanitarian responses. The UN presence on the ground, it was claimed, may well have hindered the relief effort early on. Calls for ‘a reappraisal of the relief system’ were widespread.73 And indeed off the back of these experiences and others in Nigeria and Peru, the UN and NGOs did undertake a series of reforms in the 1970s.74 In France, some reacted to the perceived inadequacy of the humanitarian response in Pakistan by insisting upon the need for greater political solidarity. This was dramatically demonstrated on 18 September 1971, when anti-fascist hero André Malraux called for the constitution of a new International Brigade for Bangladesh and announced his decision to volunteer (at the age of seventy) for military service. The memory of the Spanish Civil War was consciously evoked by Malraux and featured in all reporting on his engagement. He declared that ‘we can help Bengal seriously by speaking out for it only if we fight for it’.75 ‘We did it in Spain, we can do it again’, he declared in another interview.76 Prior to this announcement, he had written privately to an Indian diplomat, refusing to participate in a conference on the situation in East Pakistan on the grounds that ‘it will serve only to alleviate the conscience of those intellectuals who will write articles while Pakistan moves its tanks into place’.77 His call was for action not words. Though the International Brigades were never mobilised and Malraux did not go to Bangladesh until after the war, in April–May 1973, he received hundreds of letters from volunteers.78 A second reaction to the limitations of the aid response, as seen in a striking although often overlooked article by Yves-Guy Bergès, was to demand a new approach to humanitarian action. Bergès’ strident call for ‘a new Dunant’ resonated with the opinions of the Biafran group as well as those at the medical newspaper Tonus, who would soon join in forming MSF. Bergès, who had also been in Biafra, was a special envoy to East Pakistan for L’Express. As he had with Biafra, Bergès argued for solidarity with the independence movement as well as with the innocents suffering due to natural disaster and political strife. But in 1971 he also made the case for an overhaul of aid based on the slowness and reticence

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of the existing system: ‘many think today that it is no longer enough to be moved by the adorable little faces of the baby Biafrans, of baby dogs, of baby seals, of baby Bengalis, to show solidarity [être solidaires] with them. Many think, today, that it is time for charity to grow up’.79 During the Biafra–Nigeria War, Bergès had already riled against the limpid pity that cast the same gaze at dying children as it would at ‘baby seals’.80 This image captures the dehumanising passivity that critics like Bergès discovered in neutral, charitable humanitarianism. After Bangladesh Bergès listed the changes required to salvage the nobility of the humanitarian impulse: organisation, education, anticipation, development, professionalisation, and denationalisation; above all, a movement that ‘will dare to define the standards of an “engaged neutrality”’.81 The assistance he described would not, like the ICRC, be bound by rules of non-interference in state affairs and the principle of neutrality; it would challenge the assumptions that symptoms can be treated without addressing their cause, or that people could be saved while their political aspirations were being ignored. The language Bergès used was later deployed at greater length and with more impact in the public appeals and personal memoirs of Bernard Kouchner. Bergès’ appeal anticipated the public persona of later leading sans-frontiéristes: ‘we demand a new Dunant, eminent jurist, man of action, big-picture thinker gifted with imagination and audacity. If we find him, the people of Bengal, for the first time in their long history, will not have died for nothing’.82 A similar impulse towards innovation also inspired the journalists at Tonus. On 23 November 1970 they issued a call for doctors to serve as volunteers within a new type of emergency association.83 Though the Tonus mission to East Pakistan remained as hypothetical as the hoped-for mission of the Croix-Rouge Française, their appeal received roughly 180 responses, among which were the GIMCU activists.84 With this meeting the elements were united for MSF’s creation. The Tonus group had an embryonic organisation with the name of Secours Médical Français; both this and the rather inelegant GIMCU were abandoned in favour of ‘Médecins Sans Frontières’. In insisting that its own ethos sought to go beyond borders, this name should actually remind of the powerful obstacle posed by borders at the time. To the medical expertise and militant experience of the GIMCU group, the Tonus journalists brought resources (both financial and material), a media vehicle, and publicity savvy. It was because the ‘Biafrans’ responded to their call that MSF took the form it did.

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the making of a myth Before MSF, before GIMCU, there was the Comité International de Lutte Contre le Génocide au Biafra. Founded in December 1968, this was the first initiative of those who had been to Nigeria during the war, including the doctors Kouchner and Récamier, photographer Michel Laurent, journalists Olivier Todd, François Dupuis, and François Debré, and pilot Patrick Chappel.85 The networks the Biafra committee drew upon were those of political militancy: it was not a medical organisation. Kouchner, one of the group’s driving forces, has since suggested that their reference points at the time were not ‘charitable’ but based upon experiences like protesting against the Algerian War, rebelling against the authorities of the PCF, and meeting Castro and Guevara in Cuba.86 While the Committee had difficulty interesting the would-be revolutionaries, and received only a cursory mention in Le Monde,87 it did attract a tiers-mondiste audience of a less militant bent, who, moved by evidence of misery and inequality, took up the cause of underdeveloped countries.88 These ‘tiers-mondistes conséquents’ would continue to contribute to the humanitarian movement throughout the 1970s and 1980s.89 International diplomacy during the Biafra–Nigeria War, however, bore little resemblance to the Cold War alignments upon which the tiersmondiste world view was predicated. Federalist Nigeria was supported by such unlikely allies as Britain, Egypt, the Soviet Union, and the US. Secessionist Biafra had the backing of France, China, Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe), apartheid-era South Africa, and authoritarian Portugal. With such problematic coalitions the conflict did not, as Jean-François Sirinelli indicated, conform to the dominant left-wing ‘imperialism–liberation struggles analytical framework’ which helped to galvanise campaigners for Vietnam.90 This point was made early in the conflict by Pierre VidalNaquet, a classicist and a veteran of the anti–Algerian War campaign, in the tiers-mondiste review Partisans.91 Coverage in Le Monde Diplomatique illustrated the troubled frameworks of the Biafra–Nigeria War. This journal, usually dominated by progressive analyses, adopted a less partisan tone for Biafra. Several articles during the war focused on the responses of foreign powers, and especially the Soviet decision to weigh in on the Nigerian Federalist side.92 Coverage tended to be sympathetic to the Biafrans, yet critical of their leadership and certainly not generous towards their independence push. They were never credited as a national liberation movement of equal

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standing with, for instance, the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (FNL) or the African National Congress (ANC). The idea that the war represented a Muslim crusade from the north against the Christian east was also dismissed.93 The journal’s key reporter for the conflict, Edouard Pellissier, wrote in March 1968 that the moment had come for Colonel Ojukwu to abandon his intransigent stance because ‘the future of Biafra is only a minor venture in comparison to the necessary and essential survival of the Ibo “nation”’.94 At the war’s end, Pellissier concluded critically that Ojukwu ‘fell so much further and faster in that he brought a whole people down with him’.95 Instead of supporting Biafran independence aspirations, Pellissier instead saw the extremism of these aspirations as one of the main threats to the survival of the Igbo ethnicity, by then often identified with the Biafran state. The limited intellectual mobilisation that did occur on behalf of Biafra tended to emphasise humanitarian imperatives over political causes or solutions. As discussed by Yves Lavoinne, the Biafran cause found support from the Catholic writer Jacques Madaule, author of a page-one article in Le Monde characterising the conflict as genocide. The Chief Rabbi of France added his weight and the ‘solidarity’ of the Jewish community to the cause in August.96 In January 1969, a text signed by ‘left-wing intellectuals’ declared that ‘the left cannot, by its silence, tolerate the systematic use of methods predicated on the murderous mechanisms of archaic irrationalities’. Though it criticised observers for being content to act as if genocide were a natural disaster and merely ‘let out a few humanitarian sighs and appeal to activists’ kind hearts’, the appeal nonetheless argued for support of the Biafrans based on the threat to their existence rather than on more radical motifs of national liberation or anti-imperialism.97 Sartre, too, after the war’s end, decried the genocidal nature of the FMG campaign. This ‘ignominy’, he claimed in March 1970, ‘has no name, but by virtue of it, the Jews were turned into soap, and the Sudanese negroes into game. The South American Indians were slowly exterminated because of it, the Kurds in Iraq were disposed of, and so were the communists in Indonesia’.98 The Biafrans were seen as genocide victims, not freedom fighters. This was in fact a relatively new reference. The concept of genocide arose primarily from the work of jurist Raphael Lemkin, whose first relevant proposals date from the 1930s and who defined ‘genocide’ in 1944 as a process in two phases: ‘one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor’. With its codification in the UN Convention on the Prevention

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and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, passed in 1948, Lemkin’s idea was put through the wringer of international treaty writing and was additionally squeezed by the demands of Cold War politics. In the 1950s, the Genocide Convention was invoked in relation to claimed Soviet genocide of Eastern Europeans and US genocide of African Americans, and Sartre himself argued for US conduct of the Vietnam War to be considered genocide, in 1967.99 Sartre linked colonialism with the crime of genocide and in particular with the genocide of the Jews, as had anti-colonialist campaigners in France in the 1950s and early 1960s. The trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann in 1961 helped to increase awareness of the crimes of the Holocaust, and by the late 1960s the Holocaust was coming to be dominant in conceptions of genocide.100 This connection – whereby events that resemble the Holocaust can be cast as genocide, and to be recognised as genocide violence must share similarities with the Holocaust – underpinned what Lasse Heerten and A. Dirk Moses called the ‘Holocaust dramaturgy’ in portrayals of the Biafran crisis.101 This dramaturgy was actively cultivated by the Biafran leadership. It built on earlier portrayals of the Igbos as the ‘Jews of Africa’ which had taken on an increased resonance with the massacres of 1966, described in Biafran propaganda as ‘pogroms’. Within Biafra, a systematic propaganda campaign aimed to convince civilians they were the subject of a genocidal plan on the part of the FMG.102 For external communications the Biafran leadership famously hired a public relations firm, Markpress; by the end of the war the outputs of Markpress’s ‘Biafran Overseas Press Division’ ran to three volumes.103 (Less well known is that the FMG hired its own firm in response.) Many of the references to Biafra’s ‘war of survival’, genocide, and the danger of ‘extermination’ did not mention the Holocaust, but this comparison was sometimes made explicit and the language used was always calibrated to encourage it. Press releases insisted that ‘If we fail to defend ourselves, we shall be exterminated’.104 In late summer 1968 the FMG announced it would allow an international observer mission to consider the question of whether there was evidence of genocide, but restricted the team to investigating in Federal-held territories. Ojukwu responded by inviting the team to come to Biafra in a press release that claimed ‘During the Second World War, those who went to Germany and talked to Nazi leaders could not have seen evidence of genocide except from the side of the Jews who were affected’.105 Another press release quoted Karl Heinrich Jaggi, ICRC Head of Delegation in Biafra since the previous November, as saying there were ‘overtones of genocide’ in the war and evoking ‘what the Germans did to the Jews’ to

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question the legitimacy of blockade and famine as calculated strategies.106 The same imagery was seen in foreign supporters’ campaigns.107 In France, comparisons between the Biafran plight and the Holocaust were frequent and anguished. Yves-Guy Bergès despaired the recourse to ‘pity’ when faced with what he perceived as genocide and demanded: ‘if a reporter had been sent to Dachau in 1943, would he have been expected, in the name of impartiality, to give equal weight to the point of view of the Nazis as that of the Jews?’108 Refugee camps were as many ‘Buchenwalds for under thirteens’. Even when not explicit, his language was redolent of Holocaust imagery: the Eastern front reeked of the ‘revolting and intolerable smell of death’ and was haunted by stories of ‘living skeletons’ being mown down with machine guns.109 The name of the Comité International de Lutte Contre le Génocide au Biafra made its interpretation of the dangers clear. Its founding press conference paid tribute to the Biafrans’ ‘fierce, unanimous and desperate popular resistance’.110 But it also portrayed them as powerless victims in a cartoon entitled ‘the alphabet of horror’, wherein ‘A’ denoted Auschwitz and ‘B’ stood for Biafra.111 A pamphlet of another pro-Biafran group, the Comité d’Action pour le Biafra, reported a press conference featuring CRF doctors who drew comparisons between starving Biafrans and the victims of Nazi concentration camps, speaking of the Nigerian decision to ‘exterminate’ them as part of military strategy.112 At the war’s end, Kouchner also published a personal commentary on the failings of the international response, describing the massacre of Biafrans as the largest in modern history after that of the Jews. He accused: ‘The Left, if it exists, closed its eyes much as it must have done during the extermination of the Jews, and as it closed its eyes to the fate of the Kurds, the Sudanese, or the Indians of Mato Grosso’.113 Several of those who had campaigned during the war denounced the stance of both the international community and the French left. On 13 January 1970, Le Monde published a text signed by Kouchner, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Vidal-Naquet, and several other activists. It described the nameless and dehumanising evil directed against Jews, Native Americans, Kurds, and Indonesian communists – terms reprised by Sartre and Kouchner in their statements over the next months. The piece opened decisively not with discussion of Nigeria but with the Holocaust: ‘We know it now: Hitler’s genocides were achieved with the passive complicity of the Allies. Yet the passivity of the democracies and the Soviet Union – their refusal to bomb the tracks leading to the concentration camps or to help the revolt of the subhumans – at least had this shadow of a justification: it was a world war and a total war’.114

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As Heerten noted, ‘The nascent public memory and historical centrality of the Holocaust was not yet fully formed in the late 1960s’.115 But it was already clear that the rising memory of this undeniably European horror was, at least in French debates, linked with the death throes of colonialism. Holocaust references were (as discussed in the next chapter) built into in the campaign against the Algerian War in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Along with other facets of the memory of the Second World War, including tropes of anti-fascism, resistance, and collaboration, they were frequent in gauchiste rhetoric more generally. Moreover, Michael Rothberg has underlined how these visions of the past and the present were mutually constitutive. In connecting the Holocaust with the crimes of colonial and post-colonial power, ‘multidirectional memories’ also adjusted the affective geographies that activists carried with them: ‘remembrance both cuts across and binds together diverse spatial, temporal, and cultural sites’.116 Rothberg pointed to the parallels Aimé Césaire drew between Nazi genocide and colonial brutality in Discours sur le colonialisme (1955). Sartre and Kouchner, amongst others, rhetorically connected the Holocaust, the treatment of indigenous peoples, the slaughter of Indonesian communists, and the persecution of the Kurds. Ethnic violence following the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991 would see this rhetoric applied again to Europe. Nonetheless, for a long time those who warned of a return to Nazi barbarism were almost always speaking of the third world. In the history of humanitarianism, and especially in the French context, there is an additional element to how the Holocaust memory has been cast as a call to action. This relates to the ICRC’s decision during the Second World War not to denounce the Nazi camp system. The ICRC was, historian Jean-Claude Favez found, ‘adequately apprised of inhuman treatment in the camps and of the tragic fate of racial deportees’.117 However, fearing that a public stand would jeopardise its work on behalf of prisoners of war and some concentration camp internees, without impacting upon the operation of the extermination camps, it did not make a public statement.118 The recording of this decision as a moral failure was cemented by Favez’s work and keenly felt by the ICRC, although subsequent scholarship on the period has highlighted the potential for a more nuanced if no less sombre picture to emerge.119 In the story of sans-frontiérisme, the ICRC’s refusal to denounce what was perceived by its volunteers as the genocide of the Igbo people appeared to be ‘exactly the approach the organisation had relied upon in its work in Nazi-occupied Europe’.120 Kouchner and Récamier’s

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frustrated call for intervention in Biafra, however, contained no mention of the Red Cross’ conduct during the Second World War. At a push, their assertion that ‘it is illusory to be satisfied with the treatment of a few children’ could be taken to hint at the historical pitfalls of passive or unreflexive humanitarianism.121 Intellectuals’ evocation of complicity with genocide and ‘gangsterism on a planetary scale’ in Biafra did not mention the Red Cross either.122 However, subsequent writings of sans-frontiéristes developed this argument about the significance of the ICRC’s silence and its influence on later humanitarian ideas.123 Sensitivity to the Holocaust legacy and the idea of complicity has been a constant feature of the political backdrop to the sans-frontiériste movement as well as a significant motif in the discourse of the movement itself. Kouchner has most strongly insisted that ‘this whole project is integrally linked to the Shoah’.124 For Ryfman, the Holocaust memory dictated sans-frontiérisme’s emphasis on the immediacy of action, in what he called a ‘hyper-reactivity to all that, even remotely, resembles mass killings’.125 Moreover, the idea of guilt through inaction had a powerful resonance in France due to the experience of Occupation by Germany (and aid efforts during this period did not escape the ambiguity, exclusion, and compromise of life under Occupation).126 Kouchner’s contribution to what we might call (following Heerten and Moses) a sans-frontiériste Holocaust dramaturgy is unrivalled. His Le malheur des autres (1991), which has an incantatory rhythm, especially if the reader is familiar with his early writing, deploys this dramaturgy at multiple points. By this time, according to his own account Kouchner had visited Auschwitz three times. The depravity it epitomised he saw everywhere. ‘Faced with each massacre, from Biafra to Liberia, from Cambodia to Afghanistan, and the ghettos of Natal, treating the wounds of black civil wars, in each place I better understood Auschwitz, that ultimate, infinitely particular, scientific and rational expression of savagery, unique for having deliberately programmed the systematic destruction of a human group’. He celebrated the achievements of sans-frontiérisme with its refusal to accept sovereignty as a cover for inhumanity. In this new order, ‘Auschwitz, the Khmer Rouge, the large-scale massacres: we, humanitarian volunteers, have made them more difficult to perpetrate and the press more difficult to cover up. . . . The French doctors changed the world’s indignation’.127 Tellingly, Kouchner’s references to the Holocaust multiplied after the Southeast Asia refugee crises, and in particular, after the Khmer Rouge genocide. He was not alone in this, as by then references to the ‘New Look Final Solution’ in Kampuchea, for instance, were

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connected by numerous commentators to other contemporary events as well as to a resurgent French memory of the Second World War. In 2004, he reiterated that he ‘ran to Biafra . . . because I was too young for Guernica, Auschwitz, Oradour and Sétif’.128 Portrayals of the threat to the Biafran people represented the postcolonial confluence of a number of distinctive yet intersecting discourses on genocide, the Second World War, solidarity, and humanitarianism. Many years later, Kouchner would state once again the lessons of the Second World War for the principle of témoignage: ‘ We must always be there and be a witness [être témoin]. If the International Red Cross had alerted the world, if the Pope, Winston Churchill and those who knew about the extermination had spoken out, it would have changed a lot. . . . Why did the world not do anything? I detest silence. The Red Cross’ silence on the extermination camps goes hand in hand with the doctrine of neutrality, which comes down to putting the victims and the executioners on the same level’. These lessons, for Kouchner, came out of Biafra.129 The reality and implications, however, were rather more complicated. Within the circles of French sans-frontiérisme, interpretations of the Biafran conflict do not merely differ but stand in opposition to each other. In fact, the dispute is not just over Biafra but about the tradition of témoignage and its place in the early years of MSF, the movement’s first and most important organisation. The dividing line essentially lies between the original founding doctors spearheaded by Kouchner and a later but extremely influential generation around Rony Brauman, with each man incarnating a vision of the Nigerian conflict and of the invention of témoignage.130 Both plant their flag firmly in testimonial territory, indicating its importance to sans-frontiériste deontology. In basic terms, the Kouchnerian account of the Biafra–Nigeria War emphasises the existence of genocide, magnifies the significance of the act of témoignage by which the French doctors responded, and thus ascribes the essence of MSF to this seminal moment.131 Brauman in contrast has challenged the applicability of genocide, sees the témoignage as in fact rather feeble, and consequently sees the effective reimagining of this practice as one of the legacies of the later period when he was amongst the MSF leadership.132 For Kouchner, the media became part of the ‘revolt against oppression’ of the Red Cross volunteers against the expectation of silence.133 For Brauman, ‘humanitarian témoignage was already discovering its limits in the instrumentalisation of images of distress, and its partial redeployment against the very people whose suffering it wished to

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alleviate’.134 Their disagreement over Biafra thus goes to the heart of the aid response and the MSF mythology. It has also been personal. Kouchner has called Brauman’s group a ‘coalition of apparatchiks’.135 Brauman, for his part, has accused Kouchner of fabricating the history of Biafra in order to ‘see himself as the white knight, the peace-loving warrior’.136 Despite the passage of time and divergence of their careers, commentaries on the relationship between the two have continued to play up this element of personal conflict.137 Schools of followers have rallied to each side. Anne Vallaeys, author of the ‘biography’ of MSF, clearly adopted Brauman’s view. She expressed surprise about the persistence of the legend in which ‘Biafra would have been the moment of Kouchnerian rupture with a “collaborationist” ICRC’.138 Patrick Aeberhard, a veteran of the humanitarian mission in Biafra, came out firing against Vallaeys’ ‘malicious theory’ in an article transparently entitled ‘Biafra: in defence of Kouchner’. This and Aeberhard’s other writing on the history of French humanitarianism represented a largely unadulterated reprisal of Kouchner’s argument.139 Pierre Péan’s hostile biography of Kouchner, unsurprisingly, took the opposite view of the situation in Biafra and the effectiveness of the denunciation.140 Most recently, the work of Marie-Luce Desgrandchamps on aid operations during the Biafra–Nigeria War has been cited by Brauman as evidence of how much the Kouchnerian account ‘owes to retrospective reconstruction’.141 Her research found an internal ICRC communication describing Récamier and Kouchner’s account of the Biafra mission in November 1968 as an ‘excellent article’ and a request to Le Monde to reproduce it in the ICRC’s own journal, which happened in January 1969.142 Desgrandchamps suggested that, more than a division between outraged French doctors and tight-lipped Swiss ICRC delegates, interpretations were split between those who worked in the field in Biafran territory (including ICRC staff) and those whose perspective from headquarters meant they viewed the Nigerian operations as a whole.143 For reasons including the need to retain staff, the advantages of publicity, and the simple fact of their having more pressing priorities, the ICRC did not publicly react to the campaigning of the French doctors.144 Moreover, the CRF celebrated their work with an awards ceremony at its General Assembly of 1969.145 In that sense, there was no dramatic moment of mutual rupture over the practice of témoignage in Biafra. Furthermore, it is important not to overstate the extent to which the Red Cross model can be taken as a fixed reference point at the time of Biafra. Like those of the UN General Assembly, the politics of the Red

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Cross and Red Crescent Movement were responding to geopolitical change, with membership expanding rapidly as new nations gained independence. As Thierry Hentsch pointed out, in the 1960s the ICRC’s position in Africa was particularly precarious, suffering from having taken too little interest in conditions in the continent prior to decolonisation and too great an association with European powers in its aftermath.146 The Red Cross principles had only been proclaimed for the first time in 1965.147 By the end of the decade, the principles had been buffeted by experiences in civil conflict and guerrilla warfare and challenged by the proliferation of humanitarian organisations. The ICRC had little experience in the type of operations required in Biafra and was obliged to confront the ‘rival’ mobilisation not only of NGOs but also of the National Societies and the League of Red Cross Societies which in principle had agreed to concentrate on peacetime work. Forced to practice what its Vice President Jacques Freymond called the ‘politics of the possible’, the ICRC was subjected to contradictory criticisms for being both overcautious of its mandate and insufficiently discreet with regard to Nigerian sovereignty.148 At the same time, as Freymond acknowledged, it was dealing with equally challenging conflicts in the Middle East and Vietnam. It rebounded from crisis to crisis. The concurrent increase in acts of terrorism, notably by Palestinian liberation movements, presented another challenge to the ICRC which found itself on several occasions acting as negotiator with hostage-takers and accused of conferring legitimacy on criminal acts. For Freymond, this was a path that could not be taken: these experiences once again accentuated ‘the conflict between humanitarian sentiments and the imperatives of a humanitarian politics [politique humanitaire] conceived and conducted in the long-term’.149 A strategy for this politique humanitaire, he suggested, had yet to be found.150 In spite of its founders’ desire to operate differently, the first constitution of MSF enshrined a concept of discretion comparable to the ICRC’s position. The charter adopted at the creation of MSF in December 1971 in Clichy affirmed the doctors’ mandate to bring aid to ‘victims of natural disasters, of collective accidents and situations of conflict, without any political, racial, religious or philosophical discrimination’. It emphasised the organisation’s neutrality and independence and demanded, ‘in the name of its universal vocation, full and complete freedom in the practice of medical care’. It swore the doctors to forgo any interference in the affairs of the countries MSF worked in and declared that ‘they respect professional confidentiality and abstain from passing judgment or expressing an opinion – favourable or hostile – in relation to events, forces, and

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leaders who have accepted their assistance’.151 It was precisely the model that the volunteers in Biafra had resented and which had been criticised in Bangladesh. This was no accident. The text was written by Philippe Bernier, one of the Tonus staff. Bernier was responsible for the resemblance that the MSF charter bore to the principles of the Red Cross/Red Crescent Movement. He later described his belief that there was no other way to be credible, to be acceptable to all and to gain access.152 Still, Bernier’s traditionalism with regards to the need for discretion should not be confused with conservatism in ideological terms. A militant of the far left and close to Arab nationalist movements, Bernier had supported the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) as a porteur de valise and was a friend of Frantz Fanon.153 He later wrote of their desire to ‘violate’ the complacency of ‘those who have been established for years in the bureaucratic and diplomatic management of suffering . . . Yes, violate them, these relief professionals and their venerable institutions, the trophy wives who run “charitable” organisations, and the guard dogs who defend their stipends and their little plot of land’.154 (Bernier might have disagreed with Kouchner about the appropriate voice for MSF, but they were both capable of waxing lyrical about their vision.) The inclusion of the ‘professional discretion’ clause was a pragmatic decision. Tensions in the early years indicated, however, that the accent on speaking out had not been entirely stifled despite the discretion of the first charter. This became apparent with one of the earliest missions to fit the MSF mythology, a trip to Iraqi Kurdistan. For ten days in September 1974, Kouchner, Bérès, and Récamier – all three of them veterans of the Biafra mission – were guests of guerrillas associated with the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and under the leadership of Massoud Barzani. The doctors stayed in the KDP’s mountain headquarters and were impressed by the discipline, organisation, and education of the Kurdish populations.155 Back in Paris, their trip raised ire: it was inspired by political contacts, not an appeal for medical assistance, and had been decided upon unilaterally by those involved; some of MSF’s other members were also concerned about the potential diplomatic ramifications of this trip.156 For a colloquially emphatic Kouchner, this was not even a consideration: ‘we didn’t give a damn, we called for the crossing of all borders, didn’t we? Whatever they were! The Kurdish people were fighting for their independence, our place was in Barzani’s bunker’.157 On return, Kouchner was keen to begin the process of publicising the cause, to which end he had been preparing an article for Le Monde on the genocide of the Kurds, but was prevented

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by other members during an antagonistic general assembly in February 1975.158 Nevertheless, this was the moment when the Biafran clique rose to dominance within the organisation. If ‘Biafra’ became synonymous with MSF’s founding, the Kurdish cause came, especially in Kouchner’s writing, to epitomise the left’s neglect of unpopular causes. Although it attracted some support from tiersmondiste circles early on, identified in the first issue of Partisans as ‘the touchstone of the Middle East’, for its partisans the Kurdish case came to serve as a symbol of the neglect and ignorance that resulted from the ideological approach to global politics.159 References in Kouchner’s writing to the neglect of the Kurds were so frequent as to make their name synonymous with abandonment.160 He placed the responsibility for Kurdish isolation squarely with the international left: ‘Western opinion supported only causes designated by the left, and the left rarely had any causes other than those recognised by communism. So the Biafrans, the Biharis, the minorities lacking alliances were left to die’.161 The rejection of ideological paradigms – the refusal to choose ‘good and bad deaths’, what would now be described as part of respect for the principle of impartiality – was one of the characteristic features of sans-frontiériste action even as aspects of this humanitarian engagement showed the imprint of the revolutionary, tiers-mondiste ideas of its time.

conclusion If there was no moment of dramatic mutual rupture over Biafra, does this change the contemporary significance of sans-frontiérisme? The answer is, obviously, a resounding ‘no’. We need not fix a date and criteria for the first act of témoignage in order to recognise that the ideas associated with témoignage and the challenge to sovereignty have had a major effect on contemporary humanitarianism. This is not to deny the significance of those foundational ideas – and in a way recognising all the ambient difficulties and contingencies actually pays a greater tribute to their innovation than the simpler myth of a moment of indignation. Retrospective understandings can be as important, if not more so, than those expressed in the heat of the moment. Moreover, it allows a more rounded view of the sans-frontiériste model, which despite the focus on témoignage here and in many accounts of MSF’s founding is not only about the practice of speaking out. Another of its major contributions has been in the field of humanitarian logistics, a domain where MSF’s innovations date largely from the second half of the 1970s onwards.162 Logistical advances could

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only occur with increased experience and resources, but nonetheless hark back to an early aspiration to supply a flexible and fast-moving relief response where one was lacking. The current form of sans-frontiérisme thus reflects a process of inception, elaboration, and evolution rather than a moment of conception. Returning to its early history as both a narrative and a site of memory helps perceive how and why this process developed as it did. Situating this debate within its broader historical context has implications for views of sans-frontiérisme as an ideology as well as its place in the larger transformation of intellectual and political models in the last quarter of the twentieth century. It suggests that the ‘rupture’ of this period was not defined (or given the lie) by Récamier and Kouchner’s article or by the strictures of MSF’s 1971 charter, but was a more diffuse one related to numerous calls for a ‘new Dunant’ after aid models appeared to be failing not only in Biafra, but in Peru, Palestine, and Pakistan. It cautions against viewing the GIMCU doctors as ahead of their time in terms of the later ascendency of humanitarianism in international relations, or alternatively as the conservative precursors of more vocal future generations within MSF, instead showing them to be eminently of the era: critics of the international aid system whose models and networks remained influenced by those of the tiers-mondiste far left, but whose interests lay in pursuing different ways of engaging rather than existing forms of action. As more of those whose intellectual engagement with third-world suffering had taken a revolutionary form gradually changed their positions, the utopian elements of humanitarianism and human rights offered an alternative outlet and their global ambitions mirrored the scale of revolutionary thinking. But the division between sans-frontiéristes and tiersmondistes was not neat. Complicating the notion that humanitarianism and human rights represented a backlash against the misplaced utopianism of revolutionary politics, for several key sans-frontiériste activists experiences in the field provided the basis for a re-evaluation of their political paradigms. That is, they were humanitarians before they renounced their interest in radical politics. They continued to speak of solidarity after the sans-frontiériste movement had grown in scale and standing. Their experiences abroad had different goals than those of the tiers-mondistes, but they were part of a set of European internationalists who took the third world as their terrain during the Cold War and whose combined activism must be understood as much more in dialogue than in simple opposition.163

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One important way in which sans-frontiériste and tiers-mondiste concerns dovetailed was in the channelling of memories of the Second World War. References to the Second World War as part of militant engagements with third-world suffering were integral to the evolution of the wider French collective memory of the war. At the time of Biafra, the preoccupation with the Second World War was strong amongst certain radical thinkers, Jewish activists, and the ’68 generation (not mutually exclusive groups), and was on the eve of a resurgence in more mainstream debates. In Lavoinne’s view, French debates about Biafra were one of the channels that helped foster a more mainstream public memory of the Holocaust and the failure to prevent it.164 Later sans-frontiériste campaigns on behalf of Cambodia and Vietnam would also draw momentum from references to the Holocaust. In so doing they redeployed tropes used earlier by anti-colonial and anti-imperialist militants who also viewed racial and political violence through a Second World War lens.

2 Aiding the revolution Influences on tiers-mondisme

On 1 November 1954, the Front de Libération Nationale initiated a violent struggle against French colonial domination in Algeria. The war that ensued was a crucial moment in the history of decolonisation as in the history of third-worldism. It concentrated the attention of states, multilateral institutions, and international publics on the problems of colonial rule. Famously cast as a ‘savage war of peace’ because never officially declared, it dragged on for eight years, bringing violence into the métropole and establishing the FLN as a global revolutionary figurehead and the dominant force in Algerian politics for decades to come.1 The Algerian War was a brutal and bloody affair. Atrocities were committed on all sides, with the extensive use of torture and repression by the French forces paralleled by the terrorist acts of the FLN, and – towards the end of the war – the assassinations and bombing attacks of the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS).2 The war brought the collapse of the Fourth Republic, which had already overseen the loss of French colonies in Indochina, Morocco, and Tunisia, and – after the generals staged a junta in May 1958 – the return to power of Charles de Gaulle. Despite his return being sought by the junta, de Gaulle would manage the move towards Algerian independence. In April 1961, angered by the pro-independence tilt of the war and especially the secret negotiations that their government had begun with the FLN’s government-in-waiting, the Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Algérienne (GPRA), four retired military generals attempted another putsch. The greatest obstacle to Paris seeking a resolution of the conflict by this time was not its commitment to colonial rule in Algeria but its fear of losing control of its own army;3 eventually, as Todd Shepard demonstrated, it suited the government 50

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to sell decolonisation as progress.4 The Evian Accords ending the war were signed on 18 March 1962. Referenda were held in the two countries to confirm the accords and Algeria was officially declared independent on 3 July. By the end of the year alone, over 500,000 ‘pieds-noirs’ (ethnically French residents of Algeria) had abandoned the country in favour of France, as had some 25,000 ‘harkis’ (Algerians who fought on the French side).5 The campaign against the war stands alongside the Dreyfus Affair as one of the greatest struggles of the modern French intelligentsia.6 Repeated controversies over the conduct of the war and responsibility for its abuses, and thus the nature of its legacy, have kept Algeria in French public debates for decades. For French radicals it was a formative experience, a battle over identity with a lasting legacy. They celebrated the proclamation of Algerian independence as the beginning of the end for colonialism and, eventually, for imperialist capitalism. A year after the end of the war, the writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir confidently proclaimed that the Algerian example ‘announced the imminent decolonisation of the whole planet’.7 Post-independence Algiers became a Mecca for radical groups and individuals worldwide. During the war, its opponents connected the struggle against colonialism to the fight against fascism and racial violence. Memories of the Second World War played an important role in the rhetoric of anti-war campaigners, in a dynamic that Michael Rothberg termed ‘multidirectional memory’: the capacity of references to the past to impart meaning to a situation in the present even as they help to build a new interpretation of the past events they invoke. This concept emphasises the constructive role of the past in current debates, moving away from a ‘competitive’ model in which different pasts vie for attention towards a vision of these pasts in creative dialogue.8 As memories of the Algerian War in turn evolved, their continued connections with memories of the Second World War helped to drive public and official confrontations with some of the traumatic realities.9 Although there were a variety of levels to these connections, the Holocaust was ultimately the most important of them and the most powerful strategy in the denunciation of violence. Terms like responsibility, complicity, genocide, and humanity came to be associated with the extraction of lessons from the Second World War and would prove crucial to the evolution of French attitudes to suffering and injustice in the third world during decolonisation and in the post-colonial era. This chapter indicates the importance of the Algerian War in relation to intellectual engagement, tiers-mondiste militancy, and paradigms of

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memory. The first section lays out the dynamics of the war itself and the diplomatic battles it occasioned. The place of humanitarian action during the war demonstrated the capacity of emergency relief to channel, reinforce, or challenge, and even contradict, the political positions of its own practitioners as well as other stakeholders in the conflict. The discussion then takes up the anti-war campaign in France, conducted in the parallel press, in courtrooms, and in the clandestine networks that supported the FLN. Denunciation of torture was one of its central components; for those who turned towards tiers-mondisme, torture in Algeria epitomised the violence and racism integral to colonialism as a system. Anti-colonialism became a constitutive element of tiers-mondiste movements, which advocated global change through revolutionary violence and saw the newly identified third world as the key to transforming the corrupted politics of the West. The final section examines the ways that tiers-mondistes drew upon history to interpret the present and structure their own engagements. The mobilisation during the Spanish Civil War was an important source of inspiration, exemplified by the intellectual and military activism of André Malraux. Even more significant was the Second World War, which dominated the political landscape for younger militants who drove tiers-mondiste and, later, sans-frontiériste campaigns. References to mid century would recur regularly, even obsessively, in the language that activists applied to third-world events.

conflict in algeria It was not until 1999 that the Algerian War was officially recognised as such in France. When it was underway, the nationalist revolt against French rule was described euphemistically as ‘events’, a ‘rebellion’, an ‘insurrection’, the acts of ‘terrorists’ and ‘outlaws’; the authorities’ reaction was described as a ‘police operation’, as the ‘maintenance of law and order’ following the Special Powers vote of 1956, and as a ‘pacification’ exercise during the so-called Battle of Algiers of 1956–7.10 Nonetheless, as French troops in Algeria swelled through conscription to nearly half a million men, this became a difficult fiction to maintain. Civilians suffered waves of repression as the French military attempted to isolate the rebels from any source of support. They faced mass arrests and collective punishment. Civilians were also forced into detention camps, in a policy known as ‘regroupement’, which eventually saw two million Algerians living in centres that were meant to be ‘model villages’ but as often as not were simply barracks surrounded by barbed wire. The

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Morice Line, a 200-mile exclusion zone of fencing and landmines along the Tunisian border, separated fighters inside Algeria from their counterparts, resources, and key leaders outside. Like the walls that went up around ancient Rome, however, it was not a sign of strength but of weakness. The French approach became ‘a hash of high-minded ideals and harsh realities’ in which, ‘rather than complementing each other, policies of reform and repression were each the enemy of the other’.11 Algerians in France (and often many others from North Africa) also suffered surveillance and brutality at the hands of French security forces while also subject to the demands of the Fédération de France du FLN. Torture and summary executions were integral to the French military’s strategy in Algeria. The adoption of these ‘counter-insurgency’ methods was rationalised, especially from 1957 onwards, by the argument that they were necessary in order to meet the challenge of the rebels’ total commitment, by notions of urgency, and by the belief that they were effective.12 By one estimate, the authorities arrested 24,000 people out of a population of 80,000 in the Algiers Casbah, of which 80 per cent of male detainees and 66 per cent of female detainees were tortured; approximately 3,000 people ‘disappeared’. With FLN operatives in Algiers numbering roughly 1,500 (and assuming they were all amongst the 3,000 killed), this meant an estimated 15 people were tortured for each FLN member identified.13 General Paul Aussaresses, a veteran of the Resistance and the War of Indochina, ran the primary instruments of intelligence gathering and torture during the Battle of Algiers. In his frank and unapologetic account of their systematic deployment of torture, mass extrajudicial killings, and the faked suicides of Ali Boumendjel and Mohammed Larbi Ben M’hidi, Aussaresses insisted that ‘the use of this kind of violence, which is unacceptable under normal circumstances, could become inevitable in a situation that clearly defied every rule’.14 This is the ‘ticking bomb’ justification of terrorism, according to which the need to save ‘innocent’ lives excuses the use of brutal methods to extract information – suspicion itself usually counting as proof of guilt. As a justification it is widely discredited. In the case of Algeria, historian Raphaëlle Branche has argued that torture was not a functional exercise to make terrorists talk: ‘torture was designed chiefly to make people listen’.15 Like collective punishment and regroupement, it communicated to the civilian population as well as the FLN the military’s resolve to stamp out opposition. Repression took its toll, but the complex and evolving resistance structures established during the war prevented total defeat. By 1959, France found itself as close as it would get to internal military

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success, yet unable to achieve a victory and nowhere near the political solution that would allow the end of conflict. In such a context the international political battles of the war became decisive. This was not so much – or not only – because of the actual aid that international allies offered, but rather because both sides of the war believed that the ‘war for world opinion’ was pre-eminent and made their decisions on this basis. The FLN Proclamation of 1 November 1954, broadcast by the Cairo-based Voice of the Arabs radio service, announced the first of its ‘external objectives’ was the ‘internationalisation of the Algerian problem’.16 Within little more than a year the Front had set up its own clandestine broadcast service. The FLN’s diplomatic successes within the non-aligned movement – its representation at the Bandung Conference in April 1955, which brought together Asian and African countries, its adoption as a cause by the anti-colonial bloc at the United Nations – challenged the French position that the ‘events in North Africa’ were a domestic matter. The FLN established eight permanent offices around the world, the most important of which was in New York, where with the crucial support of its allies it campaigned to bring the war onto the UN’s agenda.17 At the same time, seeking to counter what it believed was undue foreign influence, France turned to its own allies for support, but without success. When Interior Minister François Mitterrand declared in 1954, ‘L’Algérie c’est la France’, it was not rhetoric. Algeria was not merely a colony but administratively part of France, with Alger, Oran, and Constantine forming three départements from 1848 onwards. Yet most of those born in Algeria were not French citizens, large swathes of territory were excluded from that arrangement, and their residents saw little of the supposed benefits of French rule. In 1954, the entire population could call upon fewer than 1,900 doctors, including only seventy-five Algerians.18 Some places had to wait for health and education services until the establishment of the Services Administratives Spéciaux (SAS) as part of the counter-insurgency strategy during the war.19 The FLN exploited humanitarian and human rights forums to internationalise the war. The UN Human Rights Commission, for example, received masses of communication about French conduct in Algeria, evidence of the FLN’s success in raising the profile of its cause. At the time, the Commission was a key battleground of international anticolonialism.20 Another important reference point was the domain of international humanitarian law. Throughout the war the FLN sought to maximise the publicity benefits of its claimed commitment to international

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humanitarian law, for instance through prisoner releases used to highlight its respect for laws of war, and to draw attention to France’s crimes. In 1960, as peace negotiations got underway, the GPRA released a White Paper on the Application of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 to the French-Algerian Conflict explaining why it believed the Geneva Conventions to be applicable to the war and denouncing French violations.21 The GPRA thus used its engagement with international law to reinforce its image as a government-in-exile and to focus attention on French abuses. The overtures of the ICRC aided the FLN in its goal of leveraging this engagement. Historians at the ICRC have described its approach to the FLN as pioneering and a ‘model for its commitment in subsequent conflicts’.22 The Committee first established contact with the FLN in February 1956, some 16 months before France recognised the applicability of the Geneva Conventions’ Common Article 3 to the conflict. It thus reached out to the FLN early on, before the evolution of the latter’s image (at least in certain circles) from one of terrorists and outlaws to that of an acceptable interlocutor for peace negotiations. Indeed, it was partly through contact with organisations like the ICRC that the FLN was able to develop its diplomatic credentials abroad. Of course, the ICRC’s relationship with the French authorities was no less fraught. There has been some suggestion that Pierre Mendès France, Prime Minister at the war’s outbreak, authorised the Committee’s access to Algeria with a view to preventing the worst potential future excesses.23 While not recognising the armed conflict as such, Mendès France indicated in February 1955 that delegates could visit detention sites related to the ‘events in North Africa’ and offer aid to detainees and their families, but would not be given lists of names.24 The first of the ICRC’s missions to Algeria took place in March of that year, their conduct affected by the shifting tensions between the Paris politicians and colonial and military authorities. Because delegates reported their findings to Paris, authorities in Algiers sometimes suspected them of surveillance with political goals. Although the agreement struck with Mendès France allowed access in principle, delegates often had to negotiate again with heads of individual sites and could not always ensure unsupervised interviews (a core feature of the ICRC’s prison visit technique since the expansion of this practice during the First World War).25 These difficulties were exposed in January 1960 when an employee of the Ministry of Justice handed one of the Committee’s reports to journalist Pierre Viansson-Ponté, who had it published in Le Monde. While the French government was forced to at least pay lip service to calls for better regulation of practices of detention

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and interrogation, the episode also caused delays in the next mission and exacerbated the military’s hostile attitude towards the ICRC. The FLN opened up local health and medical problems to international attention and concern through humanitarian programmes and institutions. The FLN integrated humanitarian ideas and structures into its strategies, using domestic issues for international effect while also trying to internationalise the war itself through humanitarian frameworks. In 1957 the FLN founded the Croissant Rouge Algérien (CRA) to provide assistance inside Algeria and to refugees in neighbouring countries. The CRA was part of a larger network of health and social services provided by the FLN (originally through its army’s medical auxiliaries). However, the CRA’s contacts with the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement made it particularly useful in the diplomatic war: although in the absence of an independent state of Algeria the CRA could not officially be a member of the movement, it courted relationships with the ICRC and various Red Cross and Red Crescent National Societies, arguing that it ‘pursued the exact same goals’ as the rest of the movement.26 Sympathetic governments in North Africa, the Middle East, and the Soviet bloc supported these efforts by hosting wounded soldiers or providing training. Algeria also inspired one of the earliest missions of Cuban international medical aid, with solidarity during the war leading to the deployment of Cuban doctors and nurses throughout the country from 1962 onwards.27 The CRF, for its part, saw itself as a value-driven player in a contest for the future of Algeria. Recognising that it was confronting a ‘genuine situation of war [de véritables circonstances de guerre]’,28 the CRF consistently presented its role in Algeria as one in which ‘our human duty meets . . . our national duty’.29 Its commitment to l’Algérie française was evident in reports by CRF President André François-Poncet, an esteemed diplomat and politician, and other submissions to the CRF’s general assembly held at the end of each year. At the 1956 meeting, FrançoisPoncet emphasised the organisation’s dual role: on one hand, it was to ‘assist the afflicted French and especially Muslim populations and to show, particularly to the latter, the face of France – humane, charitable and yet cynically and offensively defamed, and, on the other hand, we had to extend our care to our soldiers conscripted to serve throughout the territory’.30 Jean Malmejac, responsible for reporting on the CRF’s activities in the Union Française, was even more forthright. His 1955 report described Algeria as a part of France, denounced the violence of a ‘barbarian horde’ conducting reprisals against civilians, and praised the settler communities for their contribution to the Red Cross and to the future

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of Algeria. In a clear example of the CRF’s political collusion with the French authorities, he celebrated the organisation’s work teaching conscripts about the value of France’s role in Africa and the close ties between France and its colonies.31 The following year Malmejac opened his report with a florid declaration of support for metropolitan and colonial soldiers ‘fighting heroically side by side against a barbaric enemy’. The record notes that his speech at this point was interrupted by applause. He concluded it, after reporting on the CRF’s activities in the French colonies, with an elegy to the shared intellectual achievements and spirit of peace of French and Islamic civilisations.32 Despite this evident commitment to the French presence in Algeria and an obvious regret when the end of this presence began to seem inevitable, CRF personnel continued to assert their organisation’s impartiality and even neutrality in Algeria. Moreover, they presented this supposed impartiality as one of their most powerful assets in a campaign to win support for retaining ties between France and Algeria. In 1959, following de Gaulle’s decision to hold a referendum on self-determination, FrançoisPoncet contended that it was inappropriate for the CRF to take a position on this policy, yet saw in it a reason to reinforce the organisation’s aid efforts in Algeria. Algerians’ attitudes to the vote would be coloured, he argued, by their attitude to the French: ‘If they see us as effective guardians [protecteurs], friends, caring and helpful brothers, they will want to remain by our side. And who better than the Red Cross, who better than its nurses, its ambulance drivers, its assistants, the members of its Councils and Committees, to show them face of clemency, of solidarity, of affectionate generosity, that is the true face of France?’33 Two years later, in the context of ever-increasing polarisation, François-Poncet surmised that respect for the principled service of the CRF was ‘perhaps the only subject on which everyone in Algeria was in agreement’ whether military or civilian, ‘European’ or ‘Muslim’, ‘whether they are loyal or in revolt’.34 He reiterated these claims about the CRF’s impartiality and neutrality after the war’s end.35 For the CRF the challenge of decolonisation was a matter of organisational and institutional identity as well as national pride. Discussions at the annual general assembly indicated that the CRF was very much aware of the importance of international public opinion in the Algerian War and of the role of humanitarian action within that campaign.36 Three years into the war, at the Nineteenth International Conference of the Red Cross in New Delhi in October–November 1957, the CRF found itself fending off a censure motion proposed by the National Societies of Syria, Jordan,

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and Iraq, supported by Lebanon, Egypt, and Vietnam. A French decree of 22 December 1956 had established a ‘medical blockade’ of Algeria, banning the import of many medical supplies and making the sale of certain materials subject to the reporting of the buyer’s name to authorities, as well as allowing the prosecution of medical personnel who had treated members of the FLN.37 The CRF thus found itself fending off charges that it only treated the French army while ignoring the suffering of Algerian civilians; that it abandoned those who had sought refuge at the borders with Tunisia and Morocco; that it refused to offer medical care to wounded rebels; and other criticisms relating to the policies of the French authorities.38 After heated debate, the Conference passed resolutions affirming the importance of assistance to Algerian refugees, enshrining the need for independent medical care within civil conflicts, and protecting medical confidentiality, but without mention of France.39 Subsequently, the ICRC used these resolutions in representations to the French government about their restriction of medical care in the conflict.40 Evidently bruised by the experience of the Conference, François-Poncet noted that the Red Cross movement may have ‘made the same mistake as the UN’ in admitting too many new members, ‘totally ignorant and devoid of the spirit’ that constituted its raison d’être.41 The movement was at risk of degenerating, he later affirmed, into a ‘battlefield’ like the UN had become.42 This anxiety must be understood in light of criticisms of the CRF’s role in Algeria but also, and perhaps more importantly, the successive identity shifts that decolonisation represented for the CRF as it gradually lost its chapters in Indochina, North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa as colonies gained their independence. Concern about this process permeated the CRF’s annual reflections. In 1962 it tellingly described the loss of its committees in Algeria as an ‘amputation’.43 For supporters of decolonisation, these changes were received very differently. After the war, social, economic, and political programmes in the newly independent nation were continued by the FLN’s backers and allies, Cuba’s medical and educational programmes being perhaps the most prominent.44 French militants who supported the FLN also moved to the newly independent nation with a view to contributing to the revolution in train; until this point, revolutionary visitors to the territory itself had been relatively few.45 They were dubbed ‘pieds-rouges’, an ideological variation on the name for the French settlers in Algeria, known as piedsnoirs. When they arrived in Algeria, the pieds-rouges took on projects that reflected the ideological motivation of their travel. One particularly

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fertile terrain was the press and propaganda service. French Trotskyists in Algiers worked at El Moudjahid, the French-language organ of the FLN; they worked for the Algérie Presse Services; they contributed to the paper of the Union Générale de Travailleurs Algériens; pieds-rouges also managed the Bureau d’Animation du Secteur Socialiste, a State-sponsored organisation that published the bulletin L’Algérie dans le monde.46 From Maoist circles, Tiennot Grumbach, later an établi before becoming a lawyer specialised in the defence of workers’ rights, moved to Algeria in the summer of the year of its independence and pursued contacts with the many revolutionary movements that had established offices in Algiers. He helped found the Institut de Gestion et de Planification Socialiste, organised a training camp at Sidi Ferruch attended by other French Maoists, and returned to France at the end of 1964.47 In the medical field, doctor and political activist Jean-Michel Krivine went in summer 1963 to the northern region of Kabylie to establish a training school for rural doctors.48 Several examples of similar trajectories figured amongst a series of interviews by the historian Martin Evans, including pieds-rouges who had stints in Algeria extending to nearly two decades.49 Contributing to revolutionary Algeria offered French militants an escape from the exploitative, corrupt hypocrisy of the West. Part solidarity, part ideology, part altruism, their missions are a reminder of the tensions and connections between political engagement and humanitarianism and sit within a broader story of transnational activism in the post-war period. They reflected opposition to the war as well as a radical interpretation of its global meaning.

the origins of tiers-mondisme Starting modestly and for a long time a minority engagement, from 1956 the campaign against the Algerian War grew to become one of the most important sites of intellectual mobilisation in contemporary France. Less than a year after the war’s end, Michel Crouzet described it as a bataille de l’écrit for the French left, conducted from the beginning and victorious. The war over control of Algeria became, on the page and in the streets, a battle for the identity, even the honour of France.50 Numerous committees, specialised journals, and parts of the mainstream press shared the task of documentation and denunciation. Crouzet himself was involved in two of the best known, the journal Vérité-Liberté and the Comité Maurice Audin. This work grew in importance as state repression and censorship intensified, with the ‘parallel press’ supported notably by the Maspero

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and Minuit publishing houses – the latter born as a clandestine publisher during the Occupation of 1940–44. For some campaigners and militants the engagement went further, galvanising a new belief in the revolutionary potential of the third world. For the committees and many others, the denunciation of torture was central to the anti-war campaign. Although anti-colonial politics were rarely far from criticism of the war, opposition to torture and other human rights abuses allowed opponents of the war to articulate a moral stance not dependent on political positions. Torture was a ‘cancer’, a ‘plague’, it ate away at the French nation like ‘gangrene’.51 Dossiers included evidence such as eyewitness accounts, testimony from medical experts, and photographic evidence. Opponents of the war and critics of its methods, including for example the FLN’s collective of lawyers and Gilberte Alleg (wife of Henri, arrested and tortured in Algiers), submitted information to the ICRC in the hopes of increasing international pressure on French authorities.52 The case of Djamila Boupacha, whom French paratroopers tortured and raped, drew attention to the abuse inflicted upon women.53 Such campaigns made French success in the Battle of Algiers a Pyrrhic victory: effective as a tool of repression, the brutal methods used in Algiers had the opposite effect in terms of the diplomatic war over Algeria’s future.54 Fallout from the French use of torture has continued for decades after the war’s end, as anti-war veterans and historians have campaigned for the recognition of abuses and the opening of archives while perpetrators offered their own interpretations of ‘the question’. This phrase became the title of one of the most famous accounts during the war, by journalist and editor Henri Alleg. Tortured by paratroopers during a four-month imprisonment in 1957, Alleg managed to smuggle an account of his ordeal out of a civil prison. Its style was unembellished, but his control of language was crucial to its power – one of the torturers, for instance, speaks in a ‘little pointed voice which came out like the honeyed and spoilt tones of a vicious choirboy’.55 Careful to insist that his case was not unique, Alleg was nonetheless an exception – able to speak out while so many remained anonymous. Sartre provided the preface, a compelling indictment of the insidious, blunt, and dehumanising effects of torture for those who undergo it but also for its perpetrators. The truth, he wrote, is that ‘torture makes torturers’. Despite the strength of his condemnation, Sartre’s reflection on Alleg was a sombre affair, without the Sorelian incitation to violence of his preface to The Wretched of the Earth, written only a couple of years later. His final words were a call for compromise: ‘If we want to put an end to the atrocious and bleak cruelty, and save France

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from this disgrace and the Algerians from this hell, there has always been and still is only one way: to open negotiations and to make peace’.56 Some groups combined anti-torture campaigning with other forms of active opposition to the war. One example was the work of SPF, a Communist relief and solidarity organisation, which arguably led its parent organisation with regards to the mobilisation against the war. SPF had its roots in the French chapter of Moscow’s International Red Aid network, created in 1923; after a period of clandestinity during the Occupation it re-emerged under the name that it has used ever since. During the Algerian War, and actually dating from the Sétif massacres of 1945, SPF’s engagement was ‘almost total’.57 SPF offered assistance in the form of food, clothing, and medications for people in Algeria as well as refugees in Tunisia and Morocco. It supported the CRA during and after the war, helping to channel aid from the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO), unions, and other left-wing associations; campaigned against the use of torture; and provided assistance within France, for instance following the massacres of October 1961 and at Charonne station in February 1962 and in support of conscripts who refused service. However, it was in the legal domain that SPF’s contribution was most significant and effective: as of March 1956, it maintained a continuous presence in the three military tribunals active in Algeria. Like other campaigners and militants, SPF considered the dissemination of information as paramount, stating in 1957 that through such work it ‘remains faithful to one of its most important objectives: the defence of justice and legality, respect for the rights and dignity of man no matter his status or opinions’.58 Similarly, the Protestant organisation Cimade combined aid work inside Algeria with support for Algerians in France, including those held in centres de regroupement and detention centres in both locations.59 As the war dragged on and young men were called up to serve not only once, but for a second time, protests of the conscripts became an important part of the anti-war campaign. Some deserters, notably Maurice Maschino and Jean-Louis Hurst, known as ‘Maurienne’, achieved individual notoriety by publishing their experiences. The importance of desertion is suggested by its inclusion in the most famous petition of the period, the Manifeste des 121 of 5 September 1960 (although censorship prevented the text itself being printed on that day). Its 121 signatories declared: We respect and consider justified the refusal to take up arms against the Algerian people.

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We respect and consider justified the conduct of Frenchmen who believe it their duty to offer assistance and protection to oppressed Algerians in the name of the French people. The cause of the Algerian people, which is a decisive contribution to the destruction of the colonial system, is the cause of all free men.60

Despite reservations about the ethics of relatively protected public figures seeming to incite far more vulnerable young conscripts to break the law, this catalysing petition obliged all intellectuals, whether on the left or the right, to situate themselves in relation to its statements.61 The manifesto described a situation of inverted civic values: as those in power were conducting a violent and racist war, acts of ‘treason’ were in fact the only way to uphold courage and justice. This logic applied to the ‘porteurs de valises’ (suitcase carriers) whose clandestine networks helped sustain the FLN’s access to funds and arms. However, going further than justifying opposition to the Algerian War, the manifesto evoked a radical change in global power relations. Decolonisation was not just for Algeria, nor was it only of concern to the colonised, but an issue in which all were implicated. Though there were many among the 121 who could not be considered revolutionaries, the hint of tiers-mondisme was there in the final line, speaking of the Algerian movement as ‘the cause of all free men’. For those who joined the networks of porteurs de valises, a personal and physical investment on the side of the FLN often reflected revolutionary hopes for the Algerian cause. In 1961, almost 80 per cent of FLN funds came from Algerian workers resident in France and the main function of the clandestine networks was to smuggle this money out of the country.62 Much of this money went on the purchase of arms for the use of the FLN. Such was the impact of the support networks that they, along with other sympathisers, became the subject of an assassination plot by military authorities in Algiers. According to Aussaresses, twelve individuals were identified for ‘neutralisation’ in the form of execution: ‘There was no reason to treat them any better than the way we were treating the Muslim rebels’.63 The Jeanson and Curiel networks were and remain the best known – because of their size, because of the publicity they gained from judicial proceedings during the war, and because of their appearance in early studies.64 Although the porteurs de valises contributed to the antiwar cause in a very different way from the committees and petitioners, the diverse contributions interacted, with for instance the effect of the Manifeste des 121 amplified by its coincidence with the trial of the Jeanson network.65

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The courtroom offered supporters of Algerian independence a platform for their cause. Those who found themselves in the dock took the opportunity to denounce the crimes of their accusers. During the trial of the writer Georges Arnaud, for example, a series of intellectuals spoke in favour of the freedom of the press and the defence called militants from the prison at Fresnes to give evidence.66 The Jeanson trial provided a forum for Paul Teitgen, former secretary general of police in Algiers, to give evidence about the use of torture which had prompted his resignation.67 These courtroom battles brought lawyers to the fore of the anti-war debates both in France and Algeria. Lawyers served as one of the channels of communication between struggles in the two countries and helped to articulate the militants’ cause outside the courtroom. Women figured prominently, both in the dock and at the bar. But it was Jacques Vergès, spokesman of the Collectif des Avocats pour le FLN, who became the most notorious amongst them and the individual most associated with the ‘défense de rupture’ used for pro-independence militants in Algeria.68 This strategy of opposition denied the validity of French authority over Algeria and thus the legitimacy of the courts themselves; it was a strategy based on a refusal of dialogue and innately linked to the colonial context. It was, in effect, a way of bringing the colonial system itself under interrogation. Vergès and others, including Mourad Oussedik, Abdessamad Benabdallah, Maurice Courrégé, and Michel Zavrian, also defended porteurs de valises in France. Published dossiers of their work, banned from circulation, called for a ‘Nuremberg for Algeria’.69 A passionate anti-colonialist and specialist in the legal defence of the far left, Vergès consistently drew comparisons between Nazi crimes and French colonial violence. As the son of a Vietnamese mother and Réunionnais father, he was acutely sensitive to colonial suffering. His memoirs declared that ‘my birth in the colonies cured me of a blind faith in justice’.70 In summer 1962, after the agreement for Algerian independence, Vergès called for the prosecution of those guilty of torture during the war. He insisted upon the need for the immediate prosecution of war criminals in the name of the victims and as a deterrent to others of their kind: ‘if they had been condemned each time, in their era, for their crimes, the centurions may have hesitated a little more before torturing Ben M’hidi, poisoning Moumié, assassinating Lumumba or, after that of the Algerians, organising the massacre of the Angolans and the Luba people’.71 For Vergès, the condemnation of the horrors of colonialism sprang from the same moral obligation as did the condemnation of Nazi atrocities.

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No Nuremberg for Algeria would ever come. Rather, the perceived need to put to rest the violence and divisions of decolonisation and a desire to placate the military meant a series of amnesties for acts in Algeria accompanied the end of the war. By 1959, de Gaulle had been convinced of the inevitability of Algerian independence. As a settlement approached, official French discourses gradually came to reflect the idea that decolonisation represented an advance in the progression of history and a victory for the French Republic as well as the Algerian nation.72 The tide of public opinion also turned and the retrograde cruelty of the OAS during the conflict’s final stages could not change this. Yet the most radical of French anti-war campaigners often retained feelings of alienation and revulsion at their own society. Although their radicalism had varied shades, they shared a perception of decolonisation as the defining cause of the time. As an editorial in Partisans put it: Algeria was ‘the avant-garde of the peoples’ struggle for liberty; our solidarity with them has been a decisive experience for us’.73 On 14 August 1952, in L’Observateur, French demographer Alfred Sauvy was the first to speak of the ‘third world [tiers monde]’. He used this term to refer to a body of nations ‘ignored, exploited, and despised, like the Third Estate’ that had proclaimed its rights during the French Revolution of 1789. Contemporary events across the globe seemed to endorse Sauvy’s evocation of the third world’s ‘slow and irresistible thrust, humble and fierce, towards life’. The tendency to overlook the existence of the third world, Sauvy argued, had obscured the fact that competition for influence over it was the main reason for the situation of war between the first and second (capitalist and communist) worlds.74 A few months later, reflecting on a tour of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1952–3, journalist and critic Claude Roy wrote of the emerging global dynamic: There is an international of undernourishment and of under-existence, as there is an international of wealth. But in this world until now divided solely by the contrasts of misery and opulence, where lice, tuberculosis and trachoma had no homeland, where the seal of impetigo on the skulls of Egyptian fellahs, Chinese peasants and Chilean miners left on different coloured skins the same white brand of destiny, in this ‘lethal little world’, there is something new. It is the existence of a certain number of countries where the exploitation of man by man has definitively ended.75

Reasons piled up for French militants to turn away from the moribund politics of the West towards the exciting new movements in the third world. French left-wing militants were disgusted with the ‘dirty war’

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techniques of their Socialist Government and the hypocrisy of the rightsbased rhetoric it used to describe the French nation. The PCF’s approval of the special powers law of 12 March 1956, giving the security forces free rein in Algeria, was a significant factor in its plummeting membership, frustration and disillusionment contributing directly to the radicalisation of the left. Intellectual alienation from the PCF was exacerbated by the Soviet Union’s brutal suppression of revolt in Hungary in November of the same year.76 The significance of the Vietnamese victory at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954 was immense: for the first time a third-world guerrilla army had defeated a traditional European and colonial military. The Bandung Conference the following year provided another marker of the global climb of Africa and Asia; according to one French intelligence officer, it announced ‘the beginning of the end of the supremacy of the white race’.77 At the same time, third-world writers, thinkers, and leaders began to command attention in the French political and literary scenes.78 Crystallising the issues of colonialism, power, revolution, and violence, the Algerian War became the crucible of a tiers-mondiste imaginary. This claim has been made of third-worldism as a world-wide movement, with solidarity committees in other countries also an important vector for radical engagement, but also more specifically of its French forms. Decolonisation and the global world order that would follow were fundamental matters for third-worldism in all of its incarnations, although the degree of radicalism and attitude to the role of violence were not consistent or constant.79 Amongst many currents, Algeria had a central position because of the ferocity and duration of its war – considered a revolution by its supporters – and the FLN’s internationalisation campaign. As one partisan put it: ‘we believed’.80 Pierre Vidal-Naquet, a classical historian and himself an active opponent of the war, divided the campaign into three tendencies: the Dreyfusards, the Bolsheviks, and the tiers-mondistes. To the first group he attributed largely patriotic motivations, while the tiersmondistes he distinguished from their fellow Marxists by ‘their humility as Westerners in relation to the third world, suffering and in revolt’.81 Although Vidal-Naquet’s analysis was no doubt affected by his vantage point of the mid 1980s, and while of course not all of those in France who mobilised against the war were influenced by revolutionary politics, this was one of the legacies of the anti-war campaign for French activists of the 1960s and 1970s. For Vidal-Naquet and many others since, the tiers-mondiste movement – and in particular its connection with the Algerian War – was epitomised by Sartre’s preface to Frantz Fanon’s Les damnés de la terre (1961).

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At the time of its publication, Fanon, a psychiatrist born in Martinique, was recognised as a theoretician of the Algerian liberation struggle.82 Sartre’s preface to Fanon declared that ‘the Third World discovers itself and speaks to itself through this voice’. Sartre’s text has become the most emblematic expression of the tiers-mondiste rationalisation of revolutionary violence. He advocated a militant and military anti-colonialism, highlighting the guilt of the European coloniser and insisting upon the essentially brutal nature of the colonised peoples’ struggle for liberation. When the revolt begins, the philosopher wrote, ‘killing is a necessity: killing a European is killing two birds with one stone, eliminating in one go oppressor and oppressed: leaving one man dead and the other man free’. The violence of the liberation struggle was for Sartre simply the violence of the oppressor deployed against its origins; the ‘hurricane’ inflicted by the rebels, merely justice given that ‘we have sown the wind’. He proclaimed that ‘the colonised are cured of colonial neurosis by driving the colonist out by force. . . . Either one must remain terrified or become terrifying’.83 In the logic that Sartre presented, European civilisation was destined either for collapse or for annihilation by self-betrayal. He argued that the use of force brought a colonising power to a choice between surrender and genocide: ‘failing to carry the massacre to the point of genocide, and servitude to a state of mindlessness, he cracks up, the situation is reversed, and an implacable logic leads to decolonisation’. Sartre made clear that ‘the coloniser’ did not refer only to those who represented colonial power or occupation, but rather to Europeans as a whole, who all benefitted from colonialism. Europeans in Sartre’s portrayal were greedy, racist, hypocritical, oppressed, guilty, and sick with fear; they were traumatised by the realisation that ‘the only way the European could make himself man was by fabricating slaves and monsters’. Their loss of control was not to be regretted, and in any case could not be prevented. The values dear to European civilisation were each and every one of them ‘tainted with blood’.84 Such dramatic language earned Sartre’s preface a rapid notoriety that continues to be reflected in accounts of tiers-mondiste ideas and movements.85 However, its status as a paradigmatic text has been questioned, with one historian of Sartre’s anti-colonialism suggesting that it should not be read as a ‘serious meditation on violence’ but as an intentionally polemical intervention, ‘a muckraking, inflammatory text, whose sole basis for existence was to provoke and scandalise’, and too extreme to be indicative of Sartre’s sustained reflection on colonialism and racism since the 1940s.86 This is a welcome reminder regarding a text too easily

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derided. Yet it is still ironic that one of the most famous texts ever published by the Editions Maspero, which aimed to draw attention to ‘those voices who never had . . . the right to speak’, was by a canonical French writer. Even more paradoxically, it was written to accompany an original piece by a third-world author, precisely the type of Eurocentric mediation that the publisher had tried to avoid. Maspero himself claimed not to have enjoyed the text and criticised it for having ‘masked’ Fanon’s more vital message.87 Sartre’s preface has been seen as reducing Fanon’s message to a glorification of the use of violence.88 There was also a reductive element in the way that Sartre’s portrayal of a newly self-conscious third world drew upon exotic evocations of African tribal dance and the imagery of the natural world. Finally, for all his criticism of his own culture, it was the salvation of Europe that Sartre advocated through the reading of Fanon.89 Sartre also contributed one of the most passionate French texts on revolutionary Cuba: a series of sixteen articles published in June–July 1960 and collectively known as Ouragan sur le sucre. Though certain articles sought to examine the state of the Cuban society and economy after the victory of Fidel Castro in 1959, it is clear that Sartre’s real passion lay in the regenerative power he saw at work in third-world revolution – a transformative violence often associated in this period with the cult of the guerrilla fighter. He described how during a revolution, ‘society breaks its bones with hammer blows, demolishes its structures, overthrows its institutions’, until the ‘moment of most radical destruction’ allows a new system to be established in its place. He acknowledged that ‘the remedy is extreme; it is often necessary to impose it by violence’. Their will to selfsacrifice gave the rebels an advantage: ‘the first weakness of the oppressor results from his need to impose his regime on the living. Before the game begins, the regime has lost. If the Cuban people prefer to erase themselves from history, the colonial status would disappear with them’.90 Sartre’s writing on Cuba was tied to his advocacy of Algerian independence and his celebration of revolutionary violence. The language Sartre used when writing about Cuba reflected his assumption that economic neo-colonialism (in the Latin American case) was merely a reincarnation of official political colonialism (which survived for two more years in North Africa). Indeed, according to de Beauvoir, his understanding of Fanon’s Les damnés de la terre was formed during his Cuban experience.91 The outlandish style of Sartre’s writing on Cuba – described as dogmatic, superficial, naïve, and ignorant – has done little for his reputation.92 Nevertheless, it constituted perhaps the most emblematic French text on the Cuban Revolution.

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The rationalisation and sometimes even celebration of political violence by tiers-mondiste militants continued a path forged by earlier proponents of revolutionary violence. Justifications of revolutionary violence had a Jacobin heritage and a Marxist renewal, both of which denied protections to those considered the enemies of freedom and progress.93 Communist fellow travellers in the interwar and post-war period were important contributors to this discourse, as they sought to explain the terror and oppression of the Soviet Union with reference to history – not just historical precedents, but the forward march of History in which the role of violence was both inevitable and desirable.94 A sense of danger facing the revolution could rationalise violence and the abuse of justice, notably in the show trials of dissenters, opponents, and scapegoats, which some fellow travellers compared with the purges of collaborators after the French Liberation from German occupation. More profoundly, however, in a world where violence was everywhere (found in the violence of capitalism, for instance, or of colonialism), revolutionary violence was justified because it was the right kind of violence, its goals were historically the right ones. Justifications of the use of violence by its ends – seen for instance in the writing of Georges Sorel and Maurice Merleau-Ponty – often ran into problems around the unpredictability of outcomes as well as the precise nature of the relationship between means and ends. For this reason, advocates of revolutionary violence also often turned to notions of virtue, whether in the form of proletarian violence, in Sorel’s case, or anti-colonial violence for Fanon and Sartre.95 Those who considered the Soviet Union as no longer revolutionary enough to be a legitimate source of violence conferred this privilege on third-world regimes, turning the same blind eye or finding a beauty in the violence they beheld: ‘What was lifted was one cloud of political illusions; but the assumptions that had shaped them, the intoxicating vision of collective betterment, the benefit of the doubt given to all utopian projects, were hardly dented’.96 Many of these groups, the most violent of which were not in France, also sought to transform their own societies through the importation of revolutionary terror to the West.97 Assumptions about the inevitability of the revolutionary process reflected the way in which tiers-mondisme, even as its activists looked to parts of the world which had never before been considered fertile for revolt, represented a reworking of the Marxist belief in progress and a rational history. In their relationship to the history of the revolutionary project, tiers-mondistes sought a balance between due homage to their predecessors and the aspiration to forge their own path; between a set

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of political and cultural references that reflected their own sense of place and a world-wide vision in which the West was no longer the dominant force.

a past in the present At a certain level tiers-mondiste militants consciously repudiated those who had come before them. One Maoist recalled their sense that ‘we were alone, without preceding generations upon whom we could rely: they had all betrayed’.98 For these activists, the new promise of its politics was part of the third world’s appeal. Yet they were also steeped in history and consciously cultivated memories of militancy as well as remembrance of past injustice; and later, when they looked back on their own engagement, many would see a repetition of the mistakes of previous generations. Even as they sought escape from the tainted politics of their own continent, tiers-mondistes continued to map their political landscape with reference to European landmarks. Nowhere was this more evident than in the histories they invoked. The French revolutionary tradition provided a potent way to build the progressive aspirations of third-world countries into a narrative of French political engagement. At the height of the 1968 upheavals, Partisans paid tribute to the historical inspirations of the protesters and their global ambitions: ‘fighting to change the world, the students, young workers and the unemployed, the working class celebrated at the same time, in the only possible worthy manner, the different anniversaries of the Paris Commune, the Russian October, the centenary of Karl Marx’s Capital’.99 The Paris Commune of 1871 was a central reference for tiers-mondistes, allusions to the Commune in retrospective and fictionalised accounts suggesting its powerful place in their political imaginary.100 Some tiers-mondistes had sought to draw lessons from the experience of the Commune for their own action. Paradoxically, this practice led Maoists in Paris to stay out of May ’68: convinced that authorities were attempting to stage a repetition of the semaine sanglante when the Commune was overthrown and its supporters slaughtered, the UJC(ml) ordered its members to stay off the streets.101 In the early 1970s, the Gauche Prolétarienne (GP), one of the UJC(ml)’s successor organisations, reflected upon the dilemma they identified in the experience of the Commune: how to avoid the entrapment and destruction of the revolutionary base.102 French tiers-mondiste militants were also eager to identify links with the Commune in thirdworld revolutionary movements, as in February 1967 when Red Guards

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in Shanghai proclaimed the establishment of the ‘Shanghai Commune’ and celebrated it over the airwaves as heir to the Paris Commune.103 The Soviet Union and the 1917 Revolution offered another key reference for French revolutionaries, including tiers-mondistes, although this was troubled by contemporary Communist politics. It was not a question of abandoning what came before them, Partisans argued, but understanding the need for a kind of revolutionary heresy; this itself was a lesson that emerged from each of the Commune, the October Revolution, the Chinese Long March, the Cuban guerrilla movement, and the Vietnam War.104 Though Castroists in particular celebrated the improvisational, autochthonous road to revolution that the third world seemed to take, new revolutionary movements were to be considered ‘in light of a constant return to the origins and principles of Marxism-Leninism’.105 However, the authoritarian turn taken by the Soviet Union and echoed by the PCF was highly influential in the embrace of the third world. The PCF was one of the most powerful Communist parties in Western Europe, emerging strongly from the Second World War due to its crucial role in resistance to German Occupation. Having remained loyal to Stalinism, by the 1950s it had closer links to the Soviet Union than any other Western European Communist party.106 In 1956, when in quick succession the PCF responded negatively to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s speech about Stalinist errors (February) and acquiesced to ‘special powers’ for the repression of the independence movement in Algeria (March), many militants and intellectuals found their commitment to Party Communism shaken and turned elsewhere. Claude Roy, who was a PCF member before converting to Maoism, described how he sought refuge in China in order to ‘to meet with Jules Vernes, intuit Zhuangzi, obey Claudel, verify Karl Marx and console myself for Stalin’.107 The consolation, for Roy at least, was short-lived, but his desire to salvage Marxism from the taint of Stalin was shared by many who engaged with revolutionary politics in the third world. The issue of Stalinism determined the relationship between the PCF and the variegated gauchiste movement of which the tiers-mondismes were part. It was a relationship of mutual hostility. In the mid 1960s, a cohort of radical and unorthodox factions within the Union des Étudiants Communistes (UEC) managed to push it away from the PCF/Soviet line, until key figures in the renegade groups were forced out in 1965. Many of them, along with the students of Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser ousted the following year, advocated alternative paths such as Castroism and Maoism. PCF members were referred to as ‘Stals’ in far-left militant

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slang. The PCF returned the favour by labelling them ‘gauchistes’, a term first used by Lenin in a 1920 essay criticising movements to the left of the Soviet Communist Party and revived in 1968 by Georges Marchais, soon to be head of the PCF.108 The PCF also (not without some justification) derided their leftist flank as ‘groupuscules’, a pejorative term for tiny organisations also applied to Trotskyists in the 1930s. For gauchistes, the PCF was even more corrupt than the right, having betrayed their revolutionary mission through Stalinism abroad and parliamentary compromise in France. Nonetheless, their obsession with history meant tiers-mondistes continued to perform a kind of respect for the Communist movement even as they spoke of its betrayal. The mobilisation for Republican Spain was another influential historical reference point for later militants because of its powerful combination of culture, militarism, and voluntarism. Such was the importance of the Spanish Civil War, and not only in France, that for a long time it constituted ‘the main reference point for militant activism, indeed for the political sensibility of tens of millions of non-Spaniards’.109 The most famous symbol of the Spanish conflict’s international dimension was the International Brigades, which attracted some 40,000 volunteers, France supplying up to half of them.110 French philosopher Simone Weil volunteered with the anarchist forces, English writer George Orwell was wounded while fighting with militia at the Aragon front, and American novelist Ernest Hemingway was present at the last stand of the Republican army – though there were many more from working-class origins who responded to the tolling bell but were not in a position to write a novel about it. Into the 1970s and beyond, the soldier-scholars who had risked their lives for the Republican cause retained great appeal for French radicals otherwise, as one remembered, ‘full of distrust for intellectuals, their love of oratory, their inclination towards comfortable heroism with a bathroom and sea view’.111 K.S. Karol, for instance, turned to memories of Spain to convey Cuba’s uprising as ‘a nation under arms, conforming fully to the heroic picture of all revolutions’.112 For many the embodiment of the Spanish Civil War engagement was André Malraux. A French writer and art historian, Malraux was thirtyfive and a Communist fellow traveller when the war began. Active in anti-fascist campaigns prior to the war, he engaged on the Republican side within a few days of the first uprising. His contributions to the Republican cause were multifaceted, in the words of Arthur Koestler, ‘uniting in his person the normally incompatible gifts for action, art and propaganda’.113 Malraux provided a point of contact between the Spanish government

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and the rest of the world: negotiating airplane purchases and recruiting pilots, and authoring a novel, L’espoir (1938), which he adapted into a compelling film (1939). He also acted as publicist and fundraiser for the Republican Government, with a five-week campaign in North America in 1937.114 Later, Malraux’s engagement as a Resistance leader during the Second World War cemented his courageous reputation and moral standing. Despite his emergence as a Gaullist stalwart during the Fifth Republic, Malraux’s combination of intellectual accomplishment, military heroism, and left-wing engagement made him an important model for subsequent generation of radicals. Régis Debray, whose own revolutionary, military commitment took him to the jungles of Latin America, has emphasised the influence of Malraux on his generation of tiers-mondistes.115 Malraux’s revolutionary engagement also struck Pierre Goldman, who also took up arms in Latin America.116 The literary heroism embodied by Malraux was one of the most significant references for French humanitarians too, a reminder of the shared imaginaries of tiers-mondiste and sans-frontiériste engagement. Kouchner, who moved from revolutionary left-wing politics to radical humanitarianism, described belonging to a generation of militants growing up with a cult for resistance movements. His generation was, he wrote, ‘nostalgic for the Spanish Civil War, we would have liked to give a military salute to the wounded pilots whom Malraux accompanied in the descent from Teruel’.117 He has claimed to know by heart entire pages of L’espoir.118 Emmanuelli also highlighted Malraux’s pioneering role in the reporting of conflicts, citing his film and propaganda duties.119 Canadian doctor Norman Bethune had a similar appeal. Bethune had volunteered in Spain before spending two years with Mao’s army in China, treating wounded guerrilla soldiers, training doctors and nurses, and building a hospital.120 One of the Maoist bookshops in Paris was named after him and Brauman, a Maoist in his student years, has cited Bethune’s example as even more important than that of colonial doctor Albert Schweitzer.121 The two syllables of Vichy, remarked the most famous interpreter of their echo, ‘sound as a tocsin’ in the halls of French collective memory.122 This was certainly true for the movements that grappled with responses to suffering in the third world in the post-war period. For some, especially the tiers-mondiste groups, memory took the form of an obsession with the fight against fascism and the rejection of collaboration and complicity. For others, it was the Holocaust and its millions of victims. Many were under the influence of a heroic Resistance, whose image of moral

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courage in the face of repression and persecution served as inspiration for militants both in revolution and in humanitarianism. Activists viewed their own engagement through the lens of the Second World War and were highly sensitive to any suggestion that the tragedies of the period could be repeated. The experience of the Second World War in France, at once traumatic, incriminating, and ambiguous, has profoundly marked the discourse and practice of politics in France. French experience of the war had three main phases: defeat, occupation, and liberation. The first passed swiftly, with the surrender to Germany on 22 June 1940 after only six weeks of fighting. The armistice agreement established zones of German and Italian occupation and a ‘free zone’ in the south (until August 1942) under the control of a puppet government based at Vichy. 75,721 Jews died or were deported to Eastern Europe, never to return.123 While Marshal Philippe Pétain, a hero of the 1916 Battle of Verdun, headed the collaborationist regime in France, the far younger General Charles de Gaulle rallied the Free French Forces, and clandestine networks carried out resistance within France. The result was a ‘Franco-French war’, in which violent confrontations occurred not only between the French and the occupiers but also between different groups of French men and women, notably on one hand the collaborationist forces and the milice (Vichy’s paramilitary force), and on the other the ‘résistants’ and those the regime marginalised, excluded, or persecuted. The memories of these conflicts and ambiguities have been fractured, contested, and equally ambiguous themselves. Successive governments have sought to manage them in diverse ways, while their difficult aspects have largely found greater expression in cultural forms and scholarship than in official discourses on the war.124 In the Gaullist, ‘résistancialist’ view that dominated the first post-war decades, the Vichy regime under Pétain only ever constituted an illegitimate minority of collaborators; the authentic France was represented by the Resistance and the Free French, with its embodiment in de Gaulle. From the beginning of the 1970s, however, in a process first charted by Henry Rousso’s Le syndrome de Vichy, this flattering and comfortable version of history appeared less and less reliable and more frequently subject to challenge. Different voices entered the public arena, including those of children of collaborators as well as deportees. Although the Holocaust and the responsibility that Vichy bore were the subject of French scholarship in the 1940s and 1950s,125 it was not until the late 1970s that the Jewish experience began to rival resistance as the most powerful collective memory of the war, a process arguably culminating with the broadcast of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah in

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1985.126 Ten years later, President Jacques Chirac gave a landmark speech acknowledging that ‘the criminal insanity of the occupying forces was backed up by French people and by the French State’.127 In the 1950s and 1960s, references to the Second World War permeated debates on the Algerian War and the memories of the two conflicts have since remained tightly interwoven. With little more than a decade between the Liberation and the outbreak of war in Algeria, for its critics the decolonisation conflict raised the spectre of the Second World War in myriad ways. None of them flattered the French nation. As early as January 1955 – barely three months after the FLN’s initiation of the war – writer and Resistance veteran Claude Bourdet entitled his first article on the war ‘Votre Gestapo d’Algérie’.128 The first editorial of Vérité-Liberté in May 1960 stated the journal’s intention to make available ‘all the facts’ and warned that, if the years of Nazi violence had not quite returned, they could not be thought of as over.129 The same themes, with an emphasis on anti-fascism, appeared in the first editorial of Partisans, published in the final year of the Algerian War and signed by the famous résistant Vercors, co-founder of the Editions de Minuit and author of Le silence de la mer (1942).130 Evoking Oradour-sur-Glane, where the SS killed 642 civilians, was another way of comparing French acts in Algeria to Nazi crimes. Algeria was not the only or even the first context for such comparisons, with links being drawn between Nazi Occupation and colonialism in Indochina as early as 1946,131 but it was a key site for this discursive practice. Connections between colonial torture and Nazi violence were striking both for their power and for what they show about the role of memory. Condemnation of torture with reference to the Occupation period could involve an element of racial politics but could also reference the Nazi torture of French resistors, a parallel which was intended to ennoble the FLN and its supporters as the inheritors of a heroic maquis. The Manifeste des 121 suggested a parallel between systematised Nazi violence and institutionalised French violence, pointing out that ‘fifteen years after the destruction of Hitler’s order, French militarism . . . has succeeded in reinstating torture and in once again making it into an institution in Europe’.132 The same tropes dominated Sartre’s preface to La question, which opened with a comparison between the Gestapo in 1943 and France in 1958 and the knowledge that ‘fifteen years are enough to transform victims into executioners’.133 Yet the work of Darius Rejali on techniques of torture suggested that the combination of the ‘gégène’ (electric generator) with water torture used in Algeria was not a dark legacy of the

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French experience of torture at Nazi hands, but rather a technique developed in the French colonies in the 1930s and then used by French and German torturers during the Occupation.134 Constructed in memory debates as a symbol of Nazi depravity, this torture was in fact entirely French and in long service. However, the rhetorical linkage with the Second World War provided a way of condemning colonial violence, establishing an emotional proximity by bringing its Algerian victims into the same domain as the suffering French, while simultaneously reinforcing condemnation of the perpetrators by creating a distance between their acts and the experiences and values of the French nation as embodied in resistance. Critics of the war also used memories of the Occupation period to condemn racialised violence on French soil, symbolised by the massacre of dozens of Algerians on and around 17 October 1961. Witnesses of that day’s violence evoked the persecution of Jews when condemning the killings.135 Publications of the Mouvement Contre le Racisme, l’Antisémitisme et pour la Paix (MRAP), which had its roots in Occupation-era Jewish Resistance groups, compared anti-Semitism to anti-Algerian racism; Les Temps Modernes carried a petition comparing the detention of Algerians at the Palais des Sports to the imprisonment of Jews at Drancy concentration camp, from where many went to Auschwitz.136 According to Rothberg, references to Drancy or to the 1942 Vélodrôme d’Hiver round-up did not, at the time of the Algerian War, represent recognition of French responsibility in Occupation-era crimes. This, he argued, would only come later, the insistence upon these crimes in the 1960s contributing to the process of refocusing attention on French complicity with the Nazi programme.137 For militants in the 1960s and 1970s, comparisons between Algeria and the Occupation years were not mere opportunism or purely rhetorical devices, but a formative part of their identity. For instance, Daniel Lindenberg – born in 1940 – has described feeling like a ‘survivor’; his later writing on the memory of Vichy is evidence of the ongoing importance of the Occupation years to his sense of identity and intellectual activity.138 Even more striking is the example of Pierre Goldman, whose fixation on the Holocaust has been described as ‘almost pathological’.139 Goldman was born, as he emphasised, in occupied France in 1944 and he described his childhood as ‘a long, inert reverie stirred only by the spectacle of Auschwitz, of Oswiecim, in Poland’. During the Second World War, Goldman’s parents, Polish Jews, were part of a Resistance network aligned with the PCF and his account of his own life opened with a tribute to their engagement and a discussion of the war. He declared that

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he had ‘grown up with the memory of the Resistance, of a certain Resistance (that of the Jewish communists)’ exemplified by Marcel Rayman, a leader of the Francs-tireurs et Partisans–Main-d’œuvre Immigrée (FTPMOI), a Resistance section composed mostly of foreigners and including many Jews.140 The models Goldman valued were therefore activist and anti-fascist, militant and military, and Jewish. During the final years of the Algerian War he encountered students and teachers at his school who defended Vichy, which Goldman experienced as a discovery ‘that there were fascists, that this species had not died with the defeat of the Axis and the liberation of France’.141 Seeing opposition to the Algerian War as part of the struggle against fascism, he was so impassioned that at the time of the generals’ putsch he slept overnight at a PCF office awaiting mobilisation. As a result of his conviction he left France in the early 1960s to seek out guerrilla warfare in Latin America. These preoccupations were again prominent during the 1968 events, which some have seen as a tipping point in memories of the Second World War. The most obvious symptom of the soixante-huitard generation’s preoccupation with the Occupation was in the famous slogans, which Goldman despised: ‘CRS = SS’ and ‘We are all German Jews’, the latter in solidarity with student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit. These slogans, excessive and essentially superficial, nonetheless conveyed a preoccupation with the Holocaust years and a refusal to disconnect their memory from contemporary issues or ongoing examination.142 The strength of Jewish activists within the far left may well have contributed to the desire to confront taboos relating to the Holocaust and to challenge the society responsible for the sufferings that their families had experienced and transmitted.143 After 1968, first de Gaulle and then, more gradually, the version of the Occupation memory that he promoted, appeared as victims of the contestatory movements. For many militants the battles of the 1960s formed an essential part of a heroic political lineage: anti-fascist (during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War), anti-colonialist (during the Algerian War), anti-fascist-imperialist-neo-colonialist (for their own generation, including May and tiers-mondiste revolution).144

conclusion Amongst the 1968 generation in France, retrospective accounts have indicated a combination of personal factors – the stories and experiences of families and friends – and political factors leading individuals into militancy. Activists remembered their experiences according to two main

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narratives: one of a ‘natural progression’ into activism, a continuation of family heritage, a culmination of education or social influencing; the other ‘a story of struggle’ in which resentment or shame at others’ failure to engage in the past or the present drove a lone effort to take on politics.145 In the words of Claire Brière-Blanchet, a member of the Gauche Prolétarienne, a ‘double feeling of guilt’ – the guilt of Occupation and the guilt of colonisation – encouraged the rejection of Europe and the embrace of all that came from the third world.146 The politics associated with tiers-mondisme were both local and global, marginal yet very much in the spirit of the times. While tiersmondistes were always in the minority compared to most European citizens who did not share their sense of the third world’s destiny, they had vectors for influence and prominence in the engagement of intellectuals and mass student unrest.147 They translated events and ideas from the third world into fuel for political change at home, ‘domesticating’ revolutionary ideologies and practices and viewing their own societies through the same lens.148 This not only reinforced – and indeed reversed – the relationship between the centre and the periphery, but also connected different groups at the peripheries of global politics or at the margins of their own societies.149 These connections existed in a literal and personal sense, too, as the travels of tiers-mondistes took them to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. As François Maspero proclaimed, as long as there were revolutionaries fighting in the jungles, ‘the only choice is to join them’.150 In some ways – their emphasis on first-hand experience, the desire to make a contribution, the role of testimony, the very geography of upheaval and conflict – the travels of tiers-mondistes resonated with those of later sans-frontiéristes. Despite the different motivations that informed the two movements, solidarity and témoignage played a part in both cases. Both tiers-mondisme and sans-frontiérisme were inspired in distinctive ways by a desire for change. They were reactions to a world of conflict and conceived of their solidarity and militant engagement in revolutionising ways. They both repudiated the perceived errors of their forebears but could not help but reprise the actions of previous generations, often in a highly self-conscious manner. Both movements therefore were entirely rooted in their historical, political, and social context; pace Kouchner, the innovating doctors and journalists were not ahead of their time but resolutely of it. This is what makes possible Paul Berman’s characterisation of the sans-frontiériste project as a ‘Guevarism of the rights of man’ in which activists, ‘instead of carrying AK-47s, . . . carried medical bags, in order to serve the poor and the oppressed’.151

part ii VIOLENCE AND MORALITY

3 The struggle for international justice Tiers-mondiste engagement on the outskirts of May

For radicals in the 1960s the need for engagement was paramount. Sartre made the terms clear: ‘we are not priests and it is not a question of distributing equally the accusations and blame nor of giving the same number of moral sermons to the East and the West’.1 Two episodes in 1967 demonstrated the mindset of radicals of the tiers-mondiste period, bent upon opposing an authority that they identified with imperialism and whose use of violence they rejected: the International War Crimes Tribunal, which found the US guilty of genocide in the conduct of war in Southeast Asia; and the incarceration of French philosopher-turnedguerrilla Régis Debray, arrested by the Bolivian junta after a stay with Che Guevara. Four years later, a campaign following the arrest of Cuban poet Heberto Padilla indicated the changes occurring in the perception of tiers-mondiste models. The humiliation of Padilla, who had been one of the leading intellectual lights of Castro’s Havana, provoked a watershed for French supporters of the Cuban government. It marked the first stage in the severing of what Sirinelli described as ‘a red thread which, since the start of the 1960s, linked the “121” to the signatories for Vietnam and the petitioners – those on the left, at least – in favour of Régis Debray, waiting for May 1968’.2 In the 1950s and especially 1960s, French tiers-mondistes were fascinated by the figure of the guerrilla fighter. Despite the differences in culture, geography, and history, the Cuban and Vietnamese struggles were united in the role they played in establishing the figure of the guerrilla in the imaginary of European third-worldists. (Though Mao’s contribution to guerrilla warfare was by no means insignificant, his victories in the late 1940s were rather distant for the younger generation who turned to the 81

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third world for inspiration after Algeria.) Thanks to Guevara’s 1967 call for the creation of ‘two, three, many Vietnams’, the Vietnamese resistance was explicitly linked to the world’s most celebrated guerrilla warrior.3 The guerrillero, immortalised in Alberto Korda’s famous photograph of Che, became ‘the representative of a new politics and of a new relationship between State and masses – individual, mystical, voluntaristic and unquestionably a model of command’.4 However, as this model of command took on an increasingly authoritarian hue, the position of the guerrilla fighter as an embodiment of international justice came into question. Vietnam had been, in the eyes of tiersmondiste militants, ‘our Vercors and our Stalingrad, our Normandy landing and our substitute Resistance’.5 The struggle against the US had been seen as a just fight because it meant opposing racism and exploitation. The ideological and intellectual mobilisation that had operated during the Algerian War, the Vietnam War, and the Latin American struggles, began to falter with the discovery that one of its own could be imprisoned not only by a right-wing military junta, but by a left-wing revolutionary government. The figure of the political prisoner took on an increasing importance as regimes on the far left began to lose the privilege that had heretofore protected them from the criticism of revolutionary intellectuals in France. This chapter thus begins under the sign of tiers-mondisme and ends with one of the first major turning points that marked the turn against third-world revolutionary ideology. It argues that a tension within tiersmondiste campaigns between radical political goals and rights-based language eventually resulted in the strengthening of the latter to the detriment of the former. Despite the importance of militant models of action, tiers-mondisme in many ways produced movements of intellectuals and this element is particularly clear in the discussion that follows. It was seen in the composition of the Russell Tribunal, the importance of Debray’s writing, and the significance of Padilla’s status as a revolutionary intellectual under threat. Moreover, the campaigning discussed in this chapter had a manifestly textual, literary nature and often a judicial context. From the witness statements and written judgements of the International War Crimes Tribunal, to the powerful trial speeches of Régis Debray (not to mention those of Fidel Castro in the decade before), to Heberto Padilla’s distressed confessions, the choice of words and the movement of ideas was essential. And ideas certainly did move. In 1965, in spite of the need for a critical perspective, Sartre insisted ‘one must know which side he is on’.6 This

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was the logic of the International War Crimes Tribunal, censuring American violence in Vietnam, discussed in the first section of this chapter. It shows how the Tribunal combined a tiers-mondiste vision of the Vietnam War with references to international legal precedents. As in the case of the Tribunal, opposition to imperialism was the motivation for Debray’s decision to join the guerrilleros in Bolivia in 1967, discussed in section two. However, the mobilisation on Debray’s behalf appealed to the individual’s right to fair trial and freedom of speech. Finally, the third section demonstrates how fidélistes turned against one of their idols in order to defend Padilla against the security system of revolutionary Cuba. In the first major moment of rupture with Cuba – indeed, with tiers-mondisme – the campaigners for Padilla denounced the gap between their idealised vision of progressive politics in Cuba and the reality of the state that the revolution had created. The revolution, it seemed, was no longer synonymous with justice.

genocide and international conscience The International War Crimes Tribunal, with three sessions across the second half of 1967, sat in judgement upon American conduct in Southeast Asia. Generally known as the ‘Russell Tribunal’ after its instigator and honorary president, British philosopher Bertrand Russell, it brought together left-wing intellectuals from across the globe. Russell himself expressed the scale of their ambition and the depth of their sense of duty: ‘we speak because silence is complicity, a lie, a crime. We expose in order to arouse conscience’.7 Their ultimate wish was for the overthrow of the abusive imperialist system they identified with the object of their investigations: the US. The Vietnamese liberation struggle, which the Russell Tribunal explicitly supported, was central to many tiers-mondiste movements. In 1954 French leftists had celebrated the victory of the Indochinese forces at Dien Bien Phu as a triumph over colonialism. For the next twenty years, they would continue to support the Communist government in Hanoi and the FNL (or Vietcong), its allies in South Vietnam, against the government in Saigon and the full-scale offensive war waged by the US ostensibly in Saigon’s defence. The hatred of America was confirmed for many revolutionary tourists during visits to Vietnam during the war: direct experience of the bombing campaigns provided more than enough evidence of America’s murderous intent and cemented the visitors’ revulsion. For this reason – its galvanising effect – radical documentarist Chris Marker

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compared the campaign for Vietnamese victory to the international mobilisation during the Spanish Civil War.8 The paradoxical portrayal of the Vietnamese as both endangered underdog and inevitable victor was a feature of tiers-mondiste analyses of the war. In the words of an editorial in Partisans, which more than once devoted entire issues to it: ‘ours is the generation of the Vietnam War’.9 The soixante-huitard generation made the North Vietnamese cause its own. It served frequently as a motif, as when protestors chanted ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh’ or when the Boulevard Saint-Michel was rebaptised the ‘Boulevard du Vietnam Héroïque’. According to Alain Krivine French students learned these slogans during German street protests, evidence of the transnational connections between radical activists travelling within Europe.10 Solidarity committees were also a common feature of European third-worldism, in this instance represented in the creation of the Comité Vietnam National (CVN) by Trotskyist groups and the Comités Vietnam de Base (CVB) by Maoist groups. The journal of the CVB groups was called Victoire pour le Vietnam and it reported on both the activities of French campaigners and events in Vietnam. When the Front Solidarité Indochine (FSI) was founded in April 1971 as successor to the CVN, it paid tribute to the inspirational role the Vietnamese people had played for the May ’68 movements in France and affirmed that ‘the fate of all the peoples of the world is decided in large part on the Indochinese battlefields’.11 Historians have indicated how the mobilisation for Vietnam activated the eruption of May ’68 in Paris – in an immediate sense, because it was at protests in the wake of the Tet offensive that the first, contested arrests occurred which began the escalation of clashes.12 But also in a broader sense, because the Vietnamese cause united many militants in the CVN and CVB, brought them onto the streets, provided a model of revolutionary combat and, in the case of the CVB, provided the initial groupings for the ‘action committees’ in May.13 Ironically, then, the May–June events were no doubt one of the most important reasons for the drop in protests relating to the Vietnam War that occurred in France from 1968–71, when the anti-war movement in America was at its peak.14 Few dissenting voices could be heard.15 Left-wing adversaries of the US drowned out those on the right who may have supported the American intervention. The PCF was an opponent of the American offensive, although tiers-mondistes considered its call for ‘Peace in Vietnam’ a betrayal of the emancipatory and revolutionary vocation of the Vietnamese liberation struggle. Obliged by more radical groups to intensify

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its stance, from 1967–8 onwards the PCF adopted the tiers-mondiste slogan ‘Victory for the FNL [FNL vaincra]’ and multiplied its campaigning efforts.16 On the other side of the political spectrum, President Charles de Gaulle had dramatically criticised American involvement in Vietnam. As Richard Falk, an international law scholar and later a UN Special Rapporteur, commented at the time, ‘the fact that it [was] plausible to contemplate such a proceeding and to obtain for its tribunal several celebrated individuals bears witness to the general perception of the war’.17 Opposition to the Vietnam War brought together moderates, Communists, non-communists, and radicals, with the militant vanguard of young tiers-mondistes leading the charge in the streets. In this context, Russell – a philosopher, mathematician, Nobel laureate, and anti-nuclear campaigner – could be explicit about the orientation of the International War Crimes Tribunal. He indicated the scale of his ambition when he affirmed that ‘a Tribunal such as ours will be necessary until the last starving man is fed and a way of life is created which ends exploitation of the many by the few’.18 Russell’s introduction to the collected texts of the Tribunal sessions expressed his hope that ‘the peoples of the Third World will take heart from the example of the Vietnamese and join further in dismantling the American empire’. He argued that the imperial thrust, the ‘attempt to create empires’, inevitably resulted in war crimes, because ‘once one believes colonial peoples to be untermenschen – “gooks” is the American term – one has destroyed the basis of all civilised codes of conduct’.19 His inflammatory choice of wording placed Nazi racial politics in parallel with contemporary racism. Tariq Ali, a British-Pakistani writer, in the 1960s a New Left activist, and one of the Tribunal’s witnesses, understood that the entire War Crimes Tribunal was conceived as ‘a moral intervention to expose an immoral war’.20 The Russell Tribunal held three sessions to receive evidence and testimony about the Vietnam War. Two of these sessions, convened in Stockholm on 2–10 May and in Roskilde on 20 November–1 December, were more significant than the other, held in Tokyo on 28–30 August. The two Scandinavian sessions are the most often cited and the focus of the texts discussed here.21 Historians have criticised the Tribunal’s procedural defects: the lack of clear rules of evidence, lack of transparency in the selection of members, the absence of an American defence, and an unwillingness to apply consistent standards.22 Contemporaries in France and elsewhere had also expressed concerns, with for instance Falk labelling the Tribunal a ‘juridical farce’ and Thierry Maulnier, Académicien and columnist for Le Figaro, criticising its flagrant one-sidedness.23

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On a personal level, the Tribunal suffered from the rivalries and divisions between a London faction and a Paris faction, though much friction arose from the contentious behaviour of Ralph Schoenmann, Russell’s assistant, whom many regarded as a provocateur and usurper of his employer’s standing.24 The Paris faction was made up of Sartre; de Beauvoir; Laurent Schwartz, a French mathematician and anti–Algerian war activist; and Yugoslav dissident Vladimir Dedijer. Although its members and many of its investigators came from an older generation of intellectuals, the Tribunal sessions in Stockholm and Roskilde attracted younger radicals from across Europe and thus facilitated connections amongst these spectators as well as between European radicals and some of the American participants in the sessions.25 As the Russell Tribunal’s executive president and most effective spokesman in France, Sartre found himself at the crest of an intellectual wave which, in its structuralist moment, had threatened to displace him. This was Sartre’s most active tiers-mondiste period: Noureddine Lamouchi, in a study of his engagements, saw the Vietnam War as Sartre’s last great engagement and dated the end of his anti-colonialist radicalism to 1975 when this war finished.26 His biographer, Annie Cohen-Solal, agreed and also stressed his anti-Americanism in this period.27 For Paige Arthur, it was ‘Sartre’s global fame and his willingness to use it in the service of non-Europeans that was important’ in his anti-colonial engagement.28 In 1964, Sartre had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in recognition of his ‘far-reaching influence on our age’, which he refused. Russell himself had been awarded the same prize in 1950 and his engagement in UK public life, particularly in the pacifist movement and against totalitarianism and nuclear proliferation, made him a powerful moral and political figure. However, given Russell’s infirmity and the resulting impossibility of his attending the sessions, Sartre’s role as executive president was even more prominent than it might otherwise have been. With the Tribunal’s executive president (Sartre) and chairman (Dedijer) among their number, the French faction effectively dominated the conduct of proceedings. The Tribunal’s first session, held in Stockholm, examined three questions. It considered whether the US had committed aggression in violation of international law; the extent to which civilian sites were bombed; and whether Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea could be considered accomplices of US aggression in Vietnam. The session was attended by, among others and alongside the Paris faction already mentioned: Isaac Deutscher, the biographer of Trotsky; Melba Hernandez, Cuban proVietnamese campaigner and a veteran of Moncada; Dave Dellinger, an

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American pacifist; Lawrence Daly, Scottish union leader; Peter Weiss, German playwright; and Gunther Anders, a Jewish philosopher. It took submissions from investigative missions and eyewitness testimony from visitors to Vietnam, on specific incidents as well as general trends and scientific enquiries. Notable French contributors included veteran Maoist historian Jean Chesneaux, who gave an overview of American intervention in Vietnam from 1945; tiers-mondiste journalist Gérard Chaliand, who spoke about the bombing of Dai Lai; and Trotskyist doctor JeanMichel Krivine, a pied-rouge in Algeria in 1963, who testified about bombings in North Vietnam.29 The selection of witnesses in this and other sessions – activists, academics, reporters – reflected the Tribunal’s tiers-mondiste position but also its public education ambitions. On 10 May 1967 the Tribunal unanimously found the US and its ‘accomplices’ guilty on all counts. After being told that no more sessions were permitted in Sweden, the Russell Tribunal moved its hearings to Denmark at the end of 1967. The Roskilde session dealt largely with the nature of weaponry being used by the US in Vietnam and other parts of Southeast Asia. It considered whether the US had used methods banned by international law, such as chemical weapons; whether prisoners of war had been subjected to inhumane treatment, including torture; whether civilians were the target of attacks or reprisals; and, most sensationally, whether US actions in Vietnam constituted genocide. The Roskilde session drew heavily on the testimony of former American servicemen, including Donald Duncan, a former member of the ‘Green Beret’ Special Forces group in Vietnam, and Peter Martinsen, who had served there as a prisoner of war interrogator. Several French journalists again contributed, including Jean Bertolino, the 1967 recipient of the Prix Albert Londres for his reporting on conflicts in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. The complicity of the Japanese Government with American aggression was the only point of disagreement when the verdict was voted upon. On all other questions, including whether ‘the United States Government [was] guilty of genocide against the people of Vietnam’, the answer was unanimously in the affirmative. When the verdict was pronounced, it was celebrated by Radio Liberation in South Vietnam and reported with enthusiasm by Tricontinental.30 The final verdict of the Russell Tribunal was thus received as it had been intended: as part of a tiers-mondiste and anti-imperialist agenda. Yet despite the obvious bias, criticised at the time and since, and notwithstanding its organisers’ willingness to declare their own personal partisanship, they endeavoured to portray the Tribunal as an independent

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space where law and evidence reigned. Great emphasis was placed upon the supposed ‘powerlessness’ and ‘universality’ of the Tribunal, its independence from official structures.31 The right to self-defence was offered, though not accepted, and the organisers stated their disappointment at the Johnson Administration’s (predictable) refusal to participate in any way.32 The process was one of investigation, evidence, summation, and judgement. Sartre conceded but dismissed the tension this created with the Tribunal’s revolutionary perspective: ‘legalism is petit bourgeois when legislation is petit bourgeois. But the fact is, precisely, that international laws in spite of their origin, serve popular interests’.33 The Russell Tribunal was thus constructed with reference to specific international laws and conventions, enumerated in the verdicts of the Stockholm and Roskilde sessions. The citation of agreements to which the US had been party gave the Tribunal the strongest grounds for condemnation of US actions in Vietnam. As regarded Vietnam specifically, they drew upon the 1954 Geneva Agreement ending the Indochina War, recognising the unity of Vietnam and prohibiting the introduction of new troops and material. They cited the Kellogg–Briand Pact of 1928, which precluded the use of war as an instrument of foreign policy or as a means of ending diplomatic disputes, and its confirmation in Article 2 of the United Nations Charter. Along with a UN resolution of 14 December 1960 affirming the right to independence of colonial peoples, these constituted the main texts proscribing the use of force in international affairs. Other documents were cited as standards for the acceptable conduct of war and treatment of civilians. The first of these was from the Hague Conference of 1907, specifically the convention for Laws and Customs of War on Land, limiting the nature and deployment of particular weaponry and prohibiting bombardments of civilian installations. Similar clauses were cited from the Geneva Conventions of 1949. Another precedent was the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg, which in 1945–6 tried Nazi leaders for crimes against humanity.34 In particular, the verdicts referred to Article 6 of the Nuremberg Statute, describing the crimes to which individual responsibility applied: crimes against peace; war crimes (such as murder, ill-treatment, deportation, plunder); and crimes against humanity (such as murder, extermination, enslavement or persecution on any grounds). American critics of the war, including Telford Taylor, chief counsel for the prosecution during the Nuremberg trials, also invoked the Nuremberg trials as a precedent for the condemnation of events in Vietnam and Cambodia.35

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Of all of these legal precedents, the Nuremberg Tribunal was the most important in discourse surrounding the Russell Tribunal.36 The Nuremberg reference had two registers. In the first, like the other conventions and declarations, it provided the basis for legalistic criticisms of US policy. It had a special place among the legal precedents because, unlike the Geneva Conventions, it had been used to hold individuals responsible for acts of war.37 It was also a powerful reference because of the success with which the Allies and particularly the US had used the IMT to pursue their own agenda not only against the Nazis but also against the Soviet Union in the intensifying Cold War climate. The strong association of Nuremberg with American moral leadership – an association fostered by the US – added to the weight of condemnation. Yet it is also important to remember the Soviet role at the IMT: in the 1940s Soviet legal scholars had advanced concepts of ‘war crimes’ and ‘crimes against peace’, fundamental to the Nuremberg Charter, making significant contributions to Nuremberg’s legal innovations. The Soviet experts working on Nuremberg included numerous figures with experience of the Moscow Trials of 1936–8, including then Deputy Commissar of Foreign Affairs Andrei Vyshinskii, who had conducted the show trials of the 1930s.38 The direct link between Nuremberg and the Moscow Trials is a salient reminder of the leftist tradition of conducting show trials within which the Russell Tribunal can also be placed. The second register of references to Nuremberg was emotive, facilitating comparisons between US conduct in Vietnam and the Nazi destruction of Europe. Hence Sartre’s claim, for example, that the Nuremberg condemnations would be meaningless if they did not imply future prosecutions for acts described by the Nuremberg laws. Through references to Nuremberg the leaders of the American war effort, including President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defence Robert S. McNamara, were by implication put on the same level as such condemned Nazi criminals as Hermann Göring and Rudolf Hess. The power of this comparison explained the frequency with which Sartre and others alluded to the Nuremberg precedent in interviews and statements regarding the Russell Tribunal. As Sartre made clear, the creators of Nuremberg were seen by tiers-mondistes as indifferent to the third world. Their hypocrisy was symbolised by the failure to denounce the 1945 massacres around Sétif, which began on VE Day and took the lives of several thousand Algerians, three months before the Nuremberg agreement was signed.39 One of the most sustained uses of the comparison between the Second World War and contemporary conflict during the Russell Tribunal was

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Sartre’s speech for the closing of the final session, on 1 December 1967. Its tone was strident and its argumentation compact. Sartre unflinchingly pronounced America guilty of genocide in Vietnam and drew a picture of a war that ‘meets all of Hitler’s specifications’. In his analysis, Vietnam was in the line of the wars of decolonisation, which had pitted subproletarian indigenous societies against the greater might of their colonial oppressors. However, unlike during the colonial wars, there were no economic interests to dissuade the US from pursuing its terrorism against the Vietnamese to the genocidal end point. The conflict in Vietnam therefore took the form of ‘the only possible relationship between an over-industrialised country and an underdeveloped country, that is to say, a genocidal relationship implemented through racism’.40 The genocidal nature of the American actions, according to Sartre, was in no way diminished by the fact that the Vietnamese could surrender, should they want badly enough to end the conflict. In Sartre’s view, moreover, American blackmail through violence went beyond Vietnam or even Southeast Asia: it was intended as a message to the entire world. In the era of rapid communication, Sartre argued, ‘the current genocide is conceived as an answer to people’s war and perpetrated in Vietnam not against the Vietnamese alone, but against humanity. . . . The group which the United States wants to intimidate and terrorise by way of the Vietnamese nation is the human group in its entirety’. The issue of complicity, the collaboration through silence that Russell also evoked, was of the utmost importance in this Manichean, tiers-mondiste world view. It created a mandate for personal engagement: ‘this crime, carried out every day before the eyes of the world, renders all who do not denounce it accomplices of those who commit it, so that we are being degraded today for our future enslavement’.41 The Russell Tribunal’s verdict of American responsibility for war crimes and genocide was thereby shaped by Sartre into a call for individual engagement on the part of Western citizens. His bibliographers considered it among the most striking texts he ever produced.42 Sartre accurately compared his interpretation of the Vietnam War to his attitude towards FLN violence during the Algerian War. The right to violence of the oppressed was the foundation of his preface to Les damnés de la terre, echoed in his writing on the Cuban Revolution, and provided the basis of his call for resistance to American aggression. ‘On Genocide’ shared with some aspects of the anti–Algerian War campaign, notably the Manifesto of the 121, a call to resistance based on the claim that it was impossible to escape responsibility, not acting becoming a tacit

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moral support for the aggressors. Radical opposition to a hegemonic US, perceived by tiers-mondistes as racist and neo-imperialist, dovetailed with less extreme concerns about the extension of US influence into French daily life and culture.43 Sartre acknowledged that ‘I am, like other members of the “tribunal,” a declared enemy of imperialism and that I feel myself in solidarity with all those who fight against it. Commitment, from this point of view, must be total’.44 In the tiers-mondiste view, there could be no compromise with the genocidal American machine. For this reason, the Nuremberg trials were one allusion among many that attempted to establish parallels between the Vietnam War and Hitler’s campaigns. Though these allusions were frequent, they were particularly favoured by the British and American participants, who tended to use even more inflammatory rhetoric than the Paris group. Russell led the way, declaring that ‘the United States has behaved in Vietnam as Hitler behaved in Eastern Europe and essentially for the same reasons’.45 In his closing address to the first session of hearings, Russell claimed that America had achieved ‘a comparable degree of scientific extermination and moral degeneracy’ to that of the Thousand-Year Reich.46 In the ‘Appeal to the American and World Opinion’, read by Dave Dellinger but attributed to Russell, the comparison between Nazism and American conduct was once again central: Paradoxically, if Hitler announced his intention to wipe out the Jews, the photos and the reports of the atrocities did not appear in the daily newspapers or going into the living rooms in television. And if the democratic facade in the United States has prevented the American generals and presidents from announcing their intentions, perhaps even from comprehending them in their full intensity themselves, the same democratic facade allows some of the reports and some of the photos to appear in the American mass media.47

The comparison was thus designed to make Western, and particularly American audiences feel complicit in murder and extermination. Russell viewed the failure to act against the Vietnam War as akin to the failure to act when presented with evidence of the Final Solution. In the US, where the Jewish community was a strong part of the anti-war movement, this was an especially powerful emotional lever. In France, as previously noted, references to the Second World War had already served as an intensifier in anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist discourse. The emotional nature of reporting on the American campaign in Vietnam made such comparisons with Nazi violence less contentious than they might retrospectively appear. In January 1973, forty intellectuals and

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artists could unselfconsciously publish the full text of a telegram they had sent to President Nixon comparing his actions to those of the Nazis and calling on him to cease the use of ‘HITLERIAN METHODS’ in Vietnam.48 And well after the Russell Tribunal had found the US guilty of genocide, members of its Paris faction once again expressed their outrage at the intensification of US bombings in Vietnam. An advertisement in Le Monde signed by Sartre, Schwartz, and Dedijer detailed the crimes and concluded decisively: ‘WE ACCUSE Richard NIXON of being a war criminal who should be judged as were the Nazi leaders at Nuremberg for acts of the same nature’.49 The language of these debates was often extreme, with common reference to themes such as genocide, the depraved use of science, and the return of the Second World War.50 How to interpret the muted reaction to some of this rhetoric has been the subject of disagreement. According to Arthur, the lack of debate about the Tribunal’s claims of genocide, epitomised by the very limited engagement with Sartre’s closing speech, was evidence of a lack of interest in genocide at the time, whether as a possibility in Vietnam or as a reality of the past.51 Her interpretation contradicted the explanation offered earlier by Sirinelli, who proposed that the ‘B-52 effect’ – horror at the use of bombings and napalm by the US – dulled reactions to some of the more oversimplified and emotive criticisms of the war. For tiers-mondistes the B-52 effect, which demonised the US, combined with an idealisation of the Vietnamese as a people in arms. From this point of view, Sartre’s closing speech ‘On Genocide’ was delivered in a period of heightened and widespread condemnation of US actions, when the parallel with Hitler’s crimes, even at its most powerfully drawn, was not shocking. Moreover, references to the Holocaust had been prominent during 1967, including above all in reaction to the Six-Day War of 5–10 June when Israel attacked Egyptian positions in the Sinai Peninsula, then fought off offensives from Jordan and Syria. Situating this response in the history of the Holocaust memory in French debates, François Azouvi suggested that the intensity of the appeal to memory in 1967 was not a return after a period of forgetting but ‘a climactic episode’ in a longer story of a rising ‘fever’ of memories brought into the present.52 The Six-Day War was a significant moment for the memories of the Holocaust in France. On one hand, for many Jews it cemented support for Israel in light of fears of a second holocaust.53 In France, the war was extremely well reported and allusions to Auschwitz, Dachau, and the Final Solution (but also to genocide, annihilation, destruction) were insistent and emotive in commentary.54 Many who referred to the Holocaust

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memory in reference to the Six-Day War felt the connection not as a sudden discovery but as the culmination, or confirmation, of a threat against Jews felt continuously since the invention of Auschwitz.55 The French government adopted a pro-Arab position, related to its efforts to regain influence in the region following the North African debacle, and de Gaulle’s November 1967 description of Israelis as an ‘élite people, sure of itself and domineering’ met with uproar from a mainstream that supported Israel.56 Other events in these years, including the Leningrad trial of Jews attempting to flee the Soviet Union (December 1970) and the discovery of Soviet anti-Semitism, further heightened fears of this threat. On the other hand, for radicals the Six-Day War highlighted and intensified the suffering and injustice endured by Palestinians. Many gauchistes felt that the widespread sympathy for Israel, combined with its backing from the US, was evidence that both French and Israeli societies were the enemy of progress.57 For some, sympathy for Israel was the sign of a European guilt for the Holocaust, but also a misreading of the politics of the Middle East: Israeli actions were compared to Nazi violence. In this view, it was the Palestinian people who had taken on the historical position of the persecuted Jews, threatened by a militarised state that sought their destruction. Reactions to the war thus bore evidence of the intersections between a post-war process of reflection on guilt and the anti-colonialist, tiers-mondiste discourse of the 1960s.58 The importance of references to the Holocaust in the period of the Russell Tribunal, combined with the extensive condemnation of US conduct of the Vietnam War, thus explains the modesty of reactions to the inflammatory language of its genocide verdict. Despite its timeliness and intransigence, the Tribunal’s impact on public opinion was questionable. In France, a significant part of public opinion was already against the war and reporting of the hearings was fitful.59 American newspaper coverage claimed it was ‘flogging a dead horse’ given that European public opinion was already set against the war.60 Amongst American opinion, according to the major study of the Tribunal, it had less effect upon support for the war than the My Lai massacre in March 1968, when several hundred civilians were tortured and killed by American soldiers.61 In a longer-term perspective though, it has been argued that the Russell Tribunal ‘demonstrated that the failure of official criminal law to punish may not be fatal to efforts at stigmatizing those guilty of international crimes’.62 Richard Falk, who had been critical of aspects of the Russell Tribunal at the time, later reflected on the merit of the intellectuals’ activist judgement on crimes against humanity in Vietnam. Falk emphasised its

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testimonial function: the demand that ‘the law should be applied to the strong as well as the weak’ and the aim ‘to speak truth to people, awakening public opinion from its apathy to the responsibilities of being human (concern for the victimised other) and duties as citizens of free society’.63 He also suggested that the resonance of the Tribunal had grown with the passage of time. In effect, the International War Crimes Tribunal of 1967 gave rise to a series of successors for other international causes. A second Russell Tribunal was held for state terrorism in Latin America (1974–6), a third for violations of human rights in the Federal Republic of Germany (1977–8), and in 2009 the Russell Tribunal on Palestine (RToP) was convened.64 Comprising five sessions over four years, the RToP was the most ambitious of the different incarnations. With an ever-widening geographical and political range of targets for investigation, these initiatives moved away from the tiers-mondiste agenda of the 1967 campaign while nonetheless perpetuating its engaged, internationalist, and activist spirit.

the régis debray affair On 20 March 1967, French philosophy student Régis Debray arrived at a guerrilla camp at Nancahuazu, Bolivia. ‘What greater dream for a militant than to be under Che’s orders!’ he would proclaim, but the realisation of Debray’s dream came at the cost of his arrest, torture, trial, and a thirty-year prison sentence.65 As a result, he became ‘perhaps the most celebrated political prisoner in the world’.66 The campaign for Debray’s release became a major event in France and internationally, attracting such diverse luminaries as André Malraux, Jean-Luc Godard, Pablo Picasso, François Mauriac, and Graham Greene. Many participants defended Debray’s dream as well as denouncing his treatment. Yet by its end the campaign had become an illustration of the paradigm shift in which revolutionaries themselves were becoming ‘a focus of sympathy as exemplary victims of human rights abuses’.67 Prior to his arrest, Debray had been one of the leading figures of European tiers-mondisme. For French revolutionaries, ‘Régis Debray in the Bolivian maquis was our leading representative in the righteous nations’.68 A trip to Tunisia in 1961 connected Debray with liberation fighters and fuelled his passion for the third world.69 He subsequently made his way to Cuba from the US, crossing from Miami in summer 1961, and for two months assisted with the rural literacy campaign.70 He spent much of 1963–4 touring Latin America, including

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Venezuela where the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN) under Douglas Bravo offered Debray another direct encounter with a guerrilla struggle. His account of ‘Two weeks in the Venezuelan maquis’ combined a travelogue-style description of the guerrillero lifestyle with lengthy citations from Bravo that added weight to the report’s authenticity.71 At the end of 1965 he returned to Cuba to take up a position teaching philosophy at the University of Havana. This academic post provided the cover for Debray to observe and participate in guerrilla training camps.72 Welcomed by the Cuban leadership, his contributions ‘crystallised’ the alliance between Havana and the far-left intelligentsia.73 His collected writings were presented as a tool for ‘all those who want to fathom or live out the revolutionary process’.74 Although he was not the only French militant to take up arms in Latin America (Pierre Goldman and Michèle Firk – the latter also a porteur de valises during the Algerian War – both also bore arms in Latin America and for longer than Debray himself did75 ), Debray’s combination of intellectual output and physical commitment were exceptional. A short essay by Debray on Fidel Castro’s ‘long march’ in Latin America, published in January 1965 after his first travels in the region, had been read and studied obsessively in French gauchiste circles. But in September 1967, he explained that ‘when one has written what I have written, one must necessarily, from a theoretical and moral necessity, one day or another, become a simple combatant. Poor the pen without the gun; poor the gun without the pen’.76 Debray rejected the idea of ‘a theory that takes the air of an aristocrat or bureaucrat, giving orders to the “practitioners” (!) from on high’.77 Furthermore, he considered a dual approach not only a desirable attribute but a historical reality, warning that ‘imperialist bullets do not distinguish between the poet and the cane cutter’.78 Based on his own experiences but drawing heavily upon his contact with the Cuban leaders, in 1967 Debray published Révolution dans la révolution? Lutte armée et lutte politique en Amérique latine. First published in Havana, this tiers-mondiste classic articulated the ‘foquismo’ theory of the Cuban revolutionaries, advocating the fusion of theory and practice and capturing the mindset that had produced the heroism of the Sierra Maestra and the glory of Castro’s victory over the Batista regime. It asserted that ‘the people’s army will be the nucleus of the party, not vice versa’, announcing the primacy of the military line over the political or civilian organisation.79 As a model of revolutionary combat, it dispensed with the need to establish or reinforce a political party or a mass movement: arguing that uprisings would occur naturally in response to

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the military campaign, it declared that ‘insurrectional activity is today the number one political activity’.80 One of the virtues of Debray’s theory was thus to turn the situation of marginality into a positive asset. It was therefore received with enthusiasm by radical movements internationally, including the Weathermen in the United States and the Red Army Faction (RAF) in West Germany.81 As a result, it became ‘the single most influential manifesto of the Latin American guerrilla movement’.82 Révolution dans la révolution? made Debray a cult figure among radical movements across the world and was one of the vectors for his influence during May ’68 despite his absence. By then, implementing his own revolutionary philosophy, Debray had returned to the maquis, seeking out guerrilla combat alongside Che Guevara in Bolivia.83 Debray made a convoluted journey from Havana to La Paz, via various underground contacts, carrying a message from Castro. Arriving in camp on 20 March 1967, he appeared in Guevara’s diary under the nom de guerre ‘Danton’, though his stay with the guerrillas was short-lived.84 (Far longer was the period he would spend in a Bolivian prison as a result of this engagement.) The soldiers he met were exhausted, outnumbered, and vulnerable. Debray marched with them, took his turns standing watch, and handled weapons, though was not called upon to use them. Guevara noted the Frenchman’s desire to participate in the guerrilla struggle but entrusted him instead with the responsibility of organising material and financial support for the Bolivian campaign from Europe. Debray’s notoriety proved treacherous when he was picked up by the Bolivian military on leaving the camp. He was arrested on 20 April 1967, in the company of two other foreigners: Ciro Roberto Bustos, an Argentine artist and guerrilla sympathiser, and George Roth, a British journalist who had previously been working alongside the regular army and who was released without charges in July 1967. Within hours of being arrested, the foreign prisoners were being tortured and initial reports speculated about Debray’s presumed death. Fortunately, they had been seen and even photographed by a passing journalist on the day of their arrest. Somewhat ironically, given the US’ bloodthirsty reputation among tiers-mondistes, Debray credited American intelligence agents with saving his life by taking over the interrogation from the more reckless and brutal Bolivian soldiers.85 Nonetheless there was, as the French ambassador to Bolivia Dominique Ponchardier emphasised, a very real threat to Debray’s life in the early days of his interrogation.86

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An international campaign sprang up on Debray’s behalf. ‘Captured Marxist becomes a cause célèbre’, proclaimed an article in Life magazine three months after the arrests.87 While more strident left-wing campaigners accused the Bolivian government of political persecution, others pointed to irregularities in the judicial process or defended the principle of freedom of movement for journalists and writers. In France, though Debray was a hero of the left, his family connections on the right mobilised in his favour and transcended the ideological bias that was so evident in the Russell Tribunal. It became, to use Sirinelli’s term, an ‘endogenous phenomenon’, as the intellectual milieu attempted to defend one of its own.88 The aim of this mobilisation, encapsulated by the ‘extraordinary truce’ and joint initiative of Mauriac, Malraux, and Sartre, was recognised by contemporaries as ‘the sole concern, beyond all propaganda and ideology, to come to the aid of Régis Debray’.89 An intensification of reporting and petitioning occurred above all in response to menacing statements from Bolivian authorities. From early May 1967 two of the main themes were the lack of information about Debray’s situation, notably the absence of any formal charges against him, and the threat posed to his life.90 Some tiers-mondiste coverage of his case also eschewed political themes to focus on these issues.91 Early appeals for the respect of Debray’s rights as a prisoner or as the subject of a judiciary process were made by the lawyers of the Paris bar and by the head of the French chapter of PEN International, the organisation promoting freedom of expression and literature.92 De Gaulle addressed a message to Bolivian Head of State General René Barrientos Ortuño on 15 May after the latter had alluded to the death sentence awaiting Debray.93 The cause was also international even in this early phase, with interventions from Chilean President Salvador Allende, from Latin and Caribbean students, and collective protests from Italian, Belgian, and American intellectuals.94 Further protests continued the ecumenical campaign after more threats from Barrientos. A number of French intellectuals and personalities sent a telegram appealing to the Bolivian authorities’ humanity and sense of justice and referring to Debray’s rights under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This text was signed by several members of the Académie Française such as François Mauriac and René Clair; by multiple members of the Institut Français, including Raymond Aron and the human rights campaigner and soon-to-be Nobel Peace Prize recipient René Cassin; by the Nobel laureates Jacques Monod and François Jacob; and by many academics and intellectuals, including Alfred Koestler, Emmanuel d’Astier

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de la Vigerie, Philippe Sollers, Georges Perec, and Françoise Sagan. Various French organisations, including the alumni of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS), the tertiary employment union, the Paris municipal council, and Secours Populaire Français, sent messages or made appeals. Sartre was one of the most vociferous campaigners. The dust had not yet settled on the first session of the Russell Tribunal when Sartre spoke at a rally for Debray at the Mutualité building in Paris on 30 May. This speech was subsequently published as the preface to a collection of documents on Debray’s case. Sartre’s speech, unlike many of the petitions published to that point, drew attention to Debray’s militant activities and revolutionary engagement. He argued that Debray was arrested not as a combatant in the military sense but for a ‘crime of opinion’ as the author of a revolutionary theory, as a man ‘who wanted to free the guerrilleros of all restraints’.95 Sartre was unequivocal in his analysis of the case and his portrayal of the two ideologically opposed sides. He argued that Debray was arrested because ‘a revolutionary, theoretician of Latin American revolution, wherever he comes from and whatever he does, is enemy number one for a Latin American government’. The historical reality of revolution, for Sartre, made the actions of the Bolivian authorities doubly wrong: not only was their persecution of an individual ‘intolerable’ but it was also pointless.96 Sartre concluded by calling for the unconditional liberation of his philosophical and tiers-mondiste confrere in the name of freedom of opinion. Back in Bolivia, Debray was in the solitary eye of a hysterical storm. Protests and posters calling for Debray’s death heightened tensions, especially in Camiri, where he was being held. Death threats were also made against Ponchardier and the French ambassadorial staff. Concerned about Debray’s safety and the threat of torture, Bertrand Russell sent a team to investigate conditions and meet with the hitherto isolated prisoner. Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn (two of the team’s five members) were given permission to photograph Debray although not to interview him. This was the meeting that alerted Debray to the international mobilisation in his name. His initial relief notwithstanding, the prisoner soon grew ambivalent about the publicity attached to his cause. He expressed his objections in early September in a letter to his supporters in France. Despite allusions to the threat to his life and his manifest fears about the prejudice of the trial he would shortly face, the focus of Debray’s concern was the integrity of the revolutionary cause, which he saw as compromised by the ‘circus’ in which he was made to play the ‘clown’. Above all, he considered it

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a distraction: ‘instead of the “Debray affair” serving as a looking glass for outraged good consciences or as a source of income for the weekly emotion-vendors, it should be used to alert opinion a little to the general problems of America, and the revolutionary struggle, of the new Yankee fascism’.97 He was troubled by the confusion, misinformation and bourgeois sentimentality of portrayals of his case. This was, again, not only for himself but because of the tactical advantage it offered the Bolivian authorities. Debray felt himself unable to make use of the attention focused on him as an accused revolutionary leader. Of the seven defendants in the trial, including the Argentine Bustos and five Bolivians, Debray was the biggest prize and the most valuable capture. Yet despite his desire to proclaim his solidarity with the guerrilla cause, Debray felt himself constrained to deny the charge of having actually participated in combat, as this would have seemed to confirm the authorities’ claim that the Bolivian guerrilla forces were an externally organised, foreign-led provocation. After his arrest, Debray was accused by the Bolivian Government of handing over information regarding Guevara’s activities and whereabouts. These claims, as Maspero pointed out, were designed to tarnish Debray’s reputation and undermine the international support campaign.98 In the face of these manoeuvres, Debray saw his own conduct as part of a propaganda battle to be fought, and won, in fidelity to the revolutionary cause. When Debray’s trial opened on 26 September 1967, it was evident that the Bolivian authorities also had a propaganda battle in mind. The arena had been prepared with supposedly spontaneous protests calling for Debray’s execution.99 In total contravention of legal procedure and common logic, the prosecutor effectively made his closing speech, denouncing communism and Castroism, detailing Debray’s alleged crimes, and calling for the maximum penalty to be delivered, before the charges had even been read out in court. In this speech the prosecutor, Colonel Remberto Iriarte, described Debray as ‘a man who calls himself a philosopher but who is in reality a leader of the Red conspiracy trying to take over Latin America’.100 Spectators of the trial applauded lengthily in the courtroom when Iriarte had finished. French reports of the first day’s events, to which both Le Monde and Le Figaro dedicated front-page headlines, emphasised the threatening atmosphere, military aspect, and procedural anomalies.101 The terms of the battle changed drastically with news of Che Guevara’s death. Executed by the Bolivian military on 9 October 1967, his death was confirmed by Castro on 15 October and three nights later almost a million mourners attended a national wake for the fallen leader in Havana’s

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Plaza de la Revolución. An editorial in Tricontinental paid homage to Che’s commitment and sacrifice and declared that even in death ‘Che’s image will rise every moment like the Phoenix bird, battle-hardened and warlike’.102 The Organisation of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL) issued a tribute to the ‘heroic and glorious Comandante Ernesto Che Guevara’ and called for militants throughout the world to pay homage to him ‘by intoning funereal dirges with the staccato singing of the machine guns and new battle cries of war and victory’.103 European and American intellectuals, many of whom were campaigning for Debray, offered tributes to the fallen leader. Interviewed about Guevara from his cell in Camiri, Debray compared the revolutionary to Christ and affirmed that his quest was ‘a mystical adventure’.104 More than most, Debray could claim to be directly affected by Guevara’s death. In response to the news, he wrote a remarkable letter to the judges announcing his complicity with the guerrilla movement on a moral and intellectual level. Released by the knowledge that the risk to Guevara could not be exacerbated by his own actions, Debray declared that ‘I am morally and politically co-responsible for the acts of my guerrilla comrades . . . If I cannot, unfortunately, claim the honour of having been a combatant, I claim at least that of having stood alongside [d’être considéré comme solidaire de] my comrades’. Debray evoked his ‘great sorrow’ at not having died alongside the revolutionary hero and his selfsacrificial letter was perhaps an attempt to imbue his own fate with some of the Guevarist heroism. Indeed, he began the letter by affirming that ‘Che is not one who dies: example and guide, he is actually immortal because he will live in each revolutionary’.105 In asserting his solidarity, therefore, Debray was performing the perpetuation of Che’s legacy that he described. A month or so later, Debray would extend his revolutionary mea culpa in a speech to the court before sentencing. Like Castro after Moncada or the pro-Algerian militants in France, Debray used his speech to describe a vision of revolutionary engagement and to indict the system that had put him on trial.106 He denied any guilt for the acts of which he was accused, but also denied their categorisation as criminal, rejecting the validity of the world view the trial enacted. Addressing the judges directly, he warned that ‘you do not represent peace and happiness, while we represent violence and pain. Each one has to decide which side he is on – on the side of military violence or guerrilla violence, on the side of violence that represses or violence that liberates’.107 This division of the world into good and evil, the forces of liberation and the forces of repression, justified Debray’s revolutionary engagement and in particular the use of

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violence. Debray believed that the politically motivated proceedings were not in essence directed against him but against the revolutionary struggle he supported. At the same time, however, he felt obliged to downplay his contribution to the guerrillas’ cause. He expressed his regret that he had not played the role that the prosecution attributed to him in the fight between freedom and repression, declaring that ‘I would make myself perfectly ridiculous if I were seriously to accept, even for a moment, its flattering imputation that I have master-minded the guerrilla movement’. His implication was that it was the prosecution that had become ‘ridiculous’ by pushing this point. Debray attempted to re-establish the division between common criminality and ideological action, which the Bolivian Government was intent on erasing. He therefore asserted that ‘even if I declare a thousand times that I regret not being guilty the way the prosecuting attorney would like me to be, that I regret not having died beside Che, this does not give you any legal right to sentence me, since penalties are provided for deeds, not intentions’.108 For the sentencing tribunal, this argument was either unconvincing or irrelevant and on 16 November 1967 Debray received the maximum penalty of thirty years’ jail. Of these thirty years, Debray would serve only three. Nonetheless, the period was a source of many ordeals. For the early phase of his detention, according to ambassador Ponchardier, Debray was again beaten and kept in isolation; the year ended before his situation normalised.109 He was released on 24 December 1970, granted amnesty by General Juan José Torres, a left-leaning president. Instead of returning to France on his release, Debray went to Chile, where he did a series of interviews with Allende.110 In France, to his displeasure, he was a celebrity.111 But his prison diary, published a few years later, revealed that he considered himself ‘Tartempion’: a failure, a revolutionary imposter. In one passage he chastised himself that ‘you are over twenty-six years old and you have been neither Hoche, nor Bonaparte, nor Orson Welles, nor Fidel Castro’.112 The precise reason for the rapidity of Debray’s abandonment of his revolutionary mission is a subject for speculation. No doubt his insistence in court that he had not been part of the guerrilla movement had hit home; it has also been suggested that the intervention of the French state on his behalf fostered Debray’s appreciation of Western democracy.113 After his release, Debray’s politics moved away from the idea of revolution. His diary showed his increasing scepticism about the desirability of the cult of revolution; his own contribution to it was dismissed as ‘bluff’.

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His first major work on revolutionary theory to be published after his period in prison was La critique des armes (1974). It represented an overhaul of his earlier foquismo theory, expounding flexibility and versatility instead of the dominance of the military unit of the foco and emphasising national specificities over the internationalist mindset.114 In 1975, he further aired his change of attitude with the reflective essay Les rendez-vous manqués and satirised it in his novel L’indésirable, set in an unspecified Latin American country. In the latter, the decision of the guerrillas to memorise Debray’s own Révolution dans la révolution? provokes the mirth of the movement’s political guru, who sums up: ‘if all these would-be theoreticians could leave us the hell alone and stay at home instead of coming to evangelise the natives!’115 Yet, as this barb suggests, Debray’s revision of his tiers-mondiste engagement did not engender the turn towards sans-frontiérisme of so many of his contemporaries. Interviewed in 1988 about his experiences in Bolivia, Debray admitted coming to the conclusion that ‘I should have stayed home [il fallait rester chez soi]’.116 Rejecting the internationalism associated with tiers-mondisme, Debray had decided that ‘one can’t come to preach struggle against a foreign imperialism and not be from the country itself, it is contradictory’. While abandoning the concept of internationalism, Debray also rejected the notion of human rights as a political principle, sneering that ‘the first condition for the practice of human rights in the West is that they do not exist elsewhere’.117 His refusal to participate in the sans-frontiériste campaigns of Bernard Kouchner, with whom he had initially shared Latin American aspirations, stands in contrast to the political evolution of many activists.118 However, in one campaign Debray remained in touch with the obsessions of his peers, both revolutionary and humanitarian. This was the pursuit of the Nazi official Klaus Barbie, one of few constants across Debray’s political evolutions. Like many French militants of his generation, Debray envisioned third-world causes as a way of perpetuating the struggle against Nazism. He described his younger self as a ‘Latino Frenchman’ who ‘had ultimately gone to Latin America in search of situations that he hadn’t lived through, such as the Resistance or the Spanish Civil War’.119 The discovery that the ‘Butcher of Lyons’ was living in Bolivia, under the assumed name of Altmann, seemed to vindicate this conception of the post-war world. Barbie had in fact been assisting the Bolivian military in the fight against the rebels and was a successful arms dealer.120 After his release from prison, Debray constructed a plan with Serge Klarsfeld for the kidnapping of Barbie and his return to France

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via Chile, making use of Debray’s privileged relations with Allende’s government and his contacts with Bolivian guerrillas.121 This plan did not lead to anything. Still, the failed plot had a more successful literary echo in L’indésirable. The greatest sense of achievement in this novel about the obstacles confronting the revolutionary movement occurs when Frank, a tiers-mondiste militant originally from Europe, assassinates Rossi, an Italian fascist and torturer who made his money through weapons deals in Latin America.122 Off the page, Debray’s influence could perhaps be discerned a decade later, when President François Mitterrand struck a deal with Bolivia for Barbie’s extradition: Debray was his personal advisor.123 Despite the intentions of the Bolivian government in trying Debray, the episode of his arrest was a propaganda success for radicals. As a theoretician of revolution, Debray – already extremely well known – became even more famous. For the revolutionaries in Bolivia, his case was a publicity coup: Guevara noted with satisfaction at the end of May 1967 that ‘the clamour over the Debray case has raised our profile more than ten victorious battles’.124 Yet with Guevara’s assassination in October the guerrilla movement lost one of its most compelling figures and the foquismo theory that Debray had formalised took a near-fatal blow. Successive failures to ‘export’ the revolution to other countries in Latin America and Africa throughout the 1960s, which had begun in earnest after Brussels and Washington engineered the assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in 1961, diluted the prestige of the guerrilla movement. When in 1971 the Cuban comandante threw one of the nation’s most prestigious authors into prison, the implications for their own ideals became too great for France’s intellectuals to ignore.

the end of the cuban idyll Throughout the period of Debray’s travels in Latin America, and during his imprisonment in Bolivia, the Cuban regime was a beacon of progressive politics in the continent and beyond. This image was shattered with the episode of Heberto Padilla’s arrest, self-criticism, and public humiliation in Spring 1971, consistently cited as the moment when the international left broke off its love affair with the Cuban Revolution.125 Foreign intellectuals who had previously been supporters of the guerrilleros in Havana publicly aired their disenchantment with the acts of the Cuban Government and promptly saw their privileged ties to the country severed. The role of culture and the rights of the intellectual – whether within or

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beyond the revolution – were an essential theme in the exchanges over the plight of the imprisoned poet. Cuba offered a tropical escape from the repressive stalemate of the Algerian conflict and an alternative to the disappointing alignments, Stalinist and colonialist, of the PCF. Against such a backdrop, French tiersmondistes professed that ‘the profound song of the Cuban Revolution has given us the will to live and the strength to fight’.126 Cuba became the primary destination for tiers-mondiste revolutionary tourists. Visitors always went by invitation, though in various ways: as individuals, in group tours, and in the late 1960s for congresses organised by the Cuban Government.127 Documentarist Chris Marker, in his 1961 film Cuba si!, showed a marching band in the street accumulating dancers as their music transformed a military march into a Latin rhythm. The significance of such sights was explained by de Beauvoir: For the first time in our lives, we were witnessing happiness that had been won by violence; our previous experiences, especially the Algerian War, had only revealed it to us in its negative guise: the refusal of the oppressor. Here the ‘rebels’, the people who had supported them, the militia who would perhaps soon go off to fight, all glowed with gaiety.128

‘Such was Havana in 1961’, Marker’s voiceover concluded, ‘machine guns on the roofs and conga in the streets’.129 Intoxicated by the vision of a Caribbean third way, transfixed by the virility of the male leaders and the beauty of its female militants, enthused by the rigours of revolutionary justice and the spirit of social reform, visitors to Cuba returned to these themes time and again in their odes to the Cuban nation.130 From the outset, the Cuban Revolution had a dual appeal. On one hand, the guerrillas were men of action, unafraid of hardship, proven in battle, gallant in victory. They were ‘high-colour characters, bearded Christ-like men’; ‘soldiers-become-peasants, [who] carried into the cities their warlike austerity and country moralism’.131 They cultivated this image, never shedding the military fatigues that made Castro’s public image instantly recognisable. On the other hand, the Cuban leaders were seen as scholars and intellectuals: Castro, a lawyer by training, had demonstrated his eloquence during his 1953 trial; Guevara, as a medical doctor, had commitment and compassion. The period of literary and artistic vitality and innovation that immediately followed the revolution seemed to speak well of the rulers’ cultural habits. The music of Latin America imbued the Cuban Revolution as a whole with a sensitivity and sensuality that no other movement could replicate. Ultimately, however,

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the cultural and intellectual vitality of the Cuban Revolution suffered at the hands of the political leadership. As a leading cultural figure in Cuba and, crucially, part of the revolutionary generation of intellectuals, Padilla’s international stature was immense. His reputation, however, did not protect him from the repressive cultural policies of the 1960s. Padilla was among the founders of the highly influential journal Lunes de revolución in 1959, in the days of postrevolutionary creative effervescence. When it was banned two years later, Padilla worked as a correspondent for Prensa Latina, the official Cuban news agency, and Granma, the organ of the Cuban Communist Party. In 1968 he was awarded the prize of the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), selected by an international jury, for his collection of poetry Fuera del juego. This work, which expressed doubt about some of the rigidities of the revolution, saw Padilla accused of ideological betrayal; he lost his position at Granma as a result.132 Given the official decree of April 1967 that put an end to royalties, making writers financially dependent on state patronage through employment, Padilla was in a precarious position. The same was true for many other writers who found themselves on the vulnerable side of the divide between intellectuals willing to ‘subordinate their craft to the demands of the historical moment’ and those who found themselves increasingly isolated as the ideological crusade intensified.133 Alongside affronts to freedom of speech were other repressive measures directed against political opponents and social nonconformists. In the months after Castro and his comrades took power, newspapers announced daily the scores of executions taking place, some of which were carried out in sporting stadiums before thousands of spectators.134 Those who subsequently went into the prison system risked being held for long periods with no appeal: for example, Huber Matos, a guerrilla leader and military governor who criticised the revolution’s turn towards communism, was convicted of treason and conspiracy in October 1959 and spent twenty years in prison.135 Nonetheless, in the early years, French supporters of Castro were eager to excuse his repressive measures in the name of their shared revolutionary goals.136 Following Castro’s arrival in power, for instance, Claude Julien conceded that the procedure used in passing death sentences may have been questionable but saw this as normal and even argued that Castro had been lenient in not executing hundreds more. The long-standing editor of journal Le Monde Diplomatique, which was a connecting point for numerous tiers-mondiste currents and authors, Julien complained that

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for the American press, ‘the execution by the revolutionary regime of two hundred perpetrators [bourreaux] carries more weight than the 200,000 murders of the Batista dictatorship’.137 De Beauvoir claimed that the public executions were merely a way of containing the popular demand for reprisals. She was disappointed that the French press represented this ‘necessary purge’ as a crime.138 A similar sentiment was expressed by writer Françoise Sagan, who spent nine days in Cuba in 1960. The executions were, for Sagan, evidence of the commander-in-chief’s ‘horror of blood’: ‘that Castro succeeded in giving to the vengeance of a people humiliated for six years only six hundred of those responsible represents a great accomplishment’.139 For many tiers-mondistes, Castro’s glory was so great that shadows over his achievements simply did not register. The arrest of Heberto Padilla, therefore, from the point of view of Cuba’s European supporters, became a turning point. He was arrested by security police on 20 March 1971 and held for thirty-seven days. Padilla’s wife, fellow poet Belkis Cuza Malé, was arrested on the same day but released much more rapidly. Reports in the international press carried news of the couple’s arrest but could offer nothing to explain it, as the Cuban authorities remained silent about the reason. During his detention, Padilla was interrogated daily – with the exception of a six-day period when he was kept in isolation in total darkness and spoke to no one, not even the wardens.140 He was beaten, mocked by guards who taunted him with lines from his poem ‘In difficult times’ as they struck him, and more than once was also injected with drugs prior to interrogation. Eventually, Padilla was ordered to produce a confession and self-criticism, to be written in prison on his own typewriter, as a symbolic gesture to exorcise the ‘counter-revolutionary lies’ he was accused of spreading through his literary work. In the meantime, unbeknownst to the prisoner, his case had stimulated the concern and activism of intellectuals who had previously been among Cuba’s strongest international supporters. The French were especially active in this campaign.141 The first decisive sign of the change in the winds towards Cuba came in the form of an open letter to Castro, published in Le Monde on 9 April, twenty days after Padilla’s arrest. The letter expressed fears that the official silence about Padilla’s fate indicated the reappearance of a strong and dangerous ‘sectarianism’ in Cuba. It warned that ‘the use of repressive measures against intellectuals and writers who have exercised the right of criticism within the revolution can only have deeply negative repercussions among the anti-imperialist forces of the entire world’.142

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The rhetorical precautions of this protest, which was couched in the language of left-wing solidarity and reaffirmed the belief in the principles of the Sierra Maestra, could not disguise the ideological rupture that the letter represented. The signatories were a mix of European and Latin American intellectuals. French tiers-mondistes of note to sign this critique of Cuban repression included Jean Daniel, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Dionys Mascolo, Claude Roy, and Anne Philippe. Amongst the Latin Americans who added their names were Carlos Franqui (of Cuba), Julio Cortázar (Argentina), Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz (Mexico), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), and Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru). Their protest received further momentum when it was published in English translation in the New York Review of Books in early May 1971. It was seconded, to take just one example, by a statement from the PEN Club of Mexico calling for Padilla’s liberation in the name of intellectual criticism and cultural freedom.143 Observing the clearly repressive climate, it was becoming more difficult to maintain, as Sartre had in 1960, that Fidel was ‘at once the island, the men, the livestock, the plants and the land, and, a particular islander . . . he is the entire island’.144 Padilla’s release on 25 April did little to assuage critics or quell the international campaign in his name; rather, the denunciations intensified. The spectacularly ill-calculated decision by the Cuban Government to have Padilla memorise and pronounce his self-criticism to a UNEAC meeting, and then to diffuse a transcript of this document to the international press, only reinforced the concerns of international observers. Padilla’s confession was a classic piece of Stalinist self-accusation, subsequently compared to those produced during the Soviet show trials of the 1930s.145 He avowed his shame at his previously critical attitude. He praised the generosity and intelligence of his interrogators, those ‘valiant comrades’. He attacked other intellectuals, Cuban and foreigners. He declared: ‘I have made so many mistakes, mistakes that are truly unforgivable, truly reprehensible, truly indescribable, and I feel amazingly light-hearted and amazingly happy after all that I have experienced now that I shall be able to start a new life’.146 It was difficult, as Cuban exile Juan Arcocha pointed out, to see how this exaggerated confession could be the result of anything other than torture.147 A second open letter to Castro was then published, in Le Monde on 22 May. Roughly sixty intellectuals threw their weight behind its assertions, with most (though not all) of those who endorsed the first letter reiterating

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their concern. The language in this letter was far more severe than in the first. They wrote: With the same vehemence as we had, from the very first day, in defending the Cuban Revolution that seemed to be exemplary in its struggle for freedom, we exhort you to spare Cuba the dogmatic obscurantism, cultural xenophobia and repressive system which Stalinism imposed upon the socialist countries and of which events similar to those in the process of occurring in Cuba were the first glaring manifestations.148

This second letter thus described, though with greater force, the separation between ideals and reality newly perceived by intellectuals which marked the first open letter regarding Padilla. The allusion to Stalinism was particularly damning from the point of view of a tiers-mondiste movement that had taken the refusal of Stalinism as one of its original principles. The letter also accused Castro of ‘contempt for human dignity’ in submitting Padilla to violence and public humiliation. The contrast with earlier portrayals of the Cuban Revolution could not be more striking. It was recognised by contemporaries as a definitive break from the Cuban regime on the part of intellectuals who had stood alongside the guerrillas in the 1960s.149 In June 1971, a dossier in Les Temps Modernes reiterated the condemnation of Padilla’s treatment: it reprinted his self-criticism in full and, among other critiques, carried an article by Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican novelist and supporter of the Cuban Revolution, comparing Castro to the great despots of the twentieth century – Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin.150 The international mobilisation on behalf of Padilla was received with great anger and little diplomatic nuance by Fidel Castro. After the first letter, he accused the signatories of being agents of the CIA and banned them from Cuba. After the second, he was so riled by the interference in Cuban affairs that no book by a foreign writer that dealt in any way with Cuba would make it past the customs inspection.151 In a speech to the Cuban National Congress of Education and Culture, on 30 April 1971, Castro lashed out at Padilla’s supporters for thinking that ‘the problems of this country can be the problems of two or three stray sheep, who have one or two problems over the revolution because they do not have the right to continue poisoning and intriguing against the revolution’.152 He declared that for these ‘bourgeois intellectual gentlemen and bourgeois libellists and agents of the CIA . . . Entry is closed indefinitely, for an indefinite and infinite period!’ As Sartre remarked, ‘he was ferocious with us’.153

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The Padilla affair marked the definitive demise of the French radical left’s enthusiasm for revolutionary Cuba. Pronouncements like those at the Education and Culture Congress were too severe to be explained away, too clearly anti-intellectual to be ignored. With Padilla kept under unofficial house arrest and membership of UNEAC drastically cut back by state interference, it became clear that the poet’s case was not to be viewed as an aberration.154 If many were still willing to point to the Cuban Revolution’s achievements in medicine and especially literacy, the time when Cuba’s political situation could be unequivocally admired and defended was over.155 Yet as recently as 1968, 500 intellectuals and artists from 70 countries had travelled to Cuba to participate in a cultural congress hosted by the comandante himself. The Padilla affair undoubtedly played a crucial role in bringing about the change in attitudes.

conclusion Historians have pointed to several contextual factors to explain the rapidity of the turn against the revolutionary government in Havana. Firstly, Che Guevara’s death in 1967 had initially increased his mythical standing, but ultimately deprived the Cuban Government of one of its most admired members.156 Secondly, and perhaps more meaningful, was Castro’s endorsement of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Castro’s declarations in favour of the repression disappointed many intellectuals who had hitherto hesitated to align Cuba, despite its communist evolution, with the Soviet Union.157 Thirdly, as Jeannine Verdès-Leroux argued, the Padilla case was the culmination of a series of attacks on intellectuals within Cuba which had the effect of touching intellectuals outside Cuba more sharply than the persecution of homosexuals, for example.158 Finally, as Cuba became increasingly repressive, alternatives were offered by, on one hand, the Chinese Cultural Revolution and, on the other, the May ’68 events in France. The impact that Padilla’s case had on attitudes to Cuba may also have been magnified by its inclusion within another narrative, that of the rise in importance of the figure of the political prisoner, both Frenchmen and foreigners. The case of Régis Debray, so prominent in the late 1960s, was a key part of this narrative. Another French citizen, Pierre Golendorf, was also imprisoned in Latin America, having been arrested in Havana in early 1971 for espionage. Golendorf’s case did not become a cause célèbre like Debray or Padilla, though he was spared from serving the full ten years of his sentence and published an account of his experience entitled 7 ans

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à Cuba: 38 mois dans les prisons de Fidel Castro.159 Within France, a campaign to support French Maoists incarcerated under the so-called loi anti-casseur gained significant momentum – so much so that Mick Jagger made a plea on their behalf during a concert at the Palais des Sports – and led to the founding of the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (GIP) in February 1971.160 Designed to give voice to the prisoners themselves, the GIP undertook hundreds of investigations of the conditions of detention and treatment of prisoners in France. There was also, crucially, a rise in French activism on behalf of foreign political prisoners. The work of the GIP intersected, at times explicitly, with concern for members of the Black Panther Party, held in a state of perpetual and at times fatal precarity in American prisons.161 Playwright Jean Genet was an ardent supporter of the Black Panther detainees; he wrote a preface for a GIP-produced pamphlet on the death in prison of one of its members.162 A French chapter of Amnesty International, the British organisation whose mandate was to campaign for the rights of political prisoners, was founded in 1971. Despite some difficulties in adapting Amnesty’s Anglo-Saxon nomenclature and style to the French mode of political engagement, membership climbed throughout the decade to more than 20,000 in 1981.163 The case has also been made for seeing the emergence of a focus on political prisoners in the campaign against the Vietnam War: after the Paris peace accords of 27 January 1973, the emphasis of left-wing pro-Vietnamese campaigners shifted to the plight of political prisoners, symbolised by the infamous ‘tiger cages’ on Con Son Island.164 The treatment of detainees in Germany, notably the Red Army Faction members incarcerated in Stammheim prison, also came to prominence in France in 1974.165 Finally, campaigns for political prisoners fed into the public prominence of the figure of the leftwing dissident following Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s exposé of the Soviet labour camps. Heberto Padilla was thus a forerunner, in a third-world setting, of the intellectual archetype whose Soviet embodiment was Andrei Sakharov. And so, as the figure of the political prisoner or solitary dissident gained prominence, that of the guerrilla commando began to slip away. Though the romanticism and heroism of the guerrillero never faded, the influence of the guerrilla warfare model in its political and military form declined. The innovative humanitarian missions of the sans-frontiéristes offset some of the yearnings for adventure and solidarity that had previously mobilised tiers-mondiste militants. And in a novel variation on the political prisoner, sans-frontiériste volunteers imprisoned by hostile

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governments also became the subject of petition campaigns in France.166 The justification of revolutionary violence, which had been one of the tenets of the anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist struggle in Algeria, Vietnam, and Cuba, would be replaced in the years after Padilla with a focus on the exiles, prisoners, and refugees fighting for their freedom from the revolution in power.

4 Complicity, conscience, and autocritique Reconfiguring attitudes to political violence

Attitudes to violence on the French left underwent a striking evolution in the 1970s. At the forefront of the changes in these years were the generation of activists who had come to maturity under the sign of ’68. They had, in the words of Bernard Kouchner, ‘grown up in the cult of the French Resistance and the imitation of History’,1 and made constant, incantatory reference to the period of Occupation, Resistance, and Holocaust. Confronted in the 1970s with the genocidal violence of revolutionary regimes and the terrorist activities of left-wing radicals, these militants and intellectuals began to channel the legacy of the Second World War into a defence of human rights against the abuses of ideology. Activists who in 1969 had celebrated France’s inexorable progression Vers la guerre civile wound up supporting humanitarian campaigns in the belief that ‘an operation like the Bateau pour le Vietnam contributes to the recreation of fraternity, of solidarity and the denunciation of the intolerable, much more than dozens of political speeches or rounds from an automatic weapon’.2 The events that brought about this change in understanding were multiple, progressive, and interconnected. Many aspects of French society were transformed in these years. In electoral politics, the changes were momentous: the death of the towering figure of Charles de Gaulle, on 9 November 1970, was followed by the exit of Gaullism from the Elysée Palace, when Georges Pompidou gave way to the liberal republican Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in 1974. The agreement for a Union of the Left signed by the PCF and the Parti Socialiste (PS) in 1972 prepared the way for the left’s electoral tilt at the end of the decade. Social movements, especially the gay rights activists of the Front Homosexual d’Action Révolutionnaire (FHAR), the renovated feminism 112

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of the Mouvement de la Libération des Femmes (MLF), and anti-racism campaigns in the context of increased immigration from outside Europe, rose in visibility and impact. The 1973 oil crisis signalled the end of the trente glorieuses years of France’s prosperity and marked an assertive phase in the campaign for global development, seen notably in plans for the New International Economic Order (NIEO), approved by the UN in 1974.3 Crucial to changes in intellectual and ideological paradigms in this period, and fundamental to the debates that occupy this chapter, was the French-language publication in June 1974 of the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s monumental indictment of the Soviet prison and labour camp system.4 Solzhenitsyn’s invocations could not fail to strike disaffected Communists and fellow travellers: ‘it is unthinkable in the twentieth century to fail to distinguish between what constitutes an abominable atrocity that must be prosecuted and what constitutes that “past” which “ought not to be stirred up.” We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others’.5 Of course, there had been a number of important challenges to the Soviet Union’s reputation in France prior to The Gulag Archipelago; as Tony Judt wrote, ‘The revelations of the late forties, not to mention those of a later generation, were only news in the sense that some people were choosing to hear them for the first time’.6 Landmarks included the backlash from André Gide’s Retouches à mon retour de l’URSS in the 1930s, the legal battles of Victor Kravchenko and David Rousset to establish the validity of their writing on the Soviet Gulag in the 1940s, and Solzhenitsyn’s own A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch (1962). Furthermore, the disenchantment caused by Soviet repression in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968 had prepared the ground.7 However, the pull of the Soviet Union and more broadly the MarxistLeninist model of revolution had managed to survive despite the exposure of the Stalinist system. The revolutionary regimes of the third world were essential to the continuing appeal of this model, allowing the transferral of aspirations and the prolongation of hopes in spite of the repeated ‘revelations’. The ‘discovery’ of the Soviet Gulag made dissidence a watchword of French extra-parliamentary politics in the 1970s, but this did not mean that all eyes were turned, or turned exclusively, towards Eastern Europe. Many were looking towards the third world for illumination and all were relating what they saw to their own political engagement. Solzhenitsyn himself may have been writing about the Soviet Union, but his message

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was seen to pertain across the globe; and it was also part of a more ecumenical chorus that applied similar critiques to third-world powers, notably China. The downwards spiral of radical left politics in Europe was also critical. The result, remarkably rapid though by no means immediate or unanimous, was a turn against the revolutionary regimes of the third world and the ideological engagement they had inspired. Yet as Moyn wrote, despite the at times traumatic nature of this rupture, ‘the break with politics occurred in explicit or implicit fidelity to earlier aspirations’ for ‘even when they are merely about resisting atrocity, human rights are a reform project in competition with other such projects’.8 Although militants began to denounce their tiers-mondiste illusions, they also began to search for and proclaim new forms of local and international engagement against suffering and injustice. This chapter documents the challenge to the tiers-mondiste world view that occurred across the 1970s. It highlights the role of anti-totalitarian thinking in discourse about the third world as part of the breakdown of the revolutionary privilege in France. The first section argues that, for tiers-mondistes, The Gulag Archipelago was part of a narrative criticising revolutionary violence in the third world. This helps explain the great significance of Solzhenitsyn’s work in France, where it functioned as both a watershed for attitudes to revolutionary ideology in general and an intensifier of contemporaneous depictions of third-world, notably Maoist, repression. In the subsequent years, as the second section shows, a discourse of self-criticism emerged from the circles of militants coming to terms with the new perspective on their own engagement. Many of these repentant tiers-mondistes participated in a series of exchanges in 1978–9, discussed in section three, following Jacques Julliard’s assertion that ‘African socialism will only ever be totalitarian’. The concept of ideological engagement became the subject of vivid debate in and beyond the pages of Le Nouvel Observateur, with consensus impossible as contributors grappled with the fluid intellectual parameters of the moment.

maoist revolution and the third-world gulag With Cuba out of favour since the arrest of Heberto Padilla in 1971, the most powerful revolutionary reference at the beginning of the decade was to Mao’s China and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The promotion of the Chinese Revolution as a model for others around the globe had accelerated from the late 1950s and the Sino-Soviet split in the early

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1960s reinforced China’s bid for leadership of the third world. Emblematically, Mao’s Little Red Book circulated widely amongst foreign supporters and was promoted heavily, with attention to each national context, by Chinese propaganda services. In France, a widespread Chinese cultural influence accompanied a genuine, albeit more minority, theoretical interrogation of Maoism.9 However, as information about abuses in China grew and the excesses of Mao’s Red Guards became more apparent, the turn away from tiers-mondismes began to affect French Maoists as well as Castroists. The public enactment of this process – through journalistic reports and rebuttals, works of politics and philosophy, and published memoirs – showed the influence of Solzhenitsyn, notably in the works of the nouveaux philosophes, as well as the re-examination of the legacy of the Occupation and the Holocaust, discussed in the next chapter. French Maoism was a diffuse cultural and intellectual phenomenon, which shaped and indeed connected multiple generations of activists and militants, but it was also an alphabet soup of micro-parties. The Chinese Revolution, it has been noted, had something for everyone, from the ideologue to the aesthete to the purist.10 Its appeal was reflected in the extraordinary variety of high-profile visitors to the People’s Republic of China.11 For example, lawyer Jacques Vergès, notorious thanks to his defence of FLN terrorists, met with Mao during a visit in March 1963 and founded the pro-Chinese and broadly tiers-mondiste journal Révolution on his return.12 Vergès’ interest in China fitted with his position as opponent of colonialism, the PRC having sought to position itself as the leader of third-world liberation. Very different was China’s appeal for the literati of Tel Quel, who toured a decade later and focused largely on its cultural potential.13 Feminist theorist Julia Kristeva, travelling with Tel Quel editor Philippe Sollers and philosopher Roland Barthes, journeyed through China without hoping for any communion with its masses.14 Committed followers of Mao did the exact opposite.15 What China represented for French militants varied according to the times they turned their attention towards it and what their previous political engagements had been. Early accounts of the PRC emphasised the reasonable, rational style of Mao’s revolution, with the soldier who wrote poetry at its helm and projects of modernisation and sanitation. Claude Roy affirmed confidently that ‘violence for the sake of violence, romanticisation of upheavals, of terror: we find nothing of this in China’.16 This was not a ‘bloody night of revolution’ but rather ‘a peaceful dawn’.17 And if this description of the Chinese Revolution by Roy reflected not only its supposed moderation but also his own more moderate style, other visitors

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with more bellicose tendencies also praised Chinese restraint. De Beauvoir commended the remarkable patience of the Chinese approach, and Sartre wrote that ‘Terror is an unknown word in China’.18 It would be anachronistic to compare these comments, written after the couple’s visit to China in 1955, to their inflammatory writing about Cuba, fashioned as it was in the midst of the Algerian maelstrom. Yet the failing was the same in both cases – what Lamouchi described as a ‘total lack of critical distance’.19 In 1957 de Beauvoir published La Longue Marche, an account of the six-week visit to China two years earlier. She declared that ‘a country where people are taught to read at the same time as their livelihood is provided for, where generals and statesmen are men of letters and poets, allows for many dreams’.20 De Beauvoir’s compte rendu was heavily researched, yet some of her comments are disconcerting in their naïveté and cultural arrogance. Thus she noted that, while from the train she couldn’t actually test the cleanliness or odour of passing villages, she could see that the peasants always wore clean clothes; and that Chinese restaurants were without decorations because ‘the props that in Paris or San Francisco indicate that a restaurant is Chinese are pointless in Peking’.21 (Eight years later, de Beauvoir admitted that in fact the Chinese culture, ‘essentially a culture of bureaucrats and courtiers’, was of little interest to her.22 ) Though it was not the pure festival she went on to discover in Cuba, there was nonetheless much to celebrate in China: the Maoist combination of asceticism, intelligence, and social progress proved austerely seductive. While many of those who took an interest in revolutionary China were not members of the PCF, some had been and the relationship between the PCF and the Maoist movement was a difficult and complex one. The PCF had included a number of Associations des Amitiés Franco-chinoises which it attempted to dissolve in the context of the Sino-Soviet split, leading to the establishment of breakaway groups by some participants, such as former Resistance member Jacques Jurquet in Marseille.23 The relationship between the PCF and these pro-Chinese groups, including notably the Parti Communiste Marxiste-Léniniste de France (PCMLF), founded in 1967 off the back of earlier initiatives of the Marseille circles, mirrored the antagonism between the Soviet Union and the PRC.24 The PCF’s student body, the UEC, also provided a birthplace for Maoist groups that criticised its pro-Soviet orthodoxy. There were thus two key strands of French Maoist groups: the older networks of (former) PCF members and the younger student activists, often strongly influenced by

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anti-colonialism. The latter were part of proliferation of gauchiste factions that made the UEC in the 1960s a hotbed of unorthodox militancy until the PCF reasserted control by expelling militants from these different factions. In December 1966, roughly a hundred of these exiled activists founded the Union des Jeunesses Communistes (marxiste-léniniste). They became the French Maoists of popular imagination: the Little Red Book– carrying student militants depicted by Jean-Luc Godard in 1967 – although they disapproved of Godard’s film and refused to participate in its making.25 The theoretical contribution of Maoism was one of its attractions, including notably for the UJC(ml). It was also the reason that many proChinese groups did not allude to the country in their names but rather to its renewal of Marxism-Leninism. The most important figure associated with the interpretation of Maoist theory in France was the philosopher Louis Althusser. Born in 1918, Althusser became a member of the PCF from thirty years of age, three years after entering the ENS as a student. In the years of his influence upon student Maoists, Althusser was a teacher at the ENS and remained a member of the Party, advocating change from within rather than opposition from without. His students at the rue d’Ulm joined Althusser in a re-examination of Marx’s texts through the insights of Maoism, publishing their analyses in their own Cahiers Marxistes-léninistes while Althusser published Pour Marx and Lire Le Capital (1965) and directed the ‘Théorie’ series at the Editions Maspero.26 At the same time as they were participating in these debates, individual students were also discovering aspects of third-world politics, with for instance Linhart and Debray travelling to Algeria and Latin America, respectively. In addition, practices derived from Mao’s teaching were taken into the heart of Maoist activities in France. The most striking example of this was the practice of ‘établissement’ by which militants took up positions in factories in order to better understand the experience of workers, to foster workers’ political activism, and to ensure their own movement related to their lived realities.27 Roughly fifty men and women became établis between September 1967 and May 1968.28 The practice reflected the highly demanding culture of self-discipline and self-denial in the Maoist movement. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was crucial to the reception of Maoism in France. Declared in May 1966 and officially concluded a decade later, it had inspired French Maoists with the iconoclastic fervour of its revolutionary Red Guards. Many of the Maoist slogans that became famous in this period in fact dated from the 1930s, during China’s civil

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war, and were reasserted as part of the renewed appeal to transformational violence in the global context of decolonisation and the national campaign of Cultural Revolution.29 This period of turmoil, orchestrated by Mao Zedong to restore his personal power, was a dark one: within weeks of the movement’s beginning there were cases of Red Guards, unmolested, beating people to death.30 And in a sign of its destructiveness, by the end of the decade 4,922 out of Beijing’s 6,843 officially designated historical sites had been obliterated.31 Yet the late 1960s represented the high point of a French fashion for all things Maoist and a particularly fervent period for the pro-Chinese students of the UJC(ml). A few months after the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Claude Roy published an open letter in Le Monde declaring his fear that it would become a movement of ‘simple-hearted citizens, simple-minded doctrines’.32 At a time of widespread enthusiasm for Maoism, he had the feeling of ‘the solitary ant who undertakes to reprimand an erupting Krakatoa’.33 Five leaders of the UJC(ml) went to China on official invitation in August 1967. They were treated to a classically constructed revolutionary itinerary, featuring a university, a popular commune, a mausoleum, tunnels from the liberation war, multiple factories, meetings with Red Guards, and daily readings from Mao’s writings. Robert Linhart, the UJC(ml)’s single most dominant figure, wrote a letter to his partner that summed up all the anticipation and ambition that went into their trip: ‘yesterday we visited a popular commune; I’ve been waiting for this since 1964; it’s as good as we imagined it. It is the radiant path that all the starving of the world will take, all the peasants of the zone of darkness and [revolutionary] storms’.34 Jean-Pierre Le Dantec described their excitement at the opportunity to ‘discover the country that haunted our dreams, shake hands with veterans of the Long March, fraternise with the Red Guards, debate with leaders of the greatest and most glorious Communist Party of the world’.35 Another participant, Claire Brière-Blanchet, later described how their arrival in China ‘bordered on a dream’.36 A similar experience, received similarly enthusiastically, was had by journalist Claudie Broyelle. Her husband Jacques was a member of the Althusserian circle and had been to China on the UJC(ml) tour. Broyelle visited the PRC in November 1971 with a group of twelve French women and on return wrote La moitié du ciel – the title was a quote from Mao – about the situation of women in China. Broyelle indulged throughout in the stodgy prose of socialist achievement and, almost as often, inelegant condemnations of capitalist sins. The verbatim quotes from people met on tour were particularly wooden, such as the young girl who

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had learned since the Revolution to repair clocks: ‘before I knew nothing about mechanics and this ignorance prevented me from serving the people as I wanted’.37 Broyelle emphasised the pleasing pre-eminence of women in the avant-garde and the importance of education allowing the masses to ‘master the world’. La moitié du ciel thus corresponded to David Caute’s description of what fellow travellers had admired in China: mass education, health services, women’s rights; and with its appendix of figures it also conformed to the ‘fetish of production statistics’ he observed.38 Between these two visits, the already fractious Maoist movement in France had gone through something of a crisis, splintering even further and evolving away from its 1960s forms. The catalyst lay in the events of 1968: the rue d’Ulm militants had intentionally absented themselves from the mass protests of 3–10 May, believing that the necessary class dynamics were not in place.39 The Maoist leader Benny Lévy, interviewed under his militant nom de guerre Pierre Victor, admitted that 1968 appeared ‘like a thunderbolt’ for Maoists who had profoundly distrusted student politics.40 In the ensuing months a debate took place within the UJC(ml) about how to best understand the May events, with those who believed in the need for greater contact with the masses creating the Gauche Prolétarienne in September. To the GP came activists of the Mouvement du 22 Mars, which had been at the heart of the protests at Nanterre, and by 1971 the group had an estimated 3,500 members.41 The other main UJC(ml) faction (referred to as the ‘liquidateurs’) had gone on to create Vive le Communisme in 1968 and Vive la Révolution in Autumn 1969, moving towards libertarianism. The renewal and diversification of the student pro-Chinese movement especially in the years after 1968 made it, in the long run, the more influential of the two Maoist strands.42 One of the appeals of third-world political movements to tiersmondiste militants in France was their ability to connect local experiences to global events. For many Western third-worldists the search for alternatives abroad reflected frustration or anger with the state of their own society. Revolutions in the third world heralded a transformation of the global order in support of which radicals should work to bring revolution into their own societies. The place of the third world in tiers-mondistes’ political imagination was always, therefore, tied to their relationship to their home and mediated by local ideas and experiences. Hence Richard Wolin’s description of Maoism as more of a ‘trope’ of the French gauchiste imaginary and a ‘generational rite of passage’ than an ‘empirical point of reference’. In the post-May years, he argued, Maoism ‘played the unsuspecting role of a way station or transmission belt, weaning intellectuals

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away from the dogmas of orthodox Marxism and exposing them to an expanded definition of human emancipation’.43 As the Maoist example shows, like its embrace, the turn away from revolutionary politics was multifaceted and it was not always the first or most forceful accounts of revolutionary violence – or for some militants, any published criticism at all – that became the most influential. In 1972 the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution received a powerful condemnation unusual in France at that time: Simon Leys’ Les habits neufs du président Mao. For Leys, the Cultural Revolution showed that ‘the red sun of Maoism is now decidedly no more than a bloody setting sun’.44 A Belgian-born Sinologist, Leys was highly critical of the Cultural Revolution, which he referred to between scare quotes and which he considered neither cultural nor revolutionary, but instead a grab for power.45 Like François Ponchaud’s later book on the Khmer Rouge, Leys’ study drew upon a combination of official documents and broadcasts, first-hand observations, and refugees’ testimonies; like Ponchaud, too, his knowledge of the local language added to the authority of his analyses. Yet despite its later recognition as a groundbreaking work, Les habits neufs made little impact upon the pro-Chinese tenor of the French far left at the time.46 Leys was aware of the difficulty his work posed for European supporters of the PRC, who had proven ‘little inclined to investigate the historical reality of Maoism, no doubt fearing that a confrontation with reality be harmful to the myth that so conveniently excuses them from having to think for themselves’.47 The lack of interest in Leys’ book must have confirmed his scepticism about the extent to which China truly concerned French Maoists, who only later came to acknowledge how little relationship the version of China they championed had with reality. Leys returned to the forefront of the anti-tiers-mondiste information campaign with Ombres chinoises (1974). This book was intended to redress what Leys continued to identify as the exaggeratedly luminous and stereotypically positive portrayals of the PRC, despite his previous critique of the Cultural Revolution; Leys’ correctives were the ‘shadows’ in the book’s title. Though his passion for the people of China and their culture was evident, as it had been in Les habits neufs du président Mao, Leys once again made clear his opposition to the policies, system, mindset and style of the ruling regime.48 He reviled the Cultural Revolution as ‘the climax of some twenty years of periodical, often bloody purges, of systematic training in aggression, of legitimising violence and hatred’.49 Beyond the criticism of excesses and abuses in China, however, Ombres chinoises

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took task with the Westerners who endorsed and thereby encouraged this system of rule. Recognising the difficulty of escaping from the ‘encumbrance of his status as foreigner’ given the Chinese authorities’ obsession with preventing any spontaneous contact between locals and outsiders, Leys nonetheless portrayed Western Maoists as responsible – whether by naïveté, stupidity, or complacency – for their own delusions. Révo. cul. dans la Chine pop. appeared in the same year. Its title conveyed the biting irony of its stance towards the fashion for all things Maoist. The bulk of the book was made of documents translated from the Red Guard press, conveying the dual elements of bureaucratic obedience and sectarian violence that characterised the Cultural Revolution. The accompanying introduction and footnotes were, as one reviewer described it, ‘vitriolic’ and ‘outrageously satirical’.50 It put into metaphorical stocks the people responsible for the ‘inanities’ that had established the Maoist mythology, in anticipation of the shame they would feel once the truth about the Cultural Revolution became known. They were portrayed as responsible in that ‘they have contributed to the spark that inflames their heart being taken for the reddest of the red suns, and the Chinese for idiots’.51 The editors of this volume, like Leys, complained of French Maoists’ inability or unwillingness to test their idealised views of China against reality. This lament would subsequently become one of the major themes of militants’ own reflections on their engagement. Journalist Olivier Todd raised similar concerns about foreign support for the Vietnamese. First travelling to South Vietnam for Le Nouvel Observateur in 1965, Todd’s reporting was initially critical of Washington and Saigon. Although he was able to visit North Vietnam in 1967, it was not until 1973 that he managed to enter FNL-controlled territory in the South with a fellow journalist.52 There Todd found a system of control whose plurality had been far exaggerated by its supporters, obsessed with reunification and ‘re-education’, and which he described unequivocally as ‘Stalinist’. Foreign supporters, Todd believed, had pilloried South Vietnam as they had idealised the North: ‘of this country of steely ambitions and an ideological intransigence without nuance – shared by the Vietcong in the South – we wanted to make a white dove, passionate about wisdom and peace’. He published his experiences and reflection in a September 1973 article entitled ‘Comment je me suis laissé tromper par Hanoi’. Todd placed a strong emphasis on the complicity of the Western intellectuals in their own blindness, the desire to overlook the ‘obscurantist’ nature of the Vietnamese out of compassion for their suffering during the American onslaught and, in the French case, as an escape from

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unappealing politics at home.53 In a later study on Hanoi’s capture of Saigon, he again recalled how foreign supporters of the Vietnamese communists were ‘made fanatical by blindness’.54 In his view, too, the revolutionary intellectuals were complicit in their own delusions. A major blow to the reputation of third-world communist regimes came in the form of Jean Pasqualini’s account of his seven years in a Chinese labour camp. Pasqualini first published his testimony in English as Prisoner of Mao in 1973; the French version appeared two years later. Born in China to a Corsican father and Chinese mother, Pasqualini’s knowledge of foreign languages and familiarity with Western social circles led him to work with the US military and French companies, leading to his arrest in 1957 for counter-revolutionary activities. He was released in 1964 as a gesture of goodwill after France’s formal recognition of the PRC. In his memoir, Pasqualini cast himself as the only spokesman for the millions of Chinese who had shared his prison years, ‘often in abject, despairing misery, sometimes literally starving and always haunted by hunger, in perpetual submission to the authority not only of guards and warders but even more so to the “mutual surveillance” of [our] fellow prisoners and even to [our] own zealous self-denunciations and confessions’.55 He described the all-consuming nature of an ordeal that, he indicated, was without reprieve for most who suffered it. These revelations were significant for French leftists also confronted with documentation of the Soviet Gulag system. Sartre acknowledged Pasqualini’s role in revealing the existence of camps in China and hence the reason why ‘we must not put our faith in the Chinese revolution, no more than in any other revolution today’.56 Geismar highlighted the importance of reading Pasqualini for his realisation of the coercive nature of the Chinese system, as did fellow Maoists Jacques and Claudie Broyelle.57 In terms of its contemporary resonance for French Maoists, therefore, Prisonnier de Mao was far more significant than Leys’ Les habits neufs. As a sign of what this meant in activist France at the time, Pasqualini’s memoir was hailed by François Furet, the historian of the French Revolution, as ‘one of the year’s essential books’.58 To understand such a comment demands reference to Solzhenitsyn’s devastating account of the Soviet Gulag system and the ensuing debates in France about the notion of totalitarianism, to which Furet himself was a major contributor. Pasqualini’s book should also be viewed in the context of the rise of the figure of the third-world political prisoner, which had begun a few years earlier with Padilla. (It should not be forgotten that this was the era of Amnesty International’s establishment in France.) Prisonnier de Mao

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showed that debates about the third world, far from being peripheral in this period, were central to the challenge addressed to the privileged position of political ideology. The centrality of third-world events for ideological debates was also evident in Chaliand’s Mythes révolutionnaires du tiers monde. Published in January 1976, it was an instant success.59 It was an expansive study of the decline of tiers-mondiste militancy, including demographic and economic analysis of third-world countries across three continents; studies of particular leaders or movements such as the Guinean leader Amílcar Cabral or Peruvian populism; and theories of guerrilla warfare or political Marxism, based on eight years of trips to the countries in question which Chaliand undertook without financing from any official or private body.60 Though he acknowledged – or admonished – that ‘it is pleasant to tell oneself stories’, the book was conceived as ‘a critical enterprise that, beyond the programmes, declarations and slogans, strives to determine the facts’. His approach was a reaction to the militant dogmatism which had meant that ‘too often, by universalism – a lack of knowledge of concrete conditions – too great an importance has been accorded to the possible role of revolutionary ideology, without always properly evaluating what sort of society the ideology was being grafted onto and in what conditions’.61 Chaliand was not the first to propose such analyses. As early as 1970 Jean-François Revel, the writer and philosopher who would later participate in LSF’s conference, had challenged the linkages between thirdworld revolution and transformation in Europe and the transferal of hopes onto guerrilleros and fedayeen. But the timeliness and compelling quality of Chaliand’s Mythes révolutionnaires rapidly made it an essential reference.62 Like others who were revising the terms of their solidarity, Chaliand articulated a new, reasoned basis for engagement with the third world in the era after Nazism, colonialism, and the Gulag. This was, according to Chaliand, the era of the death of utopias, requiring their desanctification and the undoing of their Manichean construction. His perspective was thus in alignment with that of the nouveaux philosophes, though his style and engagement were vastly different. The loose group known as the nouveaux philosophes were the intellectual figures most often identified as the purveyors of Solzhenitsyn’s message in France. Many of these young, photogenic intellectuals had forged their political persona during the gauchiste years, particularly amongst Maoist circles. In the mid and late 1970s they were ‘omnipresent’ in the pages and airwaves of the French press and their books were amongst

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publishers’ most lucrative.63 The unifying motif of nouvelle philosophie was anti-totalitarianism. In various ways and to different degrees, they insisted that the higher moral intentions of Marxism could no longer be called upon to distinguish it from fascism or divorce it from its Stalinist derivations: ideological motives, whether left-wing or right-wing, led inexorably to totalitarianism. Their work built upon that of the ‘antitotalitarian front’, which brought thinkers such as Claude Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis into concert with those at Esprit, representing the Catholic left, or Commentaire, channelling the influence of Raymond Aron.64 In this context, nouvelle philosophie can be seen as – to quote Patrick Pharo – the ‘crystallisation or emblematic form’ of a more diffuse ‘spirit of the times’ and a new way of reflecting upon history.65 The nouveaux philosophes and the anti-totalitarian front have received substantial attention from scholars, so discussion of their works here will be brief. However, with the notable exception of Bourg’s From Revolution to Ethics, many studies have overlooked or underestimated the connection between anti-totalitarianism and contemporary debates about the third world.66 Three works of nouvelle philosophie bear mention here both for their significance and for the importance of their authors to the two movements that interest this study. These are André Glucksmann’s La cuisinière et le mangeur d’hommes (1975), described as ‘a symbolic date in [France’s] intellectual history’,67 and his subsequent Les maîtres penseurs (1977); and Bernard-Henri Lévy’s La barbarie à visage humain (1977). The two books published in 1977 both sold over 80,000 copies in their first few weeks.68 Glucksmann drew directly upon The Gulag Archipelago and other dissident texts to elucidate the meaning of the Soviet camp system for those in the West. ‘The falsehood of the USSR is in no way an exotic flower’, he wrote in La cuisinière et le mangeur d’hommes, ‘it is ours’.69 In the second, he dismissed differences between applications of Marxist theory or liberal politics, between different contexts or places, as ‘subtle distinctions’ too weak to disguise the reality that ‘nothing resembles one charnel-house better than another charnel-house’.70 Glucksmann criticised the tendency to view each incidence of violence as geographically bound, claiming instead that there was ‘nothing strictly local in the world’s succession of genocides, in the colonies and elsewhere, or in the world-wide diffusion of the concentration-camp system’.71 Lévy pursued a similar theme with his declaration in La barbarie à visage humain that ‘there is no worm in the fruit, no late-blooming sin, for the worm is the fruit and the sin is Marx’.72 That is to say, there was no

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uncorrupted part of political ideology. There was an important element of self-criticism in the attack Lévy mounted in this work on the associated model of the militant intellectual: ‘the “revolutionary” intellectual is a pitiful figure – the salt of the earth, he thinks; in reality an executioner’.73 More accessible than some other, more esoteric philosophical works associated with nouvelle philosophie, La barbarie à visage humain was one of the most successful texts to be received under that banner. However, the irritation that Lévy, especially but not exclusively, provoked in contemporaries has been shared by historians who felt that in nouvelle philosophie, as Bourg put it, ‘we are faced with the historical significance of tedious books’.74 As he indicated, these books were part of a shift in modes of engagement in the decade following May ’68. Nouvelle philosophie (if such a thing ever existed) was in this sense one of a number of signs of a broader ideological and political evolution. Bourg has demonstrated how their own experiences of censorship and incarceration brought Maoist revolutionaries of the Gauche Prolétarienne to defend democratic rights and civil liberties.75 This was one of the processes by which French Maoism – which had always been more French than Chinese – fell in the mid 1970s. The personal experience of repression that, according to Bourg, coaxed Maoists in France towards a defence of democratic principles began in 1970. This experience was more or less simultaneous with the series of texts exposing the violence of Maoist China and other revolutionary states. The GP’s convocation of civil liberties undermined the drive towards revolutionary violence; other moderating influences included internal tensions within the GP and external contacts across different intellectual generations, which helped to prevent their total isolation. These political and ideological transformations did not always occur without protest. The occupation of the offices of the newspaper Libération by gauchiste militants in 1977 was one example. Libération was originally conceived as a leftist source of news that would provide an alternative to more mainstream press. The manifesto of the Agence de Presse Libération (APL), founded in 1971, spoke of the need for a new, uncensored source of news to combat the deepening ‘shadow of fascism’ in France. When the armed section of the GP kidnapped Robert Nogrette in May 1972, it released its communiqués exclusively via APL staffer and fellow gauchiste activist Antoine de Gaudemar, making APL an indispensable source even for the venerable Agence France Presse.76 APL became Libération in 1973, its founding collective including several former

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leaders of the GP, in the company of Sartre who by this time was also editor of the GP paper La Cause du Peuple–J’accuse. But in October 1977, reacting particularly to the violence of the West German Red Army Faction, the newspaper adopted a newly critical editorial position on leftwing terrorism, announced by a headline describing the violence in West Germany as a ‘war of monsters’. Around the same time Libération editor and former gépiste Serge July condemned the ‘totalitarianism of the far left’.77 This was a real break and was felt by some as a betrayal.78 In response, angry militants from various anarchist groups and a new, aggressive group known as the Autonomes occupied the office and threatened its staff. For July, it demonstrated again the revolutionary left’s ‘fossilised’ way of thinking which, even as it came under question, reacted with violence.79 This was the far left turning on itself as shared reference points shifted. Through the work of the nouveaux philosophes and the antitotalitarian front, the hitherto sacred distinction between left-wing and right-wing powers was being challenged by a vision that emphasised the presence of camps on both sides of the divide as the key to understanding their shared nature. News from the third world made a major contribution to this process: a sense that – as Glucksmann wrote – ‘from Lenin up to Cambodia’ ideologies of the left were responsible for as many deaths as those of the right.80 The greatest casualty of the era was the privileged position that Marxist ideology had previously occupied in the loyalties of the French left. More than simply another episode in the decline of Marxism, however, critiques of totalitarianism also provided the new foundation for an intellectual engagement based on human rights, with sansfrontiérisme at its vanguard. This was not only about the terms of future state intervention in the name of human rights, but personal engagement. For the new humanitarianism, the position of the third world and the role of individual commitment would be crucial, as they had been for radical engagement before.

intellectual responsibility and public regret The Second World War, like other major conflicts, Judt tells us, accelerated the transfer of authority and legitimacy from one generation of intellectuals in France to its successor.81 The politically radicalising effect of the experience of collaboration and resistance was an important part of this process and helps explain why the same quick generational turnover characterised the years of tiers-mondiste militancy as well. This dynamic

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is particularly evident in French Maoism, in which successive generations appeared with remarkable rapidity. Some of them, like Claude Roy (born in 1915), supported the Soviet Union before turning towards China. Others, such as those of the Althusserian circle and the UJC(ml) in the late 1960s, were only children when Roy was already making this turn. They were the children of the Vichy era, born in the late 1930s and early 1940s. A third generation, closer in age to their immediate predecessors and less prominent, participated in the Maoist movements after the radicalising experiences of 1968 and government repression. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, moreover, the engagement of older intellectuals alongside younger generations of militants reinforced the cross-generational nature of French Maoism and, it has been argued, helped prevent its slide into violence. With ever more, and more convincing, information available about repression in the third world, increasing numbers of French militants began to voice their revised opinions on the regimes that had been considered leaders of the global liberation. By the end of the decade, Simon Leys’ earlier rebuke of revolutionary pilgrims for their ‘total lack of curiosity for the real China’ was no longer applicable.82 Instead, militants were ready to recognise that ‘the China in our heads’ did not correspond to reality. They felt that ‘The time has come to examine intellectuals’ tendency to try to save at any cost the “intellectual” and moral comfort that Marxist engagement, that totalitarian temptation, represents, an inclination towards servitude that no pistol at their temple demands’.83 The result of this self-critical perspective was a series of memoirs and revolutionary recantations, both symptom and motor of the shifting paradigm in intellectual engagement. While the self-critical memoir was not a new genre – one thinks of the famous exemplar by Edgar Morin simply entitled Autocritique – the rapidity of the changes in the 1970s resulted in a remarkable spate of such publications. It was somewhat ironic that the practice of self-criticism was used by Maoist militants in France to dismantle the reputation of revolutionary China. As one of the cornerstones of Mao’s political ideology, selfcriticism was intended to protect revolutionary purity by rectifying errors by cadres as well as educating the masses who witnessed the sessions. Maoist groups in France had faithfully adopted Mao’s slogan that ‘our faces will get dirty if they are not washed regularly’, requiring leaders and grass-roots members alike to publicly avow and renounce their errors. The habit of self-criticism then found a powerful expression in the political memoirs of disillusioned Maoists, whose titles invoked the lyrical

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style of the Great Helmsman but also the bitter reality behind his pastoral maxims. One early outlier of the genre and the only one that seemed to be in dialogue with Simon Leys’ books at the time of their publication, was the self-critical memoir published by Claude Roy. Much of this book, Nous (1972), was devoted to the period 1946–56, when Roy was a member of the PCF. He described this period as one of collective and individual madness, of an alienated engagement with a Soviet regime he was unable to support fully. Then, prior to the Cultural Revolution, he published extensively on China, believing that Mao had avoided Stalin’s errors and abuses. However, the Cultural Revolution confirmed his increasing scepticism towards the Chinese regime and the sense that it was a ‘reproduction in an Orientalised version’ of the Stalinist disaster.84 As the perception became less idealised, he wrote, ‘the schizophrenia that was rapidly intensifying in the communist world made us doubt not our own reasoning, which would have been wise, but reason in general, which drove us mad’.85 Eventually Roy came to consider the refusal of ideology as a way of approaching issues of inequality and injustice. His participation in the mobilisation on behalf of Padilla reflected his revision of revolutionary engagement.86 Roy’s memoir was explicitly formulated as a warning to the tiersmondistes who followed in his path. After the struggles that he qualified not only as futile and absurd but as the cause of a schizophrenic crisis, both personal and collective, his stated intention was to try to dissuade his successors from entering the same trap. He pointed to the Maoists in particular when he claimed that ‘I try to laugh, too, when I hear people explain that Stalin was the “cult of personality” but that China now is only la-pensée-Mao-Tsé-toung’.87 For French intellectuals, he argued, the revolutions of Russia, China, Cuba, or Algeria, had all been ‘all the more satisfactory given they often exist only on paper’.88 Though he didn’t resign himself to injustice, he declared himself to have awoken from his revolutionary delirium, advocating reason and reflection over the duplicity and fanaticism he associated with his militant period. Jacques and Claudie Broyelle were virtuosos of the art of autocritique. Having both visited China as revolutionary tourists, they later produced several publications seeking to deconstruct the French infatuation with the PRC.89 The first of these, Deuxième retour de Chine (1977), was an explicit challenge to the enthusiastic accounts produced by militants after their tours of revolutionary regimes. It directly revisited Claudie Broyelle’s La moitié du ciel.90 Since La moitié du ciel, from May 1973 to January 1975, the Broyelles had lived in China; their co-author Evelyne Tschirhart,

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a writer and teacher, lived in China from September 1972 to January 1975.91 These extended stays allowed them a more sensitive appreciation of the reality of the Chinese regime, bringing them to address the paradox (ultimately a false one) that ‘“our” China was the antithesis of Soviet experience, yet we were confronted head-on with various apparatus, practices, and designs whose similarity with the USSR was undeniable’.92 They perceived resemblances with the Soviet Union, they eventually concluded, because these similarities were real. Deuxième retour de Chine was therefore largely preoccupied with redressing the balance of representations of China. Much of the book was given over to discussing the repressive nature of Chinese society in various areas such as work, housing, press censorship, the treatment of foreigners, and law and order. Features of militant writing on revolutionary regimes, such as the imposition of self-censorship and the reliance on stereotypes, were mocked by their former practitioners. Their comparisons between Mao’s China, the Soviet Union, and the Third Reich showed the influence of the nouvelle philosophie debates of preceding years.93 Elsewhere they not only compared Maoism to Stalinism and Nazism but even did so negatively, claiming that ‘although it is related to the Soviet and Nazi systems, Chinese totalitarianism is different in that it is even more committed to the transformation of man at his deepest level’.94 What ten years earlier would have been positive claims for Maoism’s revolutionary ambitions became, in the light of the political paradigm change, a critique of its aggression against the human character. Totalitarianism, the repentant authors argued, was the reality of the Chinese Revolution, despite the desire of European Maoists to believe otherwise. The tension between reality and illusion was another of the key themes of their next book, Le bonheur des pierres: carnets rétrospectifs (1978). More introspective, it also conveyed extreme bitterness about revolutionary engagement. Its portrayal of the militant was particularly unflattering:

It is not that the militant, or the left-winger, is blind, or closes his eyes. No, he sees double: he sees what is before his eyes, and, like the poet, ‘beyond the horizon’; he sees the invisible, the Ideal more real than life, the beyond that belies the hereand-now. And in the perspective of this ever-receding horizon, he acquires the ability to deny all importance to reality. He must be able to recognise the camps’ existence, hear the moaning, without being affected or shaken: if he merely hid the facts from himself, the militant would remain vulnerable to revelations. On the contrary, the good militant sees all, hears all, knows all, but keeps his clear conscience and remains unwavering.95

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In the militant universe as the Broyelles portrayed it, the ideal served as a substitute for the moral; the search for values had led to the forestalling of further enquiry. They emphasised the burden of responsibility carried by Western intellectuals who had repeatedly supported violent regimes because ‘it is better to believe each time that we have been misled than to admit: we were the totalitarians’.96 In other shorter interventions they described the way in which developments in China led them to revise this position. They drew attention to the fate of Lin Biao – the military hero ignominiously vilified after his death in a plane crash in 1971 – and Mao’s support for Pinochet as key moments in their turn against China.97 Their description of this process highlighted the complex nature of the attachment of French Maoists to China. According to the Broyelles, the shock came not quite from the clash between the imaginary China and the real one, but between their idealised vision of activism and a reality that they saw both in themselves and in the frenzied Red Guards. They drew back, they wrote, when ‘we recognised ourselves in those audacious Red Guards, full of ideals and self-sacrifice. We recognised in their terrorism, their assassinations, in the “men without limits” that they had become, our potential future’.98 Once again perceptions of the third world were refracted through multiple lenses. In Les dangers du soleil (1978), Jean-Pierre Le Dantec, another Maoist, also told the story of his intellectual and political trajectory. He described attempting ‘all the contemporary versions of Marxism: successively Stalinist, Guevarist, Luxemburgist, Trotskyist, Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, syndicalist’, and his ultimate disillusionment with ideology.99 No longer was it possible, he claimed, to remain in ignorance of the ways in which Marxism had been experienced ‘socially, politically, ideologically, as imprisonment, as deportation, as brainwashing, as execution, by hundreds of millions of individuals’. Le Dantec was editor of La Cause du Peuple and, earlier, had joined the Broyelles on the UJC(ml) trip to China. Like many Maoists, he participated only partially in May ’68 – a source of regret, though a decade after these events he had come to regard them not as revolutionary in the tiers-mondiste sense but as ‘the beginning of a challenge to the very idea of Revolution as handed down by 1789 and 1917’. Arrested in March 1970, Le Dantec claimed that he had already begun to rethink his commitment to the GP before this date.100 This would place him at the forefront of the gépistes’ break with revolutionary ideology, though his writing also showed (and acknowledged) the influence of Lefort and Glucksmann’s mid 1970s publications responding to The Gulag Archipelago. The poise of Le Dantec’s self-disclosure made Les

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dangers du soleil one of the most sympathetic examples of the militant autocritique genre so prevalent from the late 1970s onwards. Another eloquent response to the loss of tiers-mondiste illusions and the rise of anti-totalitarian discourse was Jean-Claude Guillebaud’s Les années orphelines, 1968–1978 (1978). Guillebaud’s central theme was the relationship between the ‘stupefying ideological metamorphosis’ that had reshaped Paris and the earlier, more incremental deconversion of journalists like himself with direct experience of the third world. He perceived the death knell sounding for Marxist thought and the ‘romanticheroic concept of revolution which, since the post-war period, pushed the militant zeal of European and American youth towards a technicolour third world, where a clear-cut battle between good and evil was being fought’.101 Guillebaud reflected on the reasons for this fundamental change in mindset, emphasising the ‘repetitious bereavement’ of the decade after 1968 when revolutionary or national liberation movements throughout Latin America, Africa, and Asia collapsed or were shown to be corrupt and abusive.102 His attitude to the nouveaux philosophes, whom he saw as central to this revision of ideological commitment, was ambivalent: while he recognised the stimulating effect of some of their claims, Guillebaud seemed to feel that, intellectually speaking, there was more volume in their bark than effect in their bite. Nonetheless, he was positive about new forms of concrete political engagement emerging from this period. The following year came Jean Daniel’s evocatively entitled L’ère des ruptures. Like Guillebaud, Daniel’s work in journalism had exposed him to key moments of revolutionary politics and as editor of Le Nouvel Observateur he held an influential position regarding the discussion and interpretation of events. He characterised the tiers-mondiste period as a failing of intellectual rigour, in which ‘our tendency, our profession, our interest combined to make us delighted followers rather than sources of information, orchestrators more than witnesses [témoins], lawyers more than judges’.103 The privilege afforded to revolutionary violence was at the core of this failing. His strong criticisms of left-wing ideology, seen for instance in his responses to military interventions in Africa, represented the revision of these attitudes towards revolutionary violence. Daniel recognised and justified his insistence on the crimes of the left with renewed reference to intellectual responsibility: ‘is it not right that . . . we be more demanding of a revolutionary country, whose astounding heroism we supported for thirty years, than of a South American dictatorship that is utterly logical and consistent to itself when it represses, oppresses,

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exploits?’104 Hence the anti-ideological phase was, for some at least, also anti-communist. For most of the authors, the public repudiation of their revolutionary activism did not mark a withdrawal from public life. If the clock had run out for ‘songs that lead to death, dreams that kill, wars that take themselves for revolutions, fascisms that adopt the colours of religion’, this did not necessarily mean that all engagement should also stop.105 Or, as Claudie Broyelle put it: ‘I do not . . . believe that all those, including myself, who cloistered themselves within simplistic (and repressive) truths should henceforth keep quiet or tend to their own garden’.106 Rather, they continued to participate in debates about intellectual engagement and the third world, enlivened by the new frameworks of human rights and humanitarianism.

african socialism and the ‘human rights international’ In mid 1978, discussion of the status of revolutionary ideology turned distinctly towards Africa with Le Nouvel Observateur’s publication of a controversial article by Jacques Julliard. So abundant were responses to Julliard’s article that within a year they were published as a collection by Le Seuil under the title Le tiers monde et la gauche. ‘Rarely in the journal’s history have we had the impression of being such an acute site of tensions’, Daniel wrote of that autumn.107 The controversy provoked by Julliard’s article demonstrated the shifting parameters regulating French intellectual engagement with third world and the political imaginary it inspired. The article that began it all, published on 5 June 1978, gathered together the themes, by now well known in debates about the third world, of the neo-colonialism of political ideology, of intellectual responsibility for ideological partisanship, and of the human rights which could redeem them. By way of analysis of the state of global politics, Julliard asserted that ‘never before has the superpowers’ game, that is to say the management of alliances and conflicts, converged with such cynicism in the neutralisation and suffocation of individuals’.108 As European ideology was the cause of this affliction, ‘we no longer have the right, when regarding the third world, to paternalistically trot out the remnants of a progressive philosophy of history, the crimes and failures of which we witness every day’.109 According to Julliard, Western intellectuals had a duty to consider Ethiopians and Zairians in the same way as Argentines (victims of right-wing oppression) and Czechs (victims of left-wing oppression):

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Africans must be integrated into ‘the human rights International’ because ‘any other attitude makes us accomplice to the torturers [bourreaux]’.110 This article did not, as Ross claimed, merely ‘extend the map of the Gulag to incorporate the entire “third world”’,111 for the simple reason that the third-world Gulag had already been identified by the likes of Pasqualini, Ponchaud, Leys, and Padilla. Julliard rejected both ideology and raison d’Etat as frameworks for engagement in the third world, in favour of human rights. So far, so familiar. The point at which Julliard’s claims became contentious was his unequivocal assertion that ‘African socialism will only ever be totalitarian’.112 This was, as responses to the article made clear, its singularly most controversial phrase. In fact, Julliard’s apocalyptic prophesy for African socialism was the reason this particular debate took place. It provoked Ahmed Baba Miské to write the first article to Le Nouvel Observateur in response, published a fortnight after the original. Miské, member of the Saharan liberation movement Polisario Front and former Mauritanian ambassador to the UN, accused Julliard of denigrating third-world leaders as ‘bloodthirsty brutes’, lambasted as atavistic his understanding of the third world, and labelled the European attitude towards Africa as hypocritical.113 It is not insignificant that this critique from Miské, which opened the discussion, was the only contribution by a third-world thinker to this debate. This fact highlights the local nature of this debate, which really was a dispute between intellectuals about French intellectual engagement. His participation in French intellectual debates (perhaps facilitated by his work with UNESCO, based in Paris) was further indicated in his publication of two other texts in 1978 and 1981, the first of which included a dialogue with Jean Lacouture and the second of which concluded with Miské’s reflections on Western intellectuals’ engagement with the third world.114 Most authors who contributed to the debate over the next few months had something to say about Julliard’s claim for African socialism. Claude Bourdet, a political writer and activist, considered Julliard’s prophesy symptomatic of ‘a vision of the world that was incorrect from the outset’, which had contributed enormously to the ideological crisis in which they found themselves.115 Lacouture questioned whether his colleague really believed that all socialist regimes in Africa were ‘equally tyrannical and bloodthirsty, that their only difference was expressed in the number of concentration camps established or political opponents assassinated’.116 Jean Roux, a former Trotskyist and anti-colonialist campaigner, challenged the implication that ‘we can only remain without voice and

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without choice, between a capitalist Africa, bloody, corrupt, repressive [policier] and a socialist Africa no less bloody and repressive’.117 If one took Julliard’s statements at face value, it seemed, the avenues and merits of engagement in the third world were extremely limited. His criticism of the bloody ‘religion of the state’ and its cult of sovereignty appeared to blame decolonisation for abuses committed by post-independence governments.118 The argument that Julliard had insulted Africans and advocated colonialism was forcefully made by Guy Sitbon. One of Le Nouvel Observateur’s regular contributors, Sitbon made use of his extensive experience as a foreign correspondent in a very critical response to the original article. He claimed that the language Julliard had used to describe third-world regimes corresponded exactly to colonialist discourse and favoured rightwing analyses. He criticised what he saw as a reductive, bipolar conception of the world – the civilised West versus the rest, who were mired in the Gulag. He even suggested there was something racist in Julliard’s characterisation of African politics. Though he was generally careful to nuance his declarations, Sitbon’s article contained some striking scepticism about human rights. For instance, he mocked the insistence on civil rights with the sarcastic concession that, in some countries, ‘sometimes people have their passport withdrawn or their subscription to the Nouvel Observateur: it is tiresome but they survive’.119 Similarly, to criticisms of the oppressive state structures of revolutionary regimes, he responded that for ‘the African in pursuit of his first modern freedoms, [these] are not necessarily [Jimmy] Carter’s “human rights”’.120 Casting individual rights in this way, as a part of Western cultural and ideological imperialism, was a trope typical of tiers-mondisme. Although in reality third-world countries had made a fundamental contribution to post-war human rights debates, this attitude reflected the polarisation of positions on human rights during the Cold War period.121 On the other side, reformed tiers-mondistes came to Julliard’s defence and reiterated his criticisms of political ideology. Kouchner was the first to do so, asserting the need not so much to scrutinise the mentality of the third world but to ‘question our Western attitudes, our stands, our judgements’, because these attitudes ‘count more than we think in the death of others’. He portrayed gauchiste militancy as delusional, because free from physical risk, and morbid: ‘incapable, for reasons still yet obscure, to admit to our masculine taste for spectacular violence, we decreed it to be just because [it was] revolutionary, progressive and of course defensive’. He disapproved that despite the accumulation of ‘massacres, bombings,

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victims, the left does not lose its bearings: there are good and bad dead. It depends on the flag’.122 In place of this ideologically partisan approach, Kouchner argued that the defence of minorities against oppression was the only legitimate cause. On both a global level (with regards to the international left’s ongoing support for the Khmer Rouge) and in the more specific field of French politics (citing the deference of the Socialists to the PCF, particularly in matters of foreign policy), Kouchner’s view cohered with the tenets of Julliard’s original article. Le Dantec also defended Julliard’s stance. Like Sitbon and Kouchner, Le Dantec sought argumentative authority in his own militant past; unlike Sitbon, however, to whom he was in effect responding, he repudiated rather than reaffirmed it. Le Dantec’s demolition of tiers-mondisme as a conceptual framework was unambiguous: I state simply that the concept of the ‘third world’, understood as the principal storm zone of world Revolution, as seat of the national liberation struggle, as a factor necessary to break the vicious circle of underdevelopment, is a creation of Western revolutionary thought, a more or less orthodox offshoot of our Marxism and not an original thought produced by the natural movement of peoples dominated by imperialist metropoles.

He nonetheless affirmed the rectitude of campaigns against injustice, as seen in opposition to the American bombardment of Vietnam. Le Dantec demanded for the disillusioned ‘the right to lucidity, the right to declare that one barbarism can hide another . . . that people accept, without heaping us with abuse, our need to proclaim our disgust at all tyranny, wherever it comes from’.123 While rejecting ideology, he therefore continued to advocate engagement. The same mandate was claimed by various other commentators. Lacouture critised Julliard and Miské alike for sharing the assumption that ‘the capitalist or social-democratic West can do practically nothing for the peoples of the third world, apart from, says the African militant, “refrain from spraying them with napalm”’.124 Instead of being satisfied with the minimalist aspiration to encourage people in the third world to join ‘a human rights International’, he wrote, Western intellectuals should continue to judge regimes and cooperate with those deserving assistance in the name of the struggle against tyranny and poverty. Maxime Rodinson, a specialist on the Arab world and Marxist theorist who published extensively with the Editions Maspero, shared Lacouture’s view that revolutionary movements and colonial powers alike must be scrutinised and judged accordingly. In the absence of this critical perspective, he

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suggested, ‘unconditional support always leads to endorsing errors, and often to endorsing horrors’.125 Thus, while ideology was rejected, the need for investigation and judgement was maintained. It was not only Julliard’s controversial phrase that fuelled these debates. A reinvigorated French military interventionism in Africa added potency to claims about foreign meddling in the third world and intensified the stakes of these potentially theoretical debates. In June 1978 – the month Julliard’s article was published – came the second of two French interventions in Shaba province (now called Katanga) of Zaïre (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). The first, in April 1977, saw France airlift Moroccan troops into the province but the second was more substantial and direct and also involved the US and former colonial power Belgium.126 These missions were part of a controversial increase in military interventionism during Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s presidency. Despite being relatively minor military operations, the Shaba interventions raised questions about the responses of Western countries to the third world in the post-Vietnam era, the security of their own nationals outside of Europe, and how to deal with Soviet and Cuban interventionism.127 Daniel saw responses to them as representative of the loss of the ‘convenient, communal frameworks’ which would previously have dictated the left’s interpretation of such geostrategic events.128 Indeed, although he was writing about a Western military action in a former Belgian colony, Daniel used the opportunity to direct equal, if not greater criticism towards the Communist bloc. He declared that ‘we will not advocate for Luanda or Kinshasa what we condemn in Budapest or in Prague, and, in our opinion, Africans are at least as worthy as Europeans of an authentic human liberation’.129 Daniel thus rejected the idea that alignment with the Soviet Union could offer emancipation from Western neo-colonialism. Alluding to Solzhenitsyn and other dissidents, Daniel claimed that ‘the victims of Soviet despotism have taught us . . . that capitalism of the State can claim as many lives as the other’. The conclusion, difficult and traumatic for Western intellectuals to come to terms with, was that violent regimes could have ‘several masks but only one face: barbarism’.130 The Shaba interventions provided justification for the continuation of an editorial campaign by Daniel dating back to early 1976 that drew links on several occasions between events in Africa, European ideological positions, and the message of the Soviet dissidents. Certain elements of his position resonated with the anti-imperialist tenets of tiers-mondisme. However, in a new type of critique, Daniel was criticising the West’s neo-colonialism not only in itself but because it forced the

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peoples of the third world to seek refuge in ‘a Stalinism that we condemn, a dictatorship of the proletariat that we are abandoning, a bureaucratic system that we ourselves want to avoid’.131 This provided one of the points of connection with domestic concerns about the influence of the PCF within the Union of the Left it had established with the Socialist Party – a connection that Michael Scott Christofferson and Paige Arthur both considered determinative.132 Many authors, regardless of whether they backed Julliard’s position or condemned it, were troubled by the signs of a renewed French colonialism in Africa. Historian and pied-rouge René Gallissot questioned whether Africa had really been decolonised at all.133 Miské established a parallel between Giscard d’Estaing’s interventionist policy and European colonisation, ‘at the time when the reconquest of Africa by crushing everything that moves is planned officially’.134 Portraying the French intelligentsia as out of touch with reality, he sneeringly called upon the ‘democratic friends of the anti-Gulag International’ to ‘try for a moment to put yourself in the shoes of an African confronted with a multinational or a “Jaguar” and who is desperately seeking something with which to defend himself’.135 Lacouture accused Giscard of failing to reflect on the justifications for intervention ‘before launching his “Jaguars” and legionnaires at the Sahara and the Toubou’.136 From these two examples it is evident how reference to the Jaguar aircraft, recently integrated into France’s military arsenal, became a shorthand for French armed neo-colonialism in Africa. Jean Ziegler denied the possibility of justifying contemporary interventions in Shaba, Chad, or the Sahara by reference to the illusions or inheritances of an earlier era. While others accused Julliard of racism, atavism, or pessimism, Ziegler’s critique of Julliard was based on a defence of tiers-mondisme (though, like most such defences, without accepting the characterisation of tiers-mondisme used by its critics). A sociologist and lawyer by training, Ziegler was associated with the Cuban leadership in the 1960s and later became a parliamentarian in his native Switzerland and a UN Special Rapporteur. Ziegler’s foray into the controversy at Le Nouvel Observateur came in the edition of 19 August 1978; by then the debate triggered by Julliard’s article had been renewed almost weekly for over two months. He constructed a historical and political case for the Cuban presence in Africa, claiming that ‘to establish a simple equivalence between capitalist imperialism and a supposed Cuban under-imperialism amounts to the razing of a complex problematic, paralyses our own analytical reasoning and condemns us to understanding nothing’. Though not without

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criticism of Cuban militarism, he evoked the emblematic figure of Che Guevara and contrasted the illegitimate interventions of the French state with the principle of ‘tricontinental solidarity, the will to aid, throughout the world, enslaved peoples in their own liberation’, represented by Guevara even after his death.137 Ziegler continued to portray revolutionary action as redemptive at a time when most others, even on the left, had dismissed it as a destructive illusion. This was even clearer in Ziegler’s Main basse sur l’Afrique, on colonial oppression and liberation movements in Africa, which appeared almost simultaneously with his article responding to Julliard. It expressed a world view in which ‘the domination of the peoples of the periphery by the oligarchies of the hegemonic capitalism of the centre is a fact of violence’.138 Ziegler held all citizens of the latter bloc responsible for the degradation of the former. He declared that ‘global revolution, class revolution, born of the shared consciousness of all workers, of all the oppressed, is a potentially achievable, concrete, realistic project’.139 Until such a time arrived, the imperialist system ensured that ‘the world in which we live is an immense extermination camp’ in which the ravages of capitalism could be compared to the murderous project of Auschwitz.140 This harkened back to comparisons between colonialism and Nazi violence. Yet he also referred enthusiastically to a new ‘language of individual dissidence’.141 Given Ziegler’s political position, in opposition to those who had aligned themselves with the Soviet dissidents, his use of this language indicates the pervasive influence of the trope of dissidence in intellectual engagement at this time. Ziegler had an ally of sorts in Régis Debray. Debray saw the prosperity and freedoms of the West as cynically predicated upon the exploitation and degradation of others. He characterised Western human rights as hypocritical and self-serving, in a language that was rather inflammatory: ‘Western morality is the flower that grew on mass graves’, he wrote, because ‘free men must have slaves’.142 However, Debray’s article in the October 1978 edition of Le Monde Diplomatique was more an attack on the anti-tiers-mondistes than a defence of tiers-mondisme itself. Debray accused anti-tiers-mondistes of tarring third-world countries with a ‘double definition of savagery’ because ‘there human rights are not respected, and Marx’s cadaver is still moving’.143 Debray, along with Ziegler, Sitbon, and Miské, was among Julliard’s strongest critics. They also shared in disapproval of the way some other participants used the discourse of antitotalitarianism, suggesting that it was deployed either vaguely or selectively – and in any case incoherently.144

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Amidst these somewhat vituperative exchanges, two contributions adopted a more level tone. The first was Gérard Chaliand’s article of February 1979. Chaliand drew a distinction between the lucidity of an anti-colonialist commitment and the ‘delirium’ of a third-worldist one; he argued that while the dismantling of tiers-mondisme was necessary, ‘we must not, in passing from one mythology to another, maintain only one dimension’.145 (Miské had similarly claimed that the backlash against tiers-mondisme was merely ‘a more sophisticated variant of the same illusion’, with ‘the opposite excess’ but the same mindset.146 ) Though he agreed with Julliard’s rejection of gauchiste models of engagement, Chaliand insisted upon the need to remain in touch with the zone which presented ‘in the most tragic and explosive way’ the most crucial problems of international politics. Above all, he emphasised the importance of context: ‘it is not possible to just denounce human rights abuses in the third world . . . while disregarding the global, economic and political context in which the servitude and exploitation of some produces and sustains the comfort of the others’. He argued that the concept of humiliation and the resultant claim for dignity would offer more insight than the assumption that it was a desire for freedom which motivated nationalist movements. Claude Bourdet’s contribution to the collection of essays was similarly careful. A résistant during the Occupation, Bourdet had survived deportation and imprisonment in a concentration camp; afterwards he was a key figure in the Parti Socialiste Unifié (PSU), a dissident communist party with origins in the anti–Algerian War campaigns, and co-founded L’Observateur. Bourdet emphasised the French tendency towards abstraction in politics, leading to both an idealised engagement during times of revolution, including the tiers-mondiste era, as well as the hyperbolic denunciations that had taken its place. Nonetheless, he drew a distinction between the ‘violent condemnations’ of Le Dantec and Kouchner, who used the debate as a way of attacking their own past, and the majority of the respondents whose attitudes to tiers-mondisme were less emphatically denunciatory.147 Bourdet argued that ‘the melancholy or rage of respectable, disinterested intellectuals when faced with the evolution of third-world States that they, to a certain extent, helped to come into existence, is not a negligeable phenomenon and necessarily has political consequences’. The French left, he wrote, was detaching itself from the third world. He warned strongly against the consequences of this trend: ‘if we become divided, if we shrug our shoulders, if we stop trying to understand, if we refuse to support positive efforts, because of

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their inadequacies or defects . . . the third world’s push for liberation will be confiscated or crushed, to the naïve applause of the Western multitudes’. The struggle against post-colonial brutality, as against the erection of Soviet-style systems of oppression, remained essential. Julliard was offered the chance to respond in the form of a conclusion for the published collection Le tiers monde et la gauche. He did partially modify his controversial claim about the totalitarian nature of African socialism, saying it should have read ‘authoritarian, indeed totalitarian’, but this was unlikely to have placated his critics. He continued to insist upon the question of whether it was ‘possible to hope in Africa – or elsewhere – for socialism that is not authoritarian, repressive [policier], even murderous?’148 Julliard dismissed accusations of his ignorance of the variety of African political systems. What others misrepresented as his inability to differentiate between these regimes, he argued, was in fact an awareness that the frontier between barbarism and civilisation no longer corresponded to the division between right and left. Though it opened with news of the Vietnamese invasion of Pol Pot’s Kampuchea (in December 1978), Julliard’s text largely did not engage with current affairs and depicted human rights as universal. In contrast to Chaliand, Julliard asserted that the appeal to context was merely a way to ‘assume and excuse all forms of barbarism’. His rather zesty tone was summed up in his cry that ‘the tiers-mondiste illusion is dead. Long live, more than ever, the freedom of third-world peoples!’ The presentation of the collected essays did everything it could to fortify Julliard’s proclamation of the death of tiers-mondisme. Though the title refers to the ‘third world’ rather than to ‘third-worldism’, both the preface by Daniel and especially the introduction by André Burguière emphasised that what was at stake was a political and intellectual construct rather than a purely geographical zone. Burguière defined tiersmondisme in loaded terms as ‘the mix of retrospective guilty conscience and messianism by proxy that for the last fifteen to twenty years has characterised the left’s attitude towards political events in the third world’.149 It was not ‘a realisation of the political dimension of the third world’ but rather the ‘transferral, onto this terra incognita for political geography, of the universalism and revolutionary messianism that the French left had until then invested in the Western proletariat’. The description and analysis of the tiers-mondiste movement provided by Burguière was supplemented by an appendix of documents and a bibliography, compiled by Chaliand, of works about various dimensions of tiers-mondisme. The impression created by these paratextual elements, as by the prefaciers’

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references to ‘crisis’ and ‘death’, was of an intellectual artefact awaiting dissection. Of course, things were not so simple. While the exchange provoked by Julliard’s article was undoubtedly a sign of changing times, to declare revolutionary ambition entirely dead was premature. Variants and remnants of tiers-mondiste ideology continued to inflect French debates well into the 1980s. To consider the fascination with its decline an avatar for warnings against the PCF is also reductive. The anti-tiers-mondiste discourse represented in parts of the Nouvel Observateur debates may well have oversimplified the tiers-mondiste engagement of an earlier era, but this occurred within the process of redirecting energies towards human rights and humanitarian models. With the explosion of concern for the Vietnamese boat people at the end of 1978, the sans-frontiériste movement went another major step closer to eclipsing its revolutionary rival for the attention of the French intellectual left.

conclusion The beginning of the 1970s in France saw a series of challenges to tiersmondisme. The foundations of the tiers-mondiste project had been undermined by publications such as those of Leys on the destructiveness of the Chinese Cultural Revolution or Chaliand’s deconstruction of the Mythes révolutionnaires du tiers monde. Events such as the Munich massacre by Palestinian commandos, discussed in the next chapter, or the French military interventions in Africa, crystallised reflections on the use of violence and the role of ideology. Several of those who participated in criticisms of tiers-mondiste ideology made concomitant calls for a renewed democratic participation.150 This chapter, like the rest of the book, has focused on the public expressions of this process. Before moving on, however, it is worth spending a moment on the effect that this experience of destabilisation and deconversion had upon the private lives of those involved. As can be imagined, such a profound change in political positions on the part of people whose commitment had been so total was not without its toll. On a personal level, many Maoist militants suffered a period of crisis or social withdrawal, characterised by escapist and self-destructive practices. This experience resurfaced in the memoirs and novels of several former activists decades after the initial wave of autocritique texts – the additional distance no doubt making these more intimate accounts possible. The tone can be seen in the memoir of Claire Brière-Blanchet, an établi at

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Sochaux-Montbéliard, where Peugeot has one of their principal car plants, and which the GP referred to as ‘base ouvrière numéro 1’. BrièreBlanchet described the year after their break from revolutionary engagement as one of collective self-destruction: ‘jobless and dazed, no longer knowing very well what to believe, drawing uncertain conclusions, staggering, stripped of our ideological shackles, we drank too much. Far too much’.151 One night they had to prevent another ex-gépiste, Olivier Rolin, from throwing himself from a balcony. A distinguished novelist and recipient of the Prix Femina, Rolin later published a fictionalised account of the militant milieu of the 1960s and 1970s entitled Tigre en papier. Its narrator, Martin, admits that ‘The Cause, this ship of fools, will have been my one real mooring’.152 Le Dantec’s novel set in the same milieu featured a character, Line, who described her life ‘in tatters’ after the closure of the GP: ‘Ruined hopes, Gauche Prolétarienne dissolved, love in ruins and not even a career, an occupation to which to attach yourself . . . after all nothing, emptiness, the brutal realisation that we had been on the wrong track, that we were wrong’.153 Such texts help us understand the decline of tiers-mondisme in at least two ways. Firstly, they indicate the importance of highly insular collectivities amongst the French Maoists. Similar to supporters of Algerian independence during its war with France, but in contrast with other tiersmondistes such as the Castroists, the Maoist movement was structured around small groupuscules that often had extremely rigid ideological positions and demanded significant sacrifices of their members. The practice of établissement was one example of this. The collapse of this system of discipline and belonging seems to have been especially disorienting for those who made it their life. Secondly, it hints at why the publication of The Gulag Archipelago had such a strong effect in France despite only appearing after a number of significant affronts to the reputation of the Soviet Union, to tiers-mondismes, and to Marxist-Leninist ideas of revolution more generally. The experience of personal turmoil that many suffered in the early 1970s made way for a return to public engagement through the vector of Solzhenitsyn’s exposé, the writing of the nouveaux philosophes, the belated engagement with the arguments of Leys and similar works of denunciation, and the continuing stream of distressing news from Southeast Asia.154 It was precisely because these ideas were circulating after the challenge to key aspects of the tiers-mondiste movement, that intellectuals and activists could make use of them to articulate their disenchantment with the politics of revolution. The origins of this

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disenchantment were complex, a combination of internal and external factors that responded to both domestic and international events. Bernard-Henri Lévy, one of the most high-profile of the nouveaux philosophes, summed up the new framework for engagement, built upon the duty to ‘testify about the unspeakable and delay the horror, save what can be saved and reject the intolerable’.155 The prescriptions of the nouveaux philosophes, many of whom were once third-worldist activists, thus coincided with the principles of the sans-frontiéristes. Humanitarianism and human rights, too, channelled the French intellectual tradition of universalism, solidarity, and fraternity, yet were free of the shadow that had fallen over the revolutionary project. The growth of sans-frontiérisme in the second half of the 1970s, facilitated by the French intellectual context and the international geopolitical environment, would become one of the defining features of the era.

5 A rhetoric of responsibility Vichy, the Holocaust, and suffering in the third world

Across French society, truly major changes in understandings of the twentieth century, particularly the part that France played in the Holocaust, went to the heart of the nation’s sense of its destiny as the land of human rights and a place of refuge for the persecuted. The discrediting of Marxism went to the core of the French revolutionary tradition, born of the mythology of the 1789 Revolution and the Paris Commune. Attentive to both of these traditions, tiers-mondiste activists were confronted with their own complicity in precisely the type of violence they had thought themselves to be resisting. Horror at the Palestinians’ actions at the Munich Olympics, when tiers-mondisme took on the appearance of anti-Semitism, was repeated in responses to the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia. As militants faced the repressive reality of the regimes they had been supporting, as well as the sectarian evolution of their own behaviour, they discovered that, ‘starting from a revolt against Stalinism, we wound up Stalinist ourselves’.1 As part of the same shift, Médecins Sans Frontières, founded in 1971, grew from a modest organisation with innovative ambitions to a major influence on French political debates. MSF missions to Nicaragua, after an earthquake in 1972, and Honduras, after a hurricane in 1974, suffered from a lack of resources and experience.2 Only a handful of doctors went to Vietnam in 1975 under the banner of MSF. Yet the next mission, in war-torn Beirut from October 1975 until the following March, deployed roughly fifty doctors and nurses.3 MSF’s radical style of humanitarianism began to receive coverage in press outlets beyond the medical field, as in their glowing portrayal for the readers of Femmes d’aujourd’hui.4

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In 1976, an advertising campaign gave the organisation the boost in publicity which would see it take front position in the minds of the French public by the end of the decade. The first of its kind, with the slogan ‘Two billion people in their waiting room’, the campaign was significant in the history of the interaction between humanitarianism and the media and it gave the organisation ‘a dazzling notoriety’ in the words of one of its leaders.5 By mid 1977 MSF had 1,300 doctors on its list.6 MSF’s rise in profile was also connected to the intensification of the international refugee issue in the mid and late 1970s. By one estimate, the number of refugees, which had been stable in the years 1970–76, doubled from 1976–9, with the global refugee population rising from 2.7 million to 5.7 million. By 1982, it had doubled again.7 Even if these figures are treated with caution, the impression remains of large numbers of people in flight. The proliferation of refugee camps provided MSF with more work than it could accommodate and offered a training ground for a new generation of sans-frontiéristes. Most of these refugees came from crisis zones in the third world, suggesting that neither decolonisation nor the spread of Marxism could end the suffering of the peoples of the third world. The attention paid to refugees was therefore directly related to the declining fortunes of revolutionary ideology, though of course not all members of MSF were former tiers-mondistes or even necessarily politically active before their humanitarian engagement. This chapter is the second of two dealing with the debates that occurred on the left as French politics transformed. It argues that the progression of public debate about revolutionary violence and the third world must be understood in the context of the evolving collective memory of the Occupation years, which would increasingly serve as a motif in discussions about the responsibility to act against injustice. The question of complicity was central to this process, as Western intellectuals and militants began to examine the responsibility they bore for supporting ideologies that advocated the use of violence. The concept of complicity also applied to the re-examination of the legacy of the Occupation and the Holocaust, which gained momentum as a debate in its own right but also as a framework for approaches to suffering in the third world. The first section indicates how the trajectory of the French Maoist movement, specifically of the Gauche Prolétarienne, participated in transitional debates about the memory of the Second World War. The GP was arguably the most influential of the French Maoist movements and the largest in terms of membership.8 The concerns of the GP were wideranging, with sections devoted to different facets of health, education, the

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media, cinema, and law and order.9 Its militants participated in a number of initiatives that brought them into contact with outsiders, from factory workers to rural communities to immigrants in the banlieues, and even an unlikely alliance with small business owners. This section explains why and how members of the GP – which saw itself in the tradition of the French resistance to fascism during the Occupation, supported the Palestinian movement and advocated the use of revolutionary violence – were brought to a rethinking of militant engagement following the death of Israeli athletes at the hands of Palestinian terrorists during the Munich Olympics of 1972. The second section indicates how attitudes to revolutionary regimes in Asia evolved as a result of reactions to violence and displacement in Cambodia and Vietnam. It returns to humanitarian action, considering the expansion of sans-frontiériste practice in the 1970s, in the context of the shift in intellectual paradigms and the rise of the Holocaust memory. Responses to the Khmer Rouge genocide and the Vietnamese ‘boat people’ – refugees who had taken to the China Sea and were left destitute, or interned in camps in Southeast Asia – were framed by references to the Holocaust. These debates inaugurated the dominance of the new sans-frontiériste perspective on third-world events. The third section considers this development from the perspective of evolving memories of the Second World War in wider debates. It devotes particular attention to Bernard Kouchner’s contribution to this discourse, both before and after he became associated in the eyes of the public with sans-frontiérisme. Throughout this period, attention to the legacy of the Second World War inflected the disenchantment with revolutionary violence and played a central role in galvanising humanitarian responses to suffering.

remembrance and refusal The GP offered a particularly striking example of the centrality of the memory of the Second World War to tiers-mondiste engagement. In the political imaginary of these French Maoists, the two issues of the legacy of the Second World War and the political significance of the Chinese Cultural Revolution were connected in a way that is somewhat difficult to grasp. In the GP’s view, the PCF was a Stalinist party, beholden to the Soviet Union, betraying the revolutionary vocation of the wartime Resistance, while Mao resisted the spread of Soviet influence and championed the just cause of the oppressed, which for tiers-mondistes linked anti-fascism and anti-imperialism. For most people, however, including

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Sinologists or historians of the war, the two fields were unrelated. Nevertheless, in the first years of the decade, while attitudes to China slowly evolved, understandings of the Vichy regime were also reactualised with strong implications for French tiers-mondiste circles. The effect of this convergence, although delayed, was profound. The GP was heavily invested in the memory of the Second World War in a number of ways and many scholars have recognised its anti-fascist historical obsession.10 The influence of the Holocaust memory on the militant engagement of leading gépistes, as members of the GP were sometimes called, can be seen in their memoirs. Alain Geismar, the second-incharge, felt that their vision of the world in which ‘the Gauche Prolétarienne conceived of itself as the germ of Resistance, in a universe where the State and its repressive mechanisms represent the Nazis, and the PCCGT, the collaborationists’, was fundamental to the organisation’s sense of moral responsibility.11 For Olivier Rolin, head of the GP’s armed wing, the Maoists’ anti-fascism was a political expression of their moral horror at the Holocaust and the ‘shame and pain at being born in this country which had predominantly accepted Nazi law, denounced the Jews’.12 The GP’s historical paradigms and its advocacy of violent actions were intertwined; witness Jean-Pierre Le Dantec’s description of how their political imaginary sought to unite ‘the revolutionary dream of two generations – that of the Resistance and that of May ’68’.13 Like all memoirs, these accounts will have been shaped by the desire to tell a coherent story and, particularly regarding the memories they discuss, by the rise in profile of memories of the Occupation period in the years between the events they recount and the time of writing. Yet the consensus is remarkable and their claims are borne out by contemporary evidence. From its founding in September 1968, references to the Occupation years structured the GP’s vision of the world and its activities. The Maoist press was littered with historical references, with a particular emphasis on the Resistance in the GP’s organ La Cause du Peuple.14 This newspaper campaigned against the ongoing participation of collaborators in public life.15 It carried interviews with members of the Resistance.16 The name of the GP’s armed wing, the ‘Nouvelle Résistance Populaire’ (NRP), created in early 1970, referred to those who fought against the Occupation. For the NRP, the two decisive experiences of French popular insurrection and warfare were the 1871 Commune and the Resistance of the 1940s.17 Like the Red Brigades in Italy, the NRP took pride in the Second World War era weapons given to them by former anti-fascist partisans.18 Its members described their role as a struggle against fascism and understood their

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clashes with the far-right group Ordre Nouveau as part of the fight against Nazism and collaborationism.19 As its leader would later remark, they did not need to watch Le chagrin et la pitié to have the collaborationist past of France revealed to them.20 This 1971 documentary by Marcel Ophüls was a key landmark of the process by which dissenting memories of the Occupation and a new insistence upon French collaboration forced a reshaping of public memories of the war.21 It represented a landmark in the evolution of France’s perception of its own role during the Occupation, eschewing the prominent heroes of the Resistance memory in favour of a more disturbing reconstruction of the compromised lives and memories of the majority of the population. With certain predictable exceptions, however, it was not so much the film’s depictions of collaboration that prompted scandal at the time but rather the decision to ban it from French television. The majority of commentators were positive about its demythologising aspects and decried the unacceptable act of censorship to which it was subjected.22 French militants of the ’68 generation who perceived France as a continuingly Pétainist country even in the 1960s felt vindicated by the film and welcomed its iconoclastic agenda.23 However, members of the GP, which published a debate about the film in its paper in May 1971, resented Ophüls’ neglect of the Resistance.24 Though it has been criticised for offering too severe a corrective – described by Stanley Hoffmann as a ‘countermyth . . . in uniformly dirty greys’ – Ophüls’ film was of major importance in the history of French understandings of the Occupation.25 It was accompanied by a growing historiography of the Occupation and cultural engagement with memories of the Second World War in French public discourse. Notable was Robert Paxton’s historical work Vichy France, which pursued and deepened understandings of French complicity in the Holocaust. Drawing upon French and German archives, Paxton indicated comprehensively for the first time the extent to which key anti-Jewish measures under the Vichy regime were the product of French decisions rather than German pressures and refuted the notion of a French ‘double game’ against the occupiers.26 Unlike Ophüls’ documentary or the controversies surrounding the impunity of French war criminals, it is not clear whether French gauchistes engaged with Paxton’s book or other works of Vichy historiography. However, these works contributed enormously to the manifestation of the Holocaust in the collective memory of the Second World War, from the mid 1970s onwards.27 Fictional films and novels in the decade’s central years, notably the work

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of Patrick Modiano, established the presence of the Occupation in cultural production.28 There were signs, however, that memories of the war would not undergo the scrutiny that Ophüls’s film seemed to promise. President Georges Pompidou appeared intent on burying any discussion of the Occupation, celebratory or otherwise. In August 1971, an interview published in New York Times Magazine had Pompidou admitting to his dislike of all resistance commemorations and celebrations; the outrage of Maurice Clavel in December drew attention to these initially unremarked comments.29 On 23 November 1971, Pompidou bestowed a presidential pardon on Paul Touvier, a former milice commander who had been subject to intermittent attempts at prosecution for crimes committed during the Vichy years. Though this was again a quiet affair, an article in L’Express on 5 June 1972 revealing Touvier’s unmolested life in southern France triggered a deluge of Vichy-related articles: 2,000 of them by the end of that year.30 In between the pardon and its public revelation, faced with a sustained and prominent campaign led by Beate Klarsfeld, the government had requested the extradition of Klaus Barbie from Bolivia.31 But this was not evidence of a change of heart. When asked about the Touvier pardon in September 1972, Pompidou posed a question of his own that made clear his attitude to confronting the past: ‘hasn’t the time come to draw a veil over the past, to forget a time when Frenchmen disliked one another, attacked one another, and even killed one another?’32 Referring to the Occupation era as well as the ordeals of decolonisation, Pompidou contested the need to ‘keep the wounds of our national discord bleeding eternally’. In Azouvi’s blunt summation: ‘Impossible to be less in sync with the direction of history’.33 The GP, obsessed as it was with the Resistance heritage, strongly opposed Pompidou’s quietism. (In this it was far more in keeping with the public response than was the President.) On 18 June 1971 the GP staged a symbolic protest at Mont Valérien, a fort overlooking Paris that had been used by the Nazis as a prison and execution site. In the company of French intellectuals and former résistants, on the anniversary of de Gaulle’s celebrated call for resistance against Germany, they laid a wreath dedicated ‘to the victims of fascism, past and present’.34 After news of Touvier’s pardon was aired in mid June, La Cause du Peuple went on the attack. An outraged headline which filled the entire front page screamed: ‘THE GUILLOTINE BUT FOR TOUVIER! FRENCH NAZI, PARDONED BY POMPIDOU, MURDERER OF HUNDREDS OF MEN’.35 Their

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attention to memory was again linked to contemporary politics through reference to two death sentences recently carried out for murder. While critical of those executions, the article stated that Touvier’s execution was necessary so that ‘the thousands of Nazis, collabos, bastards understand that they cannot hide in peace and quiet in the banks or the police, whether Brazilian or French’.36 The NRP even toyed with a plan to assassinate Touvier. Its members later reflected on the emotional turbulence at the origins of this plan: ‘to kill a man, even a super-collaborator, was not something for which you were prepared. But the protection offered him by président Pompe and sections of the Church gave you a kind of duty’.37 According to one member, it was only their inability to find Touvier that saved his life; others were more circumspect about whether the assassination would actually have been carried out had the occasion ever arisen.38 Regardless, it was clear that the perpetuation of the resistance engagement was a major mobilising factor within the GP. Fictionalised accounts can help understand the interconnected constellations of memory that made up the French Maoist universe. Over the course of Rolin’s novel Tigre en papier, the narrator describes his militancy to the daughter of one of his ex-comrades. The portrayal is loaded with contradictions: the equally vivid violence and absurdity of certain of their stunts, the sincerity of their commitment offset by its naïveté. In telling their story, Martin emphasises the generosity and morality of their internationalism.39 Yet he remembers with pleasure their mixing broken razor blades into the glue used to stick up anti-imperialist posters, destined for the right-wing militants who would rip down the posters down; and with shame recalls their subservience to the thuggish, vindictive, and brutal individuals among the workers they attracted to the cause. Martin attempts to convey the importance that history held for this generation of militants: ‘the world that was in front of your eyes, in which you lived, was as if deepened, transformed by a power that linked each event, each individual to a whole older chain of greater, more tragic, events and individuals’.40 Only later in life did he appreciate the extent to which their youth was derailed by its proximity to the Occupation years; ‘to be born just after Vichy, you know, makes you wish for the epic . . . ’41 The Jewish identity common to many gauchiste leaders seems to have played a part in their engagement. Taking a long view of Jewish engagement with the left since the late eighteenth century, Philip Mendes summarised its main drivers as poverty and class oppression, ethnic oppression, Jewish cultural values, and left-wing support for Jewish equality.42 Jewish activists and intellectuals contributed strongly to international and

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universalist causes; however, the left–Jewish alliance declined in the postwar period. The decline was linked to the experience of the Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel: the Holocaust decimated Jewish left movements in Europe, shattered Jews’ confidence in the ability of the working-class movements to protect Jewish interests, and exhausted the explanatory powers of Marxist theorists; also, the establishment of Israel offered a different orientation for engagement and protection, thus undermining the perceived importance of class differences.43 In this context, the prevalence and prominence of militants with Jewish origins among tiersmondiste and New Left movements in many countries was an exception, no longer the rule. Yet it was a widespread phenomenon, with Jewish students highly active in the US civil rights movement, for instance, and in the anti–Vietnam War movement in the US and Australia. In France, a significant number of radical left leaders had Jewish origins, the most striking example being the political bureau of the Trotskyist Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR) – eleven of its twelve members were Jewish. Radical engagement took place on the margins of larger shifts in public memories of the Second World War and public expressions, and even conceptions, of Jewish identity. From 1967 – that is, after the Six-Day War, but also following the emigration of North African Jews to mainland France from 1956 onwards – Jews in France had adopted a more visible and public role, speaking explicitly as French and Jewish.44 In the decade that followed, the dominant memory of the Second World War shifted from one that emphasised its heroes to one that emphasised its victims. This, for Azouvi, was one of the elements that linked anti-totalitarianism to the evolution of the Holocaust memory.45 Yaïr Auron’s interviews with soixante-huitard activists in France suggested that a sense of Jewish identity, even when repressed or disregarded, deepened the motivation or significance of revolutionary activism.46 He proposed that fascism and the Holocaust were, in different ways, at the heart of the political and ideological engagement of radical French Jews in the 1960s and 1970s. This was particularly true for ‘non-Jewish Jews’ (a term first used by Isaac Deutscher), who did not practice a religious Judaism and whose sense of Jewishness was therefore reduced almost entirely to the fact of having survived the Holocaust. The experience of Alain Geismar was one example. The meeting of the memory of the Holocaust, decolonisation, and revolutionary aspirations created a prism through which to view the world. As the components that made up the prism evolved – attitudes to violence, the role of memory, tensions between local and global politics – the light it cast on contemporary events would change too.

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The attack by Palestinian commandos at the Munich Olympics was the catalyst for an acute focus on the issues of individual and collective responsibility, in light of the Holocaust legacy, among the French far left. Over 6,000 media and press representatives were in Munich to cover the Olympic Games and most of these turned their attention to the crisis, which began when Palestinian commandos stormed an apartment block, ending with the death of eleven Israeli hostages.47 If what the Palestinians were seeking was attention, they were certainly successful. However, the shedding of Jewish blood on German soil recalled memories of the Holocaust and reinforced sympathies with the Israeli victims of the assault. For members of the Gauche Prolétarienne, the events in Munich raised concerns about the terrorist use of violence and contributed to the end of the GP’s existence as a revolutionary organisation.48 A variety of factors explain the GP’s sensitivity to the implications of the Munich attack. Broadly speaking, support for Palestinian nationalism was a key aspect of tiers-mondiste militancy. The third-worldist journal Le Monde Diplomatique had a clear pro-Palestinian line. The first book to be published by Editions Maspero was on Le conflit judéo-arabe.49 Nearly a decade later, Partisans had a special dossier on ‘Le peuple palestinien en marche’, in which Chaliand noted that the French far left’s interest in Palestine was possibly stronger than that in Latin America. Chaliand himself published La résistance palestinienne, based on two trips to the Middle East.50 Secondly, on an activist level, links between the GP and the Palestinian movement were multiple. Contact with representatives of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) in Paris led to several militants, including leaders Geismar, Benny Lévy, and Tony Lévy, visiting Jordan in August 1969.51 By way of support for the Palestinian movement, on the night of 25–26 September 1969, GP militants in Paris launched an assault on the hôtel particulier of Baron Elie de Rothschild, painting it with slogans such as ‘Rothschild, the French people and the Palestinian people will blow you away!’ or ‘Ben-Gurion fascist!’ The following day, Rolin directed a demonstration that targeted the Rothschild bank and paraded the PLO flag. However, when the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) invited the NRP to attend training camps in Jordan and collaborate in terrorist attacks, the offer was declined.52 GP members participated in the ‘Comités Palestine’ formed in April 1971, which championed ‘Arab Revolution’ and had a close relationship with PLO representatives Mahmoud Hamchari and Azzedine Kalak.53

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Thirdly, the Munich attack raised questions for the GP because it was the group in France that had come closest to undertaking the radical tiers-mondiste violence of the kind carried out by the Palestinian groups. The GP’s actions included sabotage and reprisals, the bombing of the farright newspaper Minute on 13 May 1971, and the kidnapping of factory bosses.54 The most intense moment of their flirtation with violence was reached in 1972, after Jean-Pierre Tramoni, a security guard, killed GP member Pierre Overney at the Renault factory at Billancourt on 25 February. A peaceful protest the day afterwards attended by some 200,000 people was kept under control after forceful directives were issued by the Maoist leaders. However, on 8 May, the NRP kidnapped Robert Nogrette in reprisal for Overney’s death.55 A manager at the Renault factory, Nogrette was eventually released without any ransom or harm to his person and NRP communiqués were careful to specify that his lowsalt diet had been respected.56 Nevertheless, the episode generated many questions about the GP’s intentions and the possible threat to Nogrette’s life. Perceptions of the GP’s potential for violence were heightened by the rhetoric of La Cause du Peuple–J’accuse. Its style – in the words of one former militant, ‘crude and brutal, violent, of an unprecedented vulgarity’57 – combined Maoist ideological texts with direct speech from the workers at whom it was aimed and expressed a belief in the imminence and desirability of civil war. For Le Dantec, editor of the newspaper until his arrest in March 1970, what mattered in this blend of styles was ‘the cry’.58 At times it reached frantic levels, as during the Bruay-en-Artois affair of May 1972, when La Cause du Peuple–J’accuse called for vengeance after the murder of a miner’s daughter.59 The increasingly strident articles threatening physical violence against the alleged murderer were so extreme they provoked a caution from Sartre about the risk of class conflict denigrating into simple lynching in the absence of judicial process.60 Despite managing to avoid the murderous spiral of some other European third-worldist groups, the GP was nonetheless fascinated by the idea of a revolutionary application of violence. Furthermore, it was precisely the Palestinians’ use of violence that appealed to French gauchistes and facilitated the development of the revolutionary image of the Palestinian movement. Geismar, the GP spokesman, has emphasised the importance of terrorist activities in pushing perceptions of the Palestinian issue from a refugee problem to a revolutionary cause.61 As the Palestinian movements radicalised, so their

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appeal intensified. The hijacking of three planes by the PFLP in 1970 was essential to this shift in image. Leila Khaled, the infamous Palestinian terrorist arrested during a failed hijacking at the same time, later explained that the operation was indeed designed to change representations of the Palestinian plight from a humanitarian focus to a political one. She claimed that ‘nobody had heard our screams and suffering. All we got from the world was more tents and old clothes. After 1967, we were obliged to explain to the world that the Palestinians had a cause’.62 The ‘tents and old clothes’ referred to the non-interventionist approach of, among others, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), mandated to carry out emergency relief and development amongst Palestinian refugees.63 Her other allusion was to the SixDay War, which accelerated the turn to terrorism by groups like the PFLP.64 The archetypal figure of the Palestinian guerrilla became an inspiration to tiers-mondiste militants: what mattered was not applying thought or theory, as in the Cuban or Chinese models, but becoming a fedayeen. However, in practice, the GP’s actions never achieved the level of violence of either its rhetoric or its international allies. The GP’s deeds were highly contentious but they were not unequivocally terrorist. Acts like the distribution of 25,000 stolen metro tickets at Boulogne-Billancourt station (February 1970) and the theft of luxury foodstuffs from Fauchon, redistributed in the bidonvilles (8 May 1970), fell into this category of public disruption and provocation. Benny Lévy, known as Pierre Victor, drew a strict line between the Maoists’ symbolic violence and a philosophy of violence which permitted the taking of human life.65 Geismar also insisted upon the fact that although GP and NRP militants undertook actions that risked escalation and sometimes carried firearms, these weapons were never loaded and the military operations were kept under strict control.66 The Maoist framework therefore combined, as did many strands of tiers-mondisme, a fascination with violence as justified by their historical mission; support for the Palestinians and rejection of Israel; and, as seen earlier, an obsession with the Second World War and rejection of fascism. This combination gave rise to a paradox best illustrated by the actions of the German far left. Like their French counterparts, the West German gauchistes were strongly marked by the legacy of the Second World War; they also shared the references to third-world liberation struggles and guerrilla organisations.67 However, the Red Army Faction surpassed their French counterparts by the ferocity of their acts, claiming thirty-four lives

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over twenty-two years. Hans Kundnani has examined the paradoxical effect of the German gauchistes’ obsession with the Nazi years, arguing that their rhetoric decrying the Nazi past in fact contributed, on a more profound level, to the marginalisation and relativisation of the Holocaust and of the specificity of German fascism.68 In championing the Palestinian cause, the RAF mixed a violent condemnation of the Nazi generation with a tendency to cast Zionism as a form of racism and Israelis as the Nazis of the present. The destructive potential of this mix was seen on the night of 9 November 1969 – the anniversary of Kristallnacht – when members of the Tupamaros West Berlin (TW, forerunner of the RAF) attacked Jewish targets in Berlin. To express their support for Palestinians, against Israel, the militants defaced monuments and synagogues and placed a bomb in a Jewish community centre.69 With the crucial exception of the bomb, these acts of vandalism were not unlike the NRP’s raids on the Rothschild buildings in Paris. The German radicals claimed responsibility for the attacks in a text entitled ‘Shalom + Napalm’, proclaiming that ‘the Jews who were expelled by fascism have themselves become fascists who, in collaboration with American capital, want to eradicate the Palestinian people’.70 The idealisation of the Palestinian fedayeen had led to a fatal disregard for their Israeli targets. GP member Claire Brière-Blanchet later reflected on how they shared this attitude towards Israel: I feel today the sadness of having, for a while, a few years at least, participated in the denial of the uniqueness of the Shoah. We had elevated the figure of the Palestinian to such heroic heights, the cause of causes, emblem, flag of the supreme struggle, that those who allowed themselves to fight against them, that is to say the Israelis, had fallen a long way in the hierarchy of our compassion.71

When the Palestinian action at Munich resulted in the death of all hostages, Ulrike Meinhof, the RAF founder and ideologue, applauded from her prison cell. Early in the morning of 5 September 1972, two Israeli team members had been killed and nine more taken hostage in the Israeli apartment at the Olympic village, by a squad of eight Palestinian commandos.72 The commandos belonged to an organisation called Black September, a reference to attacks on Palestinian camps in Jordan in 1970. After hours of negotiations, during which the Palestinian commandos demanded the release of imprisoned fedayeen fighters as well as RAF leaders, the hostages were transferred by helicopter to Fürstenfeldbruck airport. A disastrous rescue attempt became an hour-long shootout and ended with the death of all

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hostages, plus five Palestinians and one policeman. Though competition eventually resumed, the terrorist attack has come to dominate the memory of the Munich Olympics.73 Reports in the major organs across the French press were condemnatory. The front page of the left-wing Le Monde proclaimed on 6 September: ‘once again, Palestinian extremists have perpetrated an attack that can only harm their cause’.74 Thierry Maulnier for the conservative Le Figaro declared that all the Palestinian terrorists could expect from their ‘paroxysm of violence’ was ‘attention mixed with horror that does not increase, far from it, the sympathy that we do not deny their suffering’.75 Jacques Coubard’s editorial in L’Humanité, the Communist daily, likewise noted ‘it is the Palestinian cause that loses’.76 Many also highlighted the enormous media resonance of the attack given the concentration of the Western world’s attention on the Olympic Games. From this perspective, it was acknowledged, the Palestinians had ‘aimed correctly’.77 The sensational historical reminder of the massacre of Jews on German soil was hard to miss.78 However, as Jean Daniel forcefully argued, shock at the massacre had exactly the opposite effect to what had been intended. Instead of weakening Israel’s position it reinforced it, by recalling Western responsibility for the Holocaust. He explained: the Palestinian terrorists of Black September, without wanting to and instead of recalling the existence of a new diaspora, made up of rootless Arabs and displaced persons, betrayed from all sides beginning with their own, instead of concentrating the world on the merits of their cause by shattering the Olympic symbol, these terrorists only rekindled a guilty conscience precisely where that guilt was most salient.79

As a left-wing commentator sympathetic to tiers-mondiste movements but critical of the Munich attack, Daniel rejected both ‘Israeli fervour’ (a reference to extreme Zionism) and ‘Palestinian utopianism’ as twin forces in the cycle of violence and reprisals. Such comparisons reflected the shifting paradigm in French politics in this period. In elucidating the role played by the Holocaust memory in shaping reactions to the Munich attack, Daniel also pinpointed the element through which the GP’s break with revolutionary violence would operate. GP members, who usually expressed greater solidarity with Arab militants than with mainstream France, found their affinities to be reversed by the events in Munich. The hostage crisis was a watershed for this Maoist organisation: it brought into sharp focus questions of political

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violence and the legacy of the Second World War and intensified preexisting leanings towards dissolution. The Munich events represented the concentration in one topical episode of the issues which had been circulating, at a greater remove, in discussions of Vichy and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. A consensus has emerged among the prominent figures of the GP regarding their rejection of the logic of the Munich attack and the importance of this event in the organisation’s dissolution.80 In Rolin’s account, it was the notion of collective responsibility – ‘the murder of civilians taken hostage, as representatives of a people’ – that provoked their refusal.81 For Le Dantec, the assassination of the Israeli athletes made clear the way in which the use of political violence ‘traps the struggle for justice and liberty in an even more ferocious conception of the world than that of the machines of oppression which it claims to oppose’.82 This realisation added urgency to the reconsideration of political violence that had begun after the kidnapping of Nogrette a few months earlier. Geismar also pointed to the Munich attack as crucial in the move away from violence, as did Glucksmann.83 However, at the time, the Maoists’ condemnation was not as clear as its retrospective characterisation. Prior to a meeting of the executive committee, Lévy and Rolin, as the heads of the GP’s political and military wings, agreed that a repudiation of the terrorist action was necessary.84 The communiqué they devised was published as a statement from the NRP in La Cause du Peuple–J’accuse on 14 September. It ‘fraternally’ reminded the Black September activists to distinguish between anti-Zionism and antiSemitism when protesting against the Israeli occupation of Palestine.85 This reproach was deepened with their insistence that ‘the fundamental principle of any form of guerrilla warfare is to attack only the direct enemies of the people’. Yet the communiqué also endorsed Black September’s view that the Israeli Olympic delegation represented the ‘fascist’ state of Israel because it ‘carried the flag of the occupiers of Palestine’. It paid homage to the ‘martyrs of the Palestinian resistance’ and the ‘guerrilleros of Black September’ and protested against the ‘racist’ anti-Palestinian campaign in France after the attack. Richard Wolin rather too generously portrayed this confusion as a ‘two-pronged approach’ but Philippe Raynaud’s description of it as ‘a fairly confused and muddled argument’ was more apt.86 It was certainly a very watered-down version of the rejection of collective responsibility that the authors later articulated, though there was enough critique in the original document for these retrospective views to be more than a convenient reworking of the past.

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The contemporary equivocations can be explained by the range of responses to the Munich attack among different sectors of the GP. In general, the use of terrorism posed a far greater dilemma for the GP’s leaders than its base. The NRP communiqué was greeted with dissatisfaction by some militant workers of immigrant origins, who considered that Palestinians deserved unconditional support as the embodiment of the Arab revolutionary cause.87 It also ran counter to the views of those whom the GP recruited in the banlieues, to take Hamon and Rotman’s formulation, ‘en prêchant la “cogne”’.88 For the militants in these two groups the politically motivated violence of the Palestinian commandos appeared to enact the discourse of revolutionary violence and civil war that the GP espoused. In this context, Brière-Blanchet, based in Grenoble, acknowledged the difficulty of inserting even a few critical phrases into the NRP declaration.89 She herself was threatened with beatings by other GP militants when she expressed her horror at the massacre; she subsequently discovered her position was shared by the Parisian leaders.90 The Maoist leadership was also outflanked on this issue by one of their intellectual allies. Sartre, who had taken over the direction of La Cause du Peuple–J’accuse following the arrests of its editors, published an inflammatory article in this newspaper a month after the NRP communiqué. ‘The principle of terrorism is that you must kill’, he declared.91 Reprising some of the themes of his earlier writing on anti-colonial violence, Sartre justified the Palestinians’ use of terrorism on the grounds that ‘the impoverished oppressed have no other [weapons]’. He declared that ‘this people, abandoned, betrayed, exiled, can show courage and the strength of its hatred only by organising deadly attacks’. Like those who were critical of the attack, he pointed to the publicity it brought to the Palestinian cause. With an argument that bore all the hallmarks of tiers-mondisme, Sartre accused of hypocrisy anyone who had supported the struggle of the Algerian FLN against colonialism but failed to support the Palestinians’ use of the same techniques against Israel; or who had protested against Munich but not against deaths at Tel Aviv’s hand. Any contradiction between this and his advocacy on behalf of Padilla’s rights the year before seems not to have posed a problem. Sartre’s defence of the Munich attack placed it clearly in the lineage of the tiers-mondiste fight against colonialism.92 For critics of the attack, in contrast, the most important historical reference was to the Holocaust. The memory of the Second World War, and in particular of the suffering of the Jews, played a crucial role in galvanising the GP’s refusal of violence in the wake of Munich. Despite the

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ambivalent nature of the NRP communiqué as published in La Cause du Peuple–J’accuse, it nevertheless singled out the theme of the Holocaust in shaping Western responses to events affecting Israel. It argued that the strength of Israel’s standing in public opinion was due to the fact that ‘six million Jews were massacred by Nazi barbarism and that Israel presents itself illegitimately as a refuge for the Jews, the guarantee that they will never again be exterminated’.93 Although the communiqué portrayed anti-Semitism as the creation of the European élite, it also suggested that the battle against anti-Semitism had been co-opted by Israel. In failing to distinguish its own politically motivated acts sufficiently from attacks of an anti-Semitic nature, the NRP argued, the Palestinian movement risked losing large numbers of potential supporters of their liberation struggle. It had already suggested that the principles of guerrilla warfare required combatants to ‘distinguish between an ordinary Israeli and the army, the police, or the occupationist administration of Israel’. 94 However, in drawing attention to the legacy of the murder of Jews during the Holocaust, the communiqué infused its discussion of military strategy with a crucial element of moral responsibility. The importance of the Holocaust memory in determining the response of the NRP and GP to the Munich attack would be articulated even more forcefully in the subsequent reflections of key figures. Rolin described why, at least in his own memory, he and Lévy did not even for a moment consider supporting the Munich attack. The passage merits a longer citation: For me, all that contributed . . . to me being in the Gauche Prolétarienne came from an idea of the Resistance, from the loathing, indeed the hatred that I had – that I still have, of course – for Pétainism, for this entire atrocious period in the history of what I still call my country. The abhorrence, the shame that I feel as a result is absolutely constitutive. It is the only, practically the only reason that I can now find for having participated in the founding of the Gauche Prolétarienne and for having stayed for its entire existence. Munich, the idea that Jews could be killed for being Jewish, the question of whether we should condemn it, did not even need discussion.95

The solidarity that the Palestinians of Black September demanded, condemning civilians to death by the simple fact of their belonging to a group – and this group specifically being Jews – was impossible for their French supporters given their sensitivity to the Holocaust legacy.96 For Geismar, the revelation of this period, beginning with Munich, was that ‘the crimes of guerrilla warfare are as much the essence of guerrilla warfare as the Nazi crimes are of Nazism’.97

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Subsequent acts of terrorism directed against Israel and targeting civilians reinforced this refusal of violence on the part of French tiersmondistes. In March 1973 the NRP criticised Black September’s assault on the Jordanian embassy in Khartoum for failing to attack the Israeli army directly and thereby misrepresenting the popular cause of the Palestinians as a terrorist campaign.98 Another example was the RAF’s hijacking of an Air France flight taken to Entebbe, Uganda, in July 1976, during which Israeli passengers were retained as hostages while others were released; this was remembered by French militants as the separation of Jewish passengers from non-Jews.99 Even some RAF members found this too much to bear: one of them later admitted that ‘what happened at the old Entebbe airport, for me, is Auschwitz’.100 By this time, however, there were few committed French militants left who might have attempted to rationalise this violence against civilians in the name of an ideology of liberation. This was confirmed by Libération’s 1977 dossier on leftwing terrorism, in which editor Serge July declared that the RAF terrorists resembled ‘dinosaurs lost in another era’.101 As a former Maoist and co-author of a handbook for revolutionary civil war, July’s 1977 analysis showed just how far the fates of the French and German tiers-mondistes had diverged. In the aftermath of the Munich attack, therefore, the discourse of revolutionary violence was progressively undermined and eventually abandoned. The dissolution of the Gauche Prolétarienne marked a significant step in this process. After the initial equivocations in September 1972, the Lip factory occupation of May 1973, which occurred without any intervention from organised revolutionary groups, further weakened claims that an organisation like the GP had a role to play.102 The final blow came quickly and with force: a definitive decision to break up the GP was made by its leaders in November 1973 and announced in January 1974; the rank and file were never given a chance to debate it.103 This marked the disappearance of the group which had brought France closest to the threat of gauchiste terrorism in years when Italy and Germany were rocked by a violence of similar origins.104 Nonetheless, the pages of La Cause du Peuple–J’accuse continued to bear witness to the rift between the leadership and the grass-roots membership, which had crystallised with the Munich attack, over the course of nearly a year. The debate culminated with a November 1974 editorial announcing a new incarnation of La Cause du Peuple and denouncing the ideological defeatism of Lévy and Geismar.105 The neat dissolution in name of the Gauche

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Prolétarienne disguised an experience that was in reality profoundly destabilising for those involved. Large parts of the tiers-mondiste movement, and the Maoist current in particular, had cast their engagement as a continuation of the antifascist combat of the Occupation years. The massacre of Israeli delegates at the Munich Olympics revealed that this left-wing engagement could also result in the indiscriminate killing of Jewish civilians. This realisation about the ‘iron logic’ of revolutionary force was a decisive factor in the Maoists’ rejection of political violence.106 Only a few years later, the spectre of genocide would again confront French advocates of tiersmondisme, in the Khmers Rouges’ Democratic Republic of Kampuchea. By that time, part of a broader anti-totalitarian movement, former tiersmondiste militants had become leaders of a new campaign against ideology and political violence.

the holocaust and the humanitarian imperative Like the Gaullist view of the Vichy regime, which sought to isolate collaborationism from the history of a French nation of otherwise (the story goes) honourable conduct, the French far left had sought to insulate the history of Marxist revolution against its own années noires. However, by the late 1970s the successive confrontations with repressive revolutions made dismissing them as anomalous increasingly difficult. The first strong signs of disillusionment had been directed towards Cuba, then China, followed by the painful revision of support for Vietnam, and the horrific discovery of genocidal violence in Kampuchea (Cambodia). Concurrently, as public memories of the Occupation years increasingly paid tribute to Jews instead of resistance heroes, humanitarian action converged with the focus on civilian victims.107 As Wolf pointed out, the use of the Holocaust rhetoric did not necessarily mean that the conversation was about Nazi genocide. Humanitarians would be among the first to witness the torment of refugees from Kampuchea, which was perceived as further evidence of the violent potential of revolutionary ideology. The way they responded made it a significant moment for memories of the Holocaust and French humanitarianism, a convergence that would be reiterated with responses to the Vietnamese refugee crisis at the end of the decade. In the early 1970s, humanitarian missions had brought sansfrontiériste activists into conflict zones and close proximity with rebel groups whose cause was championed by tiers-mondistes. Such missions

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explain the description of MSF in its early days as ‘a sort of medical wing to the worldwide guerrilla movement’.108 The presence of humanitarians alongside guerrilla organisations was not an indicator of partisanship, but it often reflected an interest in such groups and for some individuals perpetuated or extended a tiers-mondiste engagement under a different form. That some key humanitarians described their experiences abroad as part of the revision of their political beliefs undermines the notion of humanitarianism as a backlash against revolutionary engagement and helps to paint a more complex picture of the relationship between the shifting forms of activism. The first sans-frontiériste mission notable in the context of revolutionary tiers-mondisme involved medical work alongside Palestinian militias. In 1970, the ‘Black September’ phase of civil conflict in Jordan, when King Hussein bin Talal’s troops attacked Palestinian guerrilla fighters living amongst the refugee population, attracted gestures of solidarity from French internationalist groups. Doctors who had been to Biafra went to Jordan under the auspices of the Red Cross (MSF would not be founded until the following year).109 Once the situation in Amman settled, the French doctors took their mission to the Palestinian stronghold of Irbid, in the north-west of Jordan. The similarities between the war medicine at Irbid and earlier in Biafra have already been underlined: improvised conditions, round-the-clock operating hours, pathologies particular to war, and the doctors’ proximity to the rebels were all factors in both engagements.110 They sat alongside the more politically motivated work of other groups engaged in conflict settings at the time. The short-lived Maoist network Secours Rouge, for instance, also sent a team to Jordan to provide medical assistance in cooperation with the Palestinian Red Crescent, after being contacted with a request for assistance.111 SPF had run missions in solidarity with the Palestinians in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, though it limited itself at the time of Black September to the donation of clothes and medicine to the Red Crescent.112 Another mission that brought echoes of tiers-mondisme into contact with an emergent sans-frontiériste practice took place five years later, in South Vietnam. In late March 1975, volunteers from MSF established a medical mission in the An Loi refugee camp just outside Saigon. When North Vietnamese troops neared the city the camp was evacuated and the French doctors took charge of the Gia Dinh hospital in its centre, treating civilians wounded by the fighting.113 Kouchner later wrote that he had been waiting for the arrival of Hanoi’s army for twenty-five years: ‘I had so longed for it, in the streets of Paris, criss-crossed by our processions’.114

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Although they appear to have been negotiating reinforcements from France as late as 29 April,115 later accounts suggested that the doctors who remained in Saigon after it changed hands on 30 April were prevented from working. They witnessed the persecution and flight of South Vietnamese collaborators, including the director of their hospital.116 Eight days after the city changed hands, Kouchner claimed, they no longer had any illusions, recognising the installation of ‘a Stalinist regime’.117 His biographers emphasised that the experience was a painful one.118 As during the Saigon mission, though with greater significance for the subsequent trajectory of MSF, humanitarian missions among Cambodian refugees were part of a revision of ideological engagement on the part of several key sans-frontiériste leaders. One was Rony Brauman, who first worked for MSF in the Cambodian refugee camps in Thailand and served as president of the organisation from 1982–94. He has been described as the sans-frontiériste movement’s ‘philosopher-king’.119 At fifteen, however, he had attended his first tiers-mondiste protest, rallying in support of the Vietnamese and receiving his first coup de matraque with ‘a secret pride’ at a time when this experience was synonymous with rebellion.120 He became a member of the Gauche Prolétarienne, attracted by its internationalism and its spontaneous, libertarian element as well as by personal contacts within the organisation.121 He experienced GP protests against Jordan at the time of the Black September massacres in 1970 as ‘thrilling times’. However, for Brauman, reading Cambodge année zéro on the Khmer Rouge genocide was ‘the shock that made me break definitively with political radicalism’.122 It brought into question the nature not only of Pol Pot’s genocidal revolution but that of revolutionary communism in general, the brutality of which he came to see in dramatically new terms: ‘not to consider it an accident, a good idea that went wrong, but as a fundamental problem’.123 Brauman’s change in attitude was shared by other sans-frontiériste leaders. Xavier Emmanuelli had sought in the UEC an outlet for his revolutionary enthusiasm, but was expelled due to his support for the FLN.124 He considered the camps in Thailand ‘the field of operation thanks to which we could rationalise and get a foothold in reality. By these concrete actions, we came out of the fluid schemas of “third-worldism” and utopian dreams of creation that never worked’.125 Such an interpretation casts the revolutionary idealism of the tiers-mondiste period against the idea of a more grounded, empirical world view based on practical experience. As had been the case a couple of years earlier in Saigon, humanitarian operations were perceived as in confrontation with political

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beliefs. In Emmanuelli’s view, they eroded the lingering revolutionary sentiments of key members of the organisation. This was also the interpretation of Claude Malhuret, MSF president in the late 1970s. Born, like Brauman, in 1950, Malhuret had shared his experience of anti-authoritarian revolt and international solidarity, embodied for Malhuret in the campaign against the Vietnam War.126 He participated in May ’68 and three months later joined the PSU. By his own account, Malhuret’s work with refugees fleeing Vietnam and Cambodia from 1976 brought home to him that they were not counter-revolutionaries as the Manichean, gauchiste view would have it.127 He briefed Brauman on this evolution of attitudes when the latter joined MSF (having famously been rejected by Emmanuelli on his first attempt a few years earlier). These formative experiences, particularly amongst Cambodian refugees in Thailand, drove professionalisation debates within MSF. The Thai camps were the terrain for MSF’s logistical innovations, which were in turn crucial in MSF’s subsequent growth and help to explain its expansion from a small organisation with limited reach during the 1970s to a transnational movement in its own right, a globally recognised brand, and an operational leader in the field. The two men at the centre of MSF’s logistical advances in Thailand (which included the systematic use of inventories and protocols, the organisation and maintenance of stocks of medicines, and so on) were Vincent Faveaux and above all Jacques Pinel, a pharmacologist who had been in Bangkok when UNHCR appealed for volunteers and wound up working for MSF.128 MSF’s ‘kit system’, through which pre-packed units of clinic infrastructure and supplies are made available for rapid deployment, also dates from this period.129 In addition to its significance in the stories of professionalisation and political reflection, Cambodia was also part of MSF’s practice of témoignage. As a result of what they had witnessed on the ThaiCambodian border, in 1977 Malhuret and Emmanuelli tried to alert viewers of TF1 to the plight of the Cambodian people, threatened both at the hands of their own leaders and from starvation.130 Fabrice Weissman’s account of this episode explained that the organisation’s archives ‘reveal nothing of the discussions that were prompted by this speaking out’, which saw them accused of serving CIA propaganda but also led to changes in policy regarding the organisation’s stance on human rights abuses.131 Field personnel were directed in 1978 to report abuses internally, so that an informed decision about speaking out could be made by MSF’s leadership in cases where their staff was the only witness to violations. At the same time, field experiences continued to fuel reflection

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on attitudes to the third world; as the organisation grew in size and ambition, the space it created for itself was a critical one, not only concerning questions about humanitarian action and ethics but connected to wider political debates. The articulation of moral responsibility for atrocities in Cambodia was one of these connections between field experiences and French intellectual and political debates. The language used by the sans-frontiéristes reflected the importance of the Holocaust memory in shaping responses to suffering. In July 1979, after the Vietnamese invasion had toppled the Khmer Rouge regime, Malhuret spoke to Le Figaro about the risk of the ‘physical elimination’ of the population and evoked ‘another form of massacre’ comparable to those of Armenians in 1915–17 and of Jews in the 1940s.132 In a subsequent issue of MSF’s circular to its members, he again warned that ‘the Khmer people is disappearing’ and gave the bleak prognosis that ‘after that of the Armenians and that of the Jews, the third genocide of the twentieth century is nearly complete’.133 Emmanuelli later described how the refugees resembled inmates of Nazi camps and provoked the fear of genocide.134 MSF’s leaders therefore called for largescale humanitarian relief, especially food aid, to be delivered directly to the people of Cambodia. They linked the threat of genocide to the humanitarian imperative. In this they were not alone. Their language was shared by other public figures who also used references to the Holocaust to add urgency to appeals for action. French parliamentarians who visited Phnom Penh in November 1979 felt that, in the words of then UDF member Alain Madelin, the situation in Cambodia was ‘the continuation of genocide, by another method’.135 In January 1980, Bernard-Henri Lévy asked frustratedly ‘how many new refugees, what quantity of fresh corpses, how many more mass graves do we need to confront the horrific reality of a new look final solution?’136 The accumulation of such apocalyptic predictions of the destruction of the entire people raised the stakes of the humanitarian campaign.137 In the final years of the 1970s, propelled by the attention on Cambodia and Vietnam, the sans-frontiéristes would take centre stage in public debates about suffering and justice in the third world. Khmer Rouge violence represented one of the last major landmarks in the decline of tiers-mondisme in France.138 Former tiers-mondistes reflected bitterly that, to the extent that this ideology believed in ‘victory through the destruction of the other even if it means self-destruction . . . the Khmers Rouges are faithful to the core of Frantz Fanon’s message’.139 Militant

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journalist Jean-Claude Guillebaud described revelations about the horrors of Kampuchea as an ‘ontological Nagasaki’, arguing that the discovery of the Khmer Rouge genocide was even more significant than the belated recognition of Stalinist abuses, because it happened while they were still in power.140 Those who felt themselves implicated were therefore confronted more emphatically with their own complicity. To go to Vietnam or Kampuchea was to ‘discover Auschwitz in Asia’.141 The legacy of the Holocaust provided a framework for the humanitarian campaign in Asia and a leitmotif for this phase in the decline of revolutionary ideology. Despite its eventual prominence, the public campaign on behalf of the people of Cambodia was slow to begin. It took time for knowledge of the genocidal nature of the Khmer Rouge regime, in power from April 1975 until the end of 1978, to reach militants in France. This was in large part because of the difficulty of verifying information about its activities: government control of the press was complete and foreigners’ chances of entry into Kampuchea were so limited as to have been effectively nonexistent. But if the flow of news out of Kampuchea was a mere trickle, the waves of refugees fleeing the country provided an alternative source of information. Their stories contributed to François Ponchaud’s extremely influential book, Cambodge année zéro, published in 1977 (though partially serialised in Le Monde in February 1976). His work represented the first serious attempt to analyse the situation in Kampuchea. A Catholic missionary who had lived in Cambodia for the decade preceding the installation of the Khmers Rouges, Ponchaud combined refugee testimony with his own observations and (having learned the Cambodian language) an analysis of early official communications. He concluded that ‘even if the refugees’ affirmations are taken with a large grain of salt, the cold truth remains: the Khmer revolution is one of the bloodiest of the twentieth century’.142 Ponchaud thereby placed the responsibility for the suffering of the Cambodian people squarely upon the Khmers Rouges’ revolutionary ambitions. Elsewhere he reiterated that ‘the Khmer revolution is without doubt the exemplar of an ideology pushed to its own logical extreme’.143 Jean Lacouture, who in tiers-mondiste mode had something of a speciality in admiring biographies of third-world leaders, was one of several who signalled the importance of Ponchaud as a source of information about the situation inside Kampuchea.144 Lacouture’s writings indicated the role played by the memory of the Holocaust in the challenge

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to tiers-mondisme in this period. The concept of genocide provided a point of overlap between the Nazi Final Solution and the Khmer experiment in Kampuchea. In February 1977, Lacouture lamented: ‘we thought that the twentieth century, from Auschwitz to the Gulag, had run the gamut of horror. There remained the suicide of a people in the name of revolution. Better: in the name of socialism’.145 The Stalinist disaster in the Soviet Union was another link in this chain of horror, its negative implications for radical left-wing ideology confirmed by their repetition in Asia. In an essay pleading for action against the Khmer Rouge regime, Survive le peuple cambodgien! (1978), Lacouture drew parallels between this regime and the Third Reich: ‘German National-Socialism, to its irreducible shame, hunted down the Jews. Khmer National-Socialism has decreed as Jews more than two-thirds of its fellow-citizens’.146 As well as conveying the importance of the Holocaust memory to discussions of post-colonial violence, Lacouture’s language also suggested the relevance of nouvelle philosophie to debates about the third world. A resounding denunciation of the Khmer Rouge system, Survive le peuple cambodgien! also criticised the role played by Western supporters of revolutionary ideology. Lacouture described his shame at having contributed to the installation of ‘one of the most oppressive powers known to history’. He criticised the failure of international left-wing opinion to understand that ‘the words “revolution” and “socialism” can conceal the worst of tyrannies’ and for failing to rally to the defence of victims against their torturers.147 No longer, he wrote, would ideology serve as justification for either leniency or silence regarding human rights abuses. Nonetheless, Lacouture by no means renounced all political ideals, advocating a continued engagement alongside the peoples of the third world, but one freed from the revolutionary bias of previous years. At the end of the 1970s, the plight of Vietnamese refugees became one of the most high-profile international issues in France. As would happen several years later with the Ethiopian famine, it was one particularly striking set of footage that enabled the prise de conscience of a pre-existing situation. The outpouring was triggered on 8 November 1978, when reports screened of a cargo boat called the Hai Hong, carrying 2,500 cramped and starved refugees, prevented by Malaysian authorities from reaching land. Detailed coverage in Le Monde and Libération stressed the misery of the Vietnamese passengers.148 Within a few months, not only were aid organisations appealing for assistance, but so were an unlikely combination of friendship associations, parliamentary committees, and Catholic

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archbishops. They were galvanised by the sense that, in the words of a young journalist who was a first-hand witness, ‘a new holocaust . . . was looming, foretold and obvious to the whole world’.149 As in the mobilisation for Cambodia, references to the Holocaust helped frame the humanitarian emergency and characterised the ascent of sans-frontiérisme. The plight of the Vietnamese refugees was viewed as confirmation of the decline of tiers-mondisme. Lacouture, for example, returned to the theme of Western tiers-mondiste responsibility for the politics of the third world. The desperation of the Vietnamese refugees was disturbing, he wrote, not only in itself but also because it represented ‘the cruel consequences of a struggle in which, directly or indirectly, we were entangled, of a historical debate in which, as citizens of a colonial country firstly, then as French anti-colonialists, we were responsible participants’.150 Lacouture did not shy away from pointing the finger at the Vietnamese leaders rather than fallout from the American military offensives. He argued that the latest exodus from Vietnam was different from those of 1954 and 1975 because it was not a reflex against the installation of a new regime but a response to an already existing one. Like others who wrote regularly for Le Nouvel Observateur, who to varying degrees could be described as former tiers-mondistes, Lacouture adopted what Louis Pinto identified as the left-wing anti-Gulag line of the journal in this period.151 In this paradigm, what mattered was not the ideology of a regime but its acts and the main references became genocide and the Holocaust. One of the most frequent historical allusions during the boat people crisis, especially in reports sympathetic to the refugees’ cause, was to the Exodus affair of 1947. On 16 November 1978, Libération explained this perceived precedent, when Britain as mandated authority in Palestine turned away a boat carrying Jewish Holocaust survivors. Those passengers who survived the journey were forced back into displaced persons camps in Europe. Numerous articles alluded to the Exodus (in English) as shorthand for the inhumane treatment of suffering innocents, through this reference to the Holocaust.152 Because of this connection, the Vietnamese crisis was portrayed as of special relevance to French Jews. Jean-Pierre Allali, a Tunisian-born expert on the Holocaust, made his Jewish identity an explicit part of his call for humanitarian action. He pointed to the significance of genocide to Jewish memory and its legacy of sensitivity to tragedy elsewhere, compelling the Jewish community to act for ‘the protection of these wretched of the sea who might tomorrow be filling mass graves of a new kind’. He concluded his plea dramatically: ‘each Boat Man who drowns is one

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more gas chamber victim at Auschwitz’.153 Allali eschewed any political discussion to focus on the moral responsibility to save lives, declaring those who failed to act to be on the side of the ‘murderers’. The most dramatic evidence of the interconnectedness of memories of Vichy, as distinct from memories of the Holocaust which did not speak specifically of French guilt, and the situation of the Vietnamese refugees lay in the intervention of Marek Halter. A writer of Polish Jewish origins, Halter’s family escaped from the Warsaw ghetto when he was five, and his writing has explored and perpetuated the memory of the Holocaust. In December 1978, Halter published an extraordinarily direct article attacking the collective unwillingness to confront the historical realities of the Holocaust and the perils faced by contemporary refugees: The left is responsible for the Gulag to the extent that they justified it and covered it with their ideology, just as they are responsible for the Vietnamese refugees who today flee from the regime whose soldiers they supported. The right is responsible for Dachau and Auschwitz, because, with their theories, their political stances and their hatred of the Jew, they prepared an entire generation to accept them. As regards the Jews, you are all responsible, apart from some tens of thousands of resisters and anti-fascists: the deportation of French Jews happened in front of you, at your doors. You heard their cries and you didn’t help them. You lived.154

The ‘you’ to whom Halter spoke in his article was the French people, held responsible for the deaths of their Jewish compatriots. The article was a response to the French refusal to broadcast the miniseries Holocaust. A vivid depiction of the Nazi period, this series had screened on American television in April 1978 and been optioned in twenty-nine countries, including in West Germany where it had a major impact, but no French television channel had been willing to touch it. Halter campaigned to have the series aired in France from November 1978 until February 1979 when broadcasts began. Concurrently, he continued to campaign for Vietnamese refugees. Halter signed an early call for France to accept the Hai Hong refugees, alongside former Maoists Claudie and Jacques Broyelle, Alain Geismar, and Bernard-Henri Lévy, and Soviet dissidents Vladimir Bukovsky and Leonid Plyushch.155 He also signed the appeal that announced the beginning of the Bateau pour le Vietnam campaign that provided the catalyst for major changes within MSF. In a later article he raised the story of the S.S. Saint Louis, which departed from Germany in 1939 with several thousand Jewish refugees only to return to Europe with all its passengers

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on the eve of war. After asserting dramatically that most of them finished in Auschwitz (in fact roughly one-quarter of the passengers appear to have died in Nazi camps), Halter went on to observe that ‘once again, boats filled with refugees criss-cross the oceans in search of asylum and the doors of the world are closed to them. . . . What is the use of remembering . . . ?’156 Halter thus constructed a point of intersection between the humanitarian campaign for Vietnam and debates about the Holocaust and Vichy which were occurring simultaneously. Several of Halter’s public contributions further reflected the shifting intellectual paradigm that coincided with the transition from tiersmondisme to sans-frontiérisme. His connections with Kouchner can be traced back to the Six-Day War, when the pair collaborated within Halter’s Comité International Pour la Paix au Moyen Orient, an attempt to seek responses to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict that went beyond identification with one side or the other.157 In mid 1977 he publicly endorsed the nouveaux philosophes and their critiques of ideology, because ‘of all the colonisations inflicted on the third world, the most tenacious seems to be ideological colonisation’.158 After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, Halter joined Lévy on a clandestine mission in support of Afghan rebels on behalf of the Comité des Droits de l’Homme.159 They and Françoise Giroud, Alfred Kastler, and others united to found Action Internationale Contre la Faim in 1979. Two years later Lévy published L’idéologie française (1981), which portrayed Vichy as part of a history of French fascism. These entangled trajectories illustrate that the confrontation of memory and morality was not merely a rhetorical strategy but the foundation of a range of practical and conceptual undertakings.

a kouchner moment The discussion about French responsibility for crimes during the Second World War was a crucial social and intellectual context for the Cambodian and Vietnamese campaigns as well as other high-profile causes related to suffering in the third world. The issues of complicity and responsibility for the suffering of others were integral to both sets of debates, as was the insistence on the rights and duties of the individual. The past was thrust into the present when Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, head of Vichy’s Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives (CGQJ) from May 1942 until February 1944 and an unrepentant anti-Semite, proclaimed from his Spanish exile that ‘in Auschwitz they only gassed lice’.160 This shocking assertion provided the title for a sixteen-page

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interview published in L’Express on 28 October 1978. It was littered with caricatural anti-Semitic slurs (‘Jews are always ready to do anything to get themselves talked about, to make themselves interesting, to complain’); denials of the Final Solution (‘Six million dead Jews? An invention, pure and simple! A Jewish invention!’); and feeble excuses regarding his own part in it (‘In making a pretence of following [the Nazis], of anticipating their wishes, I was keeping in my hands (in French hands) the reins of the anti-Jewish struggle’).161 The piece was the work of investigative journalist Philippe Ganier-Raymond, who, obsessed with the Occupation and Holocaust, had already published several texts on the period. The result was truly a chilling document and it provoked a vivid debate. It challenged French understandings of their present as well as their past, by confronting them with ‘a Frenchman whose anti-Semitism was of a violence they hardly knew existed, or, if they did, thought had disappeared forever’.162 The nation responded with horror. Bernard Kouchner’s response to the interview indicated that the attentiveness of sans-frontiériste activists to the Second World War went beyond the Holocaust as a figure of memory or rhetorical trope applied to the third world, to contemporary developments in debates about the historical events and their significance. One among a selection of letters published by L’Express, Kouchner’s reading of the Darquier controversy emphasised what he saw as the continuity between Occupation-era antiSemitism and contemporary racism. ‘The indignity’, he declared, ‘is that this slaughterer, this Darquier lives, that even the vengeful had forgotten him, and that he represents an aspect of mankind’. He claimed it was disingenuous to portray the publication of Darquier’s anti-Semitic views as fuelling racism, arguing that racism was already present and active. And he connected this to the failure to transmit the memory of the Holocaust to younger generations: ‘Hitler? Don’t know him. But wogs, bicots, Jews, children know’.163 The same edition carried a letter from Marek Halter, who cooperated with Kouchner in this period in the campaign for Vietnamese refugees. Halter argued that in a situation where ‘anti-Semitic, anti-Arab, anti-Black, racist violence is routine . . . our best defence against brutality is memory’.164 Activists thus drew links between complacency regarding Nazi crimes and a failure to challenge contemporary racism. Darquier’s interview prompted a renewed activism against French war criminals, several of whom had been denounced by tiers-mondiste militants.165 A key landmark in the memory of Jewish Holocaust victims had come out of earlier judicial efforts against German perpetrators: Serge and Beate Klarsfeld’s Mémorial de la Déportation des Juifs de France (1978).

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It detailed the names and fates of Jews deported from France, convoy by convoy, painstaking research making this information available for the first time. The controversy over Darquier added fuel to the struggle against impunity for Holocaust crimes, legal battles being fought in both France and Germany over issues such as the definition of crimes against humanity and the statute of limitations for the same. Charges were progressively brought against French criminals Paul Touvier (the subject of the GP’s assassination plan in 1972), Maurice Papon (condemned by anticolonialist activists for his part in the massacre of Algerians in 1961), Jean Leguay, and René Bousquet; and the German Klaus Barbie (the target of Debray’s abduction plot in Bolivia in 1970). While post-Liberation trials dealt with the crime of treason, these trials marked the legal condemnation of French complicity with genocide during the Second World War. The trials further consolidated multidirectional memories of the Holocaust, specifically French complicity, and decolonisation. Barbie was the first to stand trial, indicted in 1983. He was defended by anti-colonialist lawyer Jacques Vergès, who had returned to France after a period in Algiers and a mysterious absence during the 1970s. The already highprofile case became more confrontational still when Vergès drew a parallel between Nazi crimes and colonial torture, using the failure to prosecute French colonial crimes, above all in Algeria, to undermine and derail the case against Barbie for crimes, Vergès argued, of a comparable nature.166 Described by one expert as ‘one of war crimes law’s least palatable but most powerful dissenting readings’,167 it was successful in turning a spotlight onto colonialist violence but failed to achieve Barbie’s acquittal. Connections between the memories of Vichy and the Algerian War arguably reached an apex with the 1997 trial of Papon, General Secretary of the prefecture of Gironde during the Occupation, a colonial administrator in the 1950s, and Prefect of Police in Paris during the Algerian War. Although he was charged exclusively with crimes against humanity during the Second World War, Papon’s later sanctioning of police violence against North Africans in Paris became the subject of a ‘trial within a trial’ and was instrumental in decisively breaking open the controversial question of French conduct during the Algerian War.168 Thus if its place in the history of the Holocaust memory was less important than that of the Barbie trial, Papon’s trial was particularly significant for its ability to connect Second World War crimes with the violence of colonialism and perceived impunity for abuses in its name. In the 1970s Bernard Kouchner contributed to most of the debates which have come to represent the abandonment of ideological paradigms

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by French intellectuals, including nouvelle philosophie, the rejection of terrorism, the fascination with dissidence, the emphasis on human rights, and the focus on the Holocaust legacy. His ubiquity at the end of the decade saw him ridiculed by the satirical paper Le Canard Enchaîné as ‘one third-worldist, two thirds society [un tiers-mondiste, deux tiers mondain]’, a blow that appears to have found its mark.169 A little over a decade later, Lévy – no stranger to publicity himself – mused on Kouchner as a reverse butterfly effect: ‘a catastrophe at one end of the planet, and he at the other responds with a fluttering of wings . . . ’170 Whatever his talents for self-promotion, there is no getting away from his ability to identify and express the concerns of this period of changing political paradigms. Denis Maillard went as far as to identify a ‘Kouchner moment’ in which the activist crystallised the stakes and discourse that characterised the epoch.171 In the 1960s Bernard Kouchner felt the pull of the Cuban Revolution. With Debray, after the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, he unsuccessfully volunteered for military service at the Cuban embassy in Paris. In 1964, he joined a delegation of the student newspaper Clarté that spent one month in Cuba, witnessing the national celebrations of 26 July. They spent time with Castro, drinking and smoking cigars (‘long sessions of dogmatic, endless debates fuelled by rum’), and joined him on a fishing trip. Kouchner was granted an interview, later describing Castro as ‘a very seductive guy, very magnetic, very “macho”, but whose openmindedness in relation to the problems of the world seemed to me very limited’. Kouchner also met Guevara – to whom he had dedicated his medical thesis – an encounter that was so influential that Kouchner for a time apparently contemplated taking up arms in the place of his medical kit, as Debray had.172 In the early 1970s Kouchner’s writing demonstrated his interest in gauchiste politics albeit not an unequivocal embrace. A study entitled La France sauvage examined events of 1968 despite his repeated absences from France for humanitarian missions around this time. Published in 1970 and co-written with Michel-Antoine Burnier, the book summarised and analysed the contestations of May ’68 and their heirs, in the education sector, union struggles, and amongst the groupuscules. ‘Illegitimate children of our society’, they wrote, gauchistes and rebels ‘are born out of the decomposition [pourrissement] of conformisms, of the aging of routines and morals’.173 After the Palestinian terrorist attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics, Kouchner published a commentary in the countercultural magazine Actuel. His article opened acerbically by observing that ‘whether violence be the midwife of History or responsible for the birth

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of a vile mouse, no matter: political movements seem to entrust it blithely with the management of their hopes’.174 Unlike the GP leaders, he did not make reference to the Holocaust legacy, instead emphasising a selfperpetuating cycle in which ‘after the desperate horror of Munich comes the methodical horror of the reprisals’ and insisting that ‘to be outraged at the carnage at Munich is not to approve the Israeli policy that prepared it’. He criticised the use of terrorist violence and the left’s tendency to turn a blind eye to the violence of anti-imperialist movements. Yet Kouchner’s article was also inflected with tiers-mondiste themes, including his attempt to criticise terrorism by citing Che Guevara’s writing on guerrilla warfare and his assertion that ‘we do not mistake the Tupamaros for assassins’.175 In 1976, Kouchner’s inclusion in Jacques Paugam’s ‘Génération perdue’ interview series on Radio France Culture flagged him as a standout figure amongst post-’68 militants. In this period he was as much known for his journalism and his revolutionary militancy as for his more recent activities with MSF, but this was rapidly to change. In his interview Kouchner spoke of the evolution of attitudes to revolutionary regimes. He evoked ‘a time when the third world constituted hope’, before the gradual disillusionment with Cuba and Vietnam and the discovery of mass murder in Cambodia. He condemned the blind spots and hypocrisy of revolutionary ideology: ‘if the struggle is said to be progressive (Cambodia), the progressives will take notice, if not, peoples can very well die (Kurdistan)’. The moral response, he concluded, was to ensure that their generation ‘must be the one of neither equivocation nor complicity’.176 Kouchner therefore unambiguously advocated engagement, but one independent of traditional ideology. In August 1977, Kouchner made a foray into the debate over nouvelle philosophie. He defended the nouveaux philosophes and emphasised the resonance between the repudiation of revolutionary ideology and the principles of sans-frontiérisme. He argued that, while the philosophers’ message about the Gulag was not new, the refusal to acknowledge their contribution was often due to irritation, resentment, or jealousy. Instead, he praised them for creating an opportunity for renewed debate about human rights abuses. A first and fundamental element of the new paradigm, shared across sans-frontiérisme and nouvelle philosophie, was the rejection of ideology as a justification for violence. In Kouchner’s summary: ‘oppression has not changed sides: like an oilspot, it has spread everywhere’.177 The second correspondence he identified between nouveaux philosophes and sans-frontiéristes was a shared willingness to mobilise the media. This was a source of frustration for many critics of the

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nouveaux philosophes but for Kouchner publicity was essential because ‘making the dead speak must be preferred to burying them twice over’.178 However, Kouchner criticised what he saw as the ongoing inadequacy of public debates about political violence. He described how French intellectuals had previously been unwilling to reflect upon their ideological complicity in left-wing assassinations. Alluding to the resurgence of Jewish identity through debates around the Holocaust, he suggested that if ‘the dead of Auschwitz can count on the Jewish survivors, the dead of Siberia die twice for being denied’.179 He acknowledged that the new attitude to politics had made possible the condemnation of Soviet abuses; yet he cautioned against the blinkers of the nouveaux philosophes’ anti-communist agenda, reproaching them for neglecting lesser-known victims of ‘less gratifying gulags’ due to an overemphasis on the Soviet Union and its dissidents. Kouchner made a plea on behalf of the victims who lacked a public profile or a political identity: ‘who will pronounce for the Kurdish cause [label], the Biafran, Chinese, Baloch, Ugandan, Argentine cause, etc. Who cares for the Mhongs of the high Laotian plains, bombed with napalm by their new masters? May dissidence not be another pretext to bury all of these and many others’. Once again he demanded a willingness to denounce all massacres, whatever their cause. In November 1979 was published an interview between Glucksmann and Kouchner which articulated the sans-frontiériste vision of transnational humanitarian action. Both tiers-mondiste militants in the 1960s, by the end of the following decade they personified two of the major strands of post-revolutionary politics. Their dialogue largely involved Glucksmann facilitating Kouchner’s responses, with the latter’s advocacy of ‘men’s rights to save others, peoples’ rights to save other peoples’ characterised by the former as a ‘new international law of civilians’.180 Evoking his experience during the Biafra–Nigeria War, he argued that the only solution when faced with oppression was ‘to no longer ask about labels, to accept only the idea of giving help to minorities and deprived populations’.181 Sans-frontiériste action was accordingly based upon a new perspective in which ‘there are no good and bad dead’. Throughout his humanitarian career, Kouchner would make a mantra out of this idea.182 A second major feature of the sans-frontiériste principles as developed by Kouchner in this 1979 dialogue was the motivation born of the legacy of the Holocaust. He presented his own sans-frontiériste engagement as the result of exposure to three genocides: the Holocaust, Biafra, and Cambodia. However, on a collective level, he considered the mere awareness of genocide to be insufficient in spurring people to action. This, too, was

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one of the lessons of the Holocaust: ‘the day the International Red Cross did not denounce the Nazi camps, Auschwitz or Buchenwald, it did good conscience a great service. Because no one would have moved to pull the Jews out of the furnaces’.183 The proof, he argued, was in the international failure to take action in Cambodia despite the undisputed and immediate knowledge of the genocide taking place. Like the Maoists of the GP, though in a different way, and as in his own reading of the significance of Darquier’s anti-Semitic statements, Kouchner thus saw the perpetuation of the stakes of the Second World War in contemporary events. In this context, sans-frontiérisme would provide a framework for individuals to take responsibility for the suffering of others, in a world in which ‘genocide is shown live, during the evening meal’. Generating publicity for a cause would contribute to public pressure for action and make avoidance or indifference more difficult. Alluding to the anti-fascist brigades during the Spanish Civil War, Kouchner also called for ‘international humanitarian brigades that would act, and make it known, at the moment of the killings and not afterwards’.184 This project was therefore in keeping with both the voluntarist militancy of the tiers-mondiste period, in which many sans-frontiéristes had shared, and the attention to the Holocaust legacy which had risen as revolutionary politics was in decline. Kouchner and the radical humanitarians were of course not the only activists to express the new form of engagement, but their discourse occupied the intersection of a large number of interrelated issues that, collectively, engineered the transformation of French models of intellectual engagement. As the massacre of Israeli civilians at Munich was a shock that wrenched the GP away from the temptation of political violence in the name of revolution, so the references to the Holocaust provided an incontestable platform from which to reject political rationalisations of the suffering of refugees. The codes from which action derived its meaning, as Philippe Mesnard observed, had passed from a political to a moral register, with the Holocaust as a historical referent.185 Comparisons with the Holocaust added urgency to calls for a response to suffering in Southeast Asia. Many, like Allali, made these humanitarian calls without reference to political ideology. The most high-profile campaigners, however, including the activists who would come to embody the new sans-frontiériste engagement, used their campaign as a way of undermining tiers-mondiste militancy. No longer, they declared, would the left be allowed to apportion ‘the labels of good and bad struggles’.186 The French case thus challenges the idea, more easily associated with earlier narratives or Anglo-American ones, that ‘the breakthrough of human rights – far more

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an anti-totalitarian reflex – occurred in striking isolation from humanitarian concern, particularly for global suffering’.187 In contrast with revolutionary third-worldism, the version of humanitarianism that shaped public discourses on the third world at the beginning of the 1980s claimed to treat all suffering equally and without judgement. This may have been at odds with the revolutionary left, but the aspiration towards impartiality was not what made sans-frontiérisme radical as far as some older versions of humanitarianism were concerned. Rather, its innovation came in the willingness to challenge state sovereignty and in its use of advocacy on behalf of those it identified as in need. Neither was entirely new but with sans-frontiérisme these ideas began to develop a power that they had not held before. Their rise was part of a much larger process in which ‘NGOs of all kinds became part of the institutional reshaping of international politics’, to quote Mark Mazower, and as such it is both an international story and a French one.188

conclusion Throughout the 1970s, the intellectual and ideological engagement of the French left underwent a transformation. The extreme rapidity with which French attitudes to political violence evolved in this decade and the density of debates that contributed to this process make it a difficult evolution to chart. Although there is no smoking gun, what emerges gradually yet compellingly is the way in which engagements with the third world, for both tiers-mondistes and sans-frontiéristes in France, were tied to understandings of political violence at home. Most of the time, this bond was achieved through abstractions such as the concepts of revolution, humanity, responsibility, complicity, solidarity, and human rights. These abstractions were then confirmed or undermined by first-hand experiences in third-world countries. Debates about the Second World War, which in the tiers-mondiste period had largely focused on fighting fascism, from the beginning of the 1970s began to emphasise more heavily the specificity of the Holocaust and – although not often together – the role of French collaboration. In this phase, the notion of complicity came to play a central role. Challenging more than the language of revolution, the intellectuals re-examined the form and function that their engagement could assume. They abandoned the relativism which in the tiers-mondiste era had sought to justify left-wing violence as necessary resistance to oppression. Many who had shared an idealised vision of revolutionary politics in the third

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world came to advocate, in its place and despite expressions of concern at new versions of reductive attitudes, a concrete form of activism. The moral foundation of the new activism was human rights. Intellectuals and militants who publicly repudiated their ideological engagements made human rights the cornerstone of future campaigns; the universalism and idealism of the revolutionary cause was channelled into this new stand. Hence Jean-Pierre Le Dantec insisted that, despite the pessimism which necessarily resulted from disillusionment, ‘the best of ourselves, the very thing that had engendered our extreme engagements, must rise again within us in a rigorous defence of what are usually called “human rights” in the face of barbarism’.189 The activist trajectories of militants like Le Dantec, or Bernard Kouchner and Rony Brauman – who both began their political career as tiers-mondistes and rose to the forefront of the sans-frontiériste movement – exemplified the process by which the adoption of a moral attitude became a core legacy of the gauchiste world view.190 Sans-frontiérisme therefore became one of the most prominent incarnations of the paradigm shift in France in favour of human rights. Sansfrontiérisme reformulated certain of the elements of tiers-mondisme not entirely discredited by the decline of Marxism, such as an interest in the third world, solidarity with the suffering of others, voluntarism, and individual engagement. Yet it sought to place these elements in a framework independent of classic ideological considerations. It also built them into the legacy of the Second World War, evoking the horror of the Holocaust as a reason for vigilance against human rights abuses. The meaning of the historical referents deployed by humanitarian activists – terms like genocide, Holocaust, resistance, complicity – was being revisited at the same time as this language was being used to drive a new approach to suffering in the third world. Both the history they invoked and the current affairs they engaged with were being actualised and made personal in a mutually amplifying relationship. To the extent that tiers-mondiste engagement had been a response to the memory of the Second World War, this was another continuity across the two modes of activism. But in the new post-revolutionary era, as sans-frontiérisme understood it, the left, too, was capable of genocide.

part iii ETHICS AND POLEMICS

6 Idealism beyond borders The turn to sans-frontiériste spectacle

Within a little over twelve months, two major sans-frontiériste publicity campaigns were launched in France to promote the cause of Southeast Asian refugees. The first campaign, which peaked in mid 1979, was the Bateau pour le Vietnam (Boat for Vietnam). Its supporters hailed it as ‘seductive, indeed spectacular, and as concretely useful as could be’.1 They could point not only to the devotion of the doctors and nurses operating amongst the refugees but also to the dominance of their politically ecumenical campaign among newspapers back in France. This campaign gave rise to the celebrated reunion of ideological adversaries Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron in the name of refugees. It was wholly associated with Bernard Kouchner, though as a result of it he was ousted from the organisation with which he had become synonymous. The second campaign, sponsored by Médecins Sans Frontières in the wake of Kouchner’s departure, was the Marche pour la Survie du Cambodge (March for the Survival of Cambodia). Held on the Thai– Cambodian border in February 1980, the protest announced the emergence of an anti-communist agenda among the driving forces of MSF. It inaugurated a period in which, in the words of Rony Brauman, ‘the ambition to be actors who bear witness – or witnesses who act – imposed itself as obvious . . . and only became stronger’.2 Despite the personal and political differences that separated this group from their predecessors, the Cambodian march shared with Kouchner’s initiative an emphasis on the use of the media and a willingness to bring humanitarian aid into the domain of political engagement. The innovative aspects of these campaigns, their combination of media focus with echoes of past forms of militancy, were distinctive features of French sans-frontiérisme. 181

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Though humanitarian ideas had been gaining momentum and sansfrontiéristes had been regular contributors to public discourse, the mobilisations for Vietnam and Cambodia represented the first time that humanitarians managed as such to dominate the codes of French interaction with the third world. The Bateau pour le Vietnam in particular has been treated as a sign of the consensus around human rights and humanitarianism. It is one of the few humanitarian episodes consistently cited in the historiography of intellectuals in post-war France, reflecting the way it epitomised the transformation of intellectual frameworks.3 The Cambodian march, while recognised as ‘one of the only public advocacy campaigns undertaken by aid organisations during the Cambodian crisis’, has featured most prominently in the memoirs of participants or prosopographical studies of the sans-frontiériste movement.4 These campaigns took place against the backdrop of arguably the last great revolutionary hope of the Cold War period, the Iranian Revolution of 1979. French intellectual responses to the Iranian Revolution, and in particular the attention devoted to it by philosopher and political activist Michel Foucault, offered a microcosm of the relationship between tiersmondisme and sans-frontiérisme. Many historians have either condemned Foucault’s enthusiasm for Iran as an ‘intellectual lacuna’ or debunked the ‘myth’ that Foucault was an unrepentant apologist for Ruhollah Khomeini, the revolutionary religious leader and later Supreme Leader of Iran.5 Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson focused on Foucault’s individual, prolific, and ‘passionate political commitment’ to the Islamic revolution and relegated his humanitarian activism to a lesser significance.6 Conversely, Julian Bourg, who placed probably the greatest emphasis on what he termed Foucault’s interest in ethics, had little to say about the Iranian episode, apart from a reference to Foucault’s ‘infamously controversial comments’ at the time of the revolution and, buried in a footnote, his ‘unfortunately charitable assessment’ of it.7 Bourg did not discuss the implications of this episode despite casting Foucault as exemplifying the broader transition towards ethics that he so effectively documents. Yet reactions to Foucault’s enthusiasm for revolution are best understood in the context of the dominant place occupied by humanitarianism in this period. Indeed, Foucault’s engagement with the Iranian revolutionary movement had important synergies with his advocacy of individual responsibility through multiple human rights and humanitarian campaigns in the final years of his life. Similarly, the prises de position of the sans-frontiéristes should not be viewed only within the insular

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narrative of the expanding influence of moral politics, but connected to these seemingly contradictory debates. As this chapter and the following one will show, the continuing presence of – and, perhaps more importantly, belief in the influence of – radical progressive politics shaped the political discourse of sans-frontiérisme in France well into the 1980s. This chapter thus lays out the intersecting engagements with thirdworld suffering as seen through debates around the Iranian Revolution, the ‘boat people’ mobilisation, and the Cambodian access campaign. The first section examines Foucault’s support for the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and its intellectual context, including others who took an eager interest in developments. The second section introduces the first of the sans-frontiériste spectacles, the Bateau pour le Vietnam, which was also backed by Foucault, and shows how it sat against the shifting debates on Iran. It also considers the tensions within MSF and their operational implications. The fallout from the so-called schism, when MSF split between Kouchner’s supporters (who departed the organisation) and a second generation of doctors and activists, forms part of the chapter’s final section. This part discusses two terrains where the idea of transgressing borders was of central importance: Cambodia, with the protest march, and Afghanistan, with its ‘cross-border’ missions. While the Marche pour la Survie du Cambodge both conveyed the political priorities of a new leadership and echoed some practices favoured by the departed older guard, danger and clandestinity imbued the missions in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan with the same spirit of militant adventure which had characterised sans-frontiérisme from its beginnings. As the 1970s ended, however, and with thousands of refugees from communist countries perceived to be ‘voting with their feet’, the French doctors’ enterprise became increasingly, intentionally anti-communist.

revolution in iran Protests in Iran began in late 1977 and intensified from January 1978. Cycles of unrest were structured by the forty-day observance rituals that followed each killing of protesters by government forces. On 8 September 1978, on what became known as Black Friday, large numbers of people died when the military opened fire on protesters at Jaleh Square in Tehran. The US-backed monarch, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, fled Iran on 11 January 1979. On 1 February, Ayatollah Sayyed Ruhollah Khomeini returned triumphant to Iran after years of exile in Iraq and, latterly, in France. The ‘true Iran’ was proclaimed on 11 February and a new

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constitution was created which bestowed upon Khomeini the titles of Commander of the Revolution, Founder of the Islamic Republic, Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, and Imam of the Muslim World.8 Foucault had been there as witness. He made two visits to Iran during the protest period, from 16 to 24 September 1978, in the wake of the Black Friday massacre, and again from 9 to 15 November. He was working for the Italian left-wing newspaper Corriere della Sera, which had commissioned him to run a column he called ‘reportages of ideas’, to combine conceptual and current affairs analysis.9 Foucault in Iran embodied his belief in being ‘there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force’.10 As a result of his visits, eight articles on the Iranian Revolution were published with Foucault’s byline in Corriere della Sera, plus another in Le Nouvel Observateur. He also commented on Iran in a handful of other texts until mid 1979.11 As James Miller observed, Foucault’s enthusiasm intensified over the course of his interest in Iran and his initial attempt at objectivity fell away.12 The origins of Foucault’s interest in politics lay in his experiences with student protests in Tunisia in 1967–8. He unambiguously declared: ‘it wasn’t May of ’68 in France that changed me; it was March of ’68, in a third-world country’.13 Having accepted a teaching position at the University of Tunis from September 1966, Foucault was witness to the beginnings of student agitation in December of that year. As protests became more politicised and allegations surfaced of the torture of students imprisoned in President Habib Bourguiba’s crackdown on dissent, Foucault’s initially critical attitude towards the protests changed to one of support. He became personally involved, sheltering students and hiding an illegal printing press at his house. In an interview conducted in late 1978 – that is, when protests were already underway in Iran – Foucault identified these experiences as ‘decisive’.14 Though some have attributed his discovery of politics to his relationship with activist Daniel Defert, ‘it was precisely his Tunisian experience that allowed a much more vocally militant Foucault to emerge’.15 Thanks to these experiences, political militancy for Foucault became spiritual rather than straightforwardly ideological. During the Tunisian protests Foucault understood that ‘Marxism did not represent merely a way of analysing reality; it was also a kind of moral force, an existential act’. He admired the ‘radical violence and intensity’ of the students’ commitment and saw their willingness to risk their safety in its name as a ‘true political experience’. Foucault shared with others who had experienced revolutionary protest in the third world, such as Goldman and Debray,

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a rather dismissive view of May ’68. He felt that ‘in France, somewhat absurdly, the May experience was overshadowed by the phenomenon of splinter groups’; in Tunisia, in contrast, there was ‘something absolutely different from all that muttering of political speeches and debates’.16 Foucault had been out of France during the years of the Algerian War. Anti-colonialist and tiers-mondiste campaigners during this conflict did in fact take significant risks, for example in couriering money for the FLN and in sheltering wanted militants. Instead, the upheaval in Tunisia, for Foucault, performed the revelatory function that the Algerian War had for many others on the French left. It convinced him that ‘the role of political ideology, or of a political perception of the world, was indispensable to the goal of setting off the struggle’. In the years after this discovery Foucault became involved in radical politics, notably in the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons.17 He provided the introduction to the GIP’s first study, Enquête dans vingt prisons, published in 1971. At the height of his engagement with the Maoist movement, Foucault became a prominent advocate of popular, revolutionary violence. Some of his positions were more extreme than those of younger radicals. In dialogue with Benny Lévy, Foucault argued that popular justice could only be direct and could not tolerate any form of official apparatus or staging of the judicial process. While Lévy challenged this position through examples from Maoist China and the French Liberation, Foucault cited the example of ‘executions’ of prisoners in Revolutionary France, claiming that the September 1792 massacres were justifiable as a form of popular justice, ‘a response to oppression, strategically effective and politically necessary’.18 It was Foucault’s animosity towards what he considered bourgeois justice that pushed the GIP towards an information service rather than a tribunal.19 But his attitude had evolved by 1977, when Foucault participated in efforts to prevent the extradition of German lawyer Klaus Croissant, who had sought asylum in France after being pursued for defence of a criminal organisation.20 The Croissant affair combined a lingering fascination with radical revolutionary movements with the rising interest in dissidence and human rights (in this case, the RAF’s right to a legal defence and to freedom from torture). Like the debates about Iran, it indicated the shifting paradigms of political engagement in France. Foucault’s celebration of the ‘political spirituality’ and ‘collective will’ of the Iranian people in 1978 reprised his discoveries in Tunisia ten years earlier and revisited some of the tropes of tiers-mondisme. Like Marxism in Tunisia, Foucault interpreted Shi’ite Islam in Iran as an avatar for

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the authentic political will of the people, claiming that the clergy was not actually directing the popular movement but ‘the form that the political struggle takes as soon as it mobilises the common people’.21 He particularly emphasised this idea in an article in Le Nouvel Observateur of 16–22 October. The Iranians were striving towards ‘political spirituality’, Foucault wrote, ‘this great thing whose possibility we have forgotten since the Renaissance and the great crisis of Christianity’.22 In Corriere della Sera he paid tribute to the ‘collective will’ that operated like ‘a tidal wave without a military leadership, without a vanguard, without a party’.23 His attitude can only be described as one of awe. Take, for instance, his admission in March 1979 that he had ‘thought that the collective will was like God, like the soul, and something one would never encounter’.24 Various elements of Foucault’s reportages evoked tiers-mondiste visions of the third world. With all the analysis of the decline of tiersmondisme being done at the time, others certainly perceived Foucault’s writing in this way. He saw the Iranian popular movement as an anticolonial struggle. Though he considered the collective will in Iran exceptional, he identified its precedents in independence movements and anticolonial wars. Like the protesters, echoing tiers-mondisme, he adopted a critical stance towards Western models and ideas. He characterised the Shah’s regime as one of classic colonialism, claiming that the Shah was ‘of the age of the predatory monarchs’.25 His derisive aside that ‘the privileged rats are jumping ship’ chimed perfectly with tiers-mondiste rhetoric of the 1960s and early 1970s.26 The Iranian clergy occupied a position analogous to that of guerrilla fighters in much tiers-mondiste writing. Foucault praised the militant ‘immobility’ of Islam and noted the historical tradition in which ‘the mullahs preached with a gun at their side in the mosques’.27 He compared them with other examples of religion asserting itself as radical politics, often violently: Girolamo Savonarola, a fifteenth-century leader of Florence, the Anabaptists of the sixteenthcentury Munster rebellion, and the Presbyterians at the time of Cromwell. Foucault’s recognition of the importance of the religious leadership to the protest movement has been seen as an insight not shared by all contemporary observers. However, his categorical assertion that ‘there will not be a Khomeini party; there will not be a Khomeini government’ has stood the test of time less well.28 Foucault proposed a great global destiny for the Iranian Revolution. It was aimed not at political calculations, he felt, but at ‘the transfiguration of this world’.29 Foucault speculated that this was ‘perhaps the first great insurrection against global systems, the form of revolt that is the most

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modern and the most insane’. The historical significance of the Iranian Revolution would be found ‘not in its conformity to a recognised “revolutionary” model, but instead in its potential to overturn the existing political situation in the Middle East and thus the global strategic equilibrium’.30 Islam, he claimed, ‘has a good chance to become a gigantic powder keg, at the level of hundreds of millions of men’. These attributes contributed to the interpretation of Foucault’s support for the Islamic revolutionary movement as the ‘climax’ of the anti-humanist, anti-Western mentality of tiers-mondisme.31 Foucault was not alone in supporting the revolutionary movement. Extensive coverage in Témoignage Chrétien reflected the excitement of Catholic tiers-mondistes about a movement that was both revolutionary and religious. This journal was the inheritor of an Occupation-era press and during the decolonisation period had campaigned in favour of independence and against the use of torture in Algeria. Its use of témoignage dating from 1941 highlights the depth of this term beyond its sansfrontiériste use and speaks of the significance of witnessing practices for those who were motivated by Christian values. The tiers-mondiste aspirations of the Christian and especially Catholic far left survived until relatively late in comparison with other groups, largely because the religious foundation of their engagement was not undermined by the successive discoveries of the violence of revolutionary regimes in the way that Marxist ideology was. Catholic tiers-mondistes were inspired by examples such as Camilo Torres, the priest who died while fighting with the Columbian National Liberation Army in 1966, but it was the the stimulus of Latin American liberation theology that helped sustain their engagement and insulate it against the so-called ‘Solzhenitsyn effect’. An attempt to read Christian faith through the experience of the poor, liberation theology was endorsed by the Conference of Latin American Bishops in Medellín in 1968 and articulated in Gustavo Gutiérrez’s Teología de la liberación: perspectivas (1971). Under these influences, at the time of the Iranian Revolution, the tenor of the revolutionary fervour at Témoignage Chrétien was at least as vibrant as in Foucault’s writing. After the revolution, the journal’s editor Georges Montaron declared that the Iranian people are in the process of ‘living the reason that the friends of Témoignage Chrétien have never stopped fighting, for their total liberation, for the march towards Happiness’.32 Others with a past or ongoing commitment to revolutionary politics also initially greeted the events with enthusiasm. Serge July, the editor of Libération, responded to the seizing of arms and toppling of the

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government by declaring that ‘joy has arrived in Tehran’.33 Even Le Nouvel Observateur briefly hailed Iran’s revolutionary movement, before adopting the defence of human rights as its primary agenda.34 But everyone’s zeal was surpassed, in both intensity and duration, by the fanaticism of Roger Garaudy. Garaudy was a theoretician for the PCF during its Stalinist years, became a proxy ambassador for Khomeini in France, and later renewed his notoriety with the negationist theories of Les mythes fondateurs de la politique israélienne (1995). His suggestion that radical Islam could offer ‘an alternative to the suicidal Western model’ was received as pure tiers-mondiste mythology.35 Anomalies like Garaudy aside, however, the Iranian Revolution struggled to retain supporters. As a dossier in Esprit showed, even the most positive French commentators quickly revised their positions; enthusiasm, as they put it, ‘suddenly reversed and gave way to a strict discourse on infringed human rights’.36 The work of Claire Brière and Pierre Blanchet, Libération’s two key correspondents in Iran, illustrated the tensions in coverage of the events. Brière and Blanchet were among the first to visit Khomeini when he arrived at Neauphles-le-Château, outside Paris, and – having met Foucault in Iran when all three were working as journalists – facilitated the philosopher’s contact with the Ayatollah.37 Both were former members of the Gauche Prolétarienne and their awareness of the violent potential of revolutionary movements showed in their 1979 book Iran: la révolution au nom de dieu. Their description of the uprising’s significance conveyed their ambivalence: ‘the event is probably without equivalent in history and, for this reason alone, deserves to be recognised, whatever may be the future rifts in Iranian society, the bloody fractures, the new prejudices that we foresee in the future’.38 A dialogue with Foucault published as an appendix to La révolution au nom dieu revealed the concern felt by Brière-Blanchet in particular (to use her married name) at the ‘enormous impression of intolerance’ she received from the popular movement in Iran: ‘woe betide anyone who did not conform’. She compared the atmosphere in Iran to what she had witnessed in China in 1967, the charisma of Khomeini to that of Chairman Mao, and the admiration of the Islamic militants for their leader to the Red Guards’ loyalty to Mao. In contrast to Maoist self-censorship during the tiers-mondiste era, Brière-Blanchet asserted that it ‘would not be honest to be silent’ regarding her concerns about the Iranian revolutionary movement.39 Blanchet and Foucault agreed that the movement displayed anti-Semitism, xenophobia, physical aggression, and censorship.40 Its reception in France followed the same course of enthusiasm,

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reconsideration, and disillusionment that had been seen in relation to other revolutions in the third world, just much faster. From a certain perspective Foucault’s passion for the revolutionary movement in Iran was indeed evidence that, despite the supposed demise of the revolutionary model, old habits die hard.41 But in fact much of the debate that occurred over the response to the Iranian Revolution focused on the nature of intellectual engagement rather than the terms of the ideological commitment. With this in mind it can be seen not so much as a throwback compared to the new norms around human rights and sans-frontiérisme, but as part of a single broader movement of ideas. Some of the most balanced discussion on the Iranian Revolution and its reception in France came from the Middle East scholar Maxime Rodinson. He published two relevant articles, in early December 1978 and then in late February 1979, later acknowledging that they were both intended to respond to Foucault’s portrayal of the events. His first article was a broad analysis of the rise in Islamist political movements across the Middle East and North Africa, exploring questions related to their Islamic identity and the phenomenon of fundamentalism. He pointed to a type of ‘Muslim “gesticulation”’ that could be compared to the Marxist gesticulation of Soviet leaders, used to maintain consensus through symbolic measures. A former member of the PCF, Rodinson warned it was a law of history that ‘good moral intentions, whether or not endorsed by the deity, are a weak basis for determining the practical policies of states’. He delivered a caution to tiers-mondistes ‘convinced of the vices of Europe and hoping to find elsewhere (why not in Islam?) the means of assuring a more or less radiant future’.42 Rodinson’s second article was more explicitly directed against Foucault’s particular brand of pro-Iranian passion. The dominant themes of this article, published in the week after the Islamic regime came to power, were scepticism and vigilance. Rodinson was bluntly critical of the disconnection of ideological politics from reality, declaring that ‘the content of an ideology does not necessarily play a decisive role in the movements that that ideology supports with its authority’.43 From the allusions he chose – referring to the Anabaptists and to Khomeini’s potential to become a Savonarola or a Cromwell – it is likely that Rodinson had read Foucault’s Corriere della Sera article of 8 October 1978, in which the philosopher cited the same comparisons with a much more approving tone. Rodinson conceded that a religious inspiration was not, in itself, a sign of an oppressive ambition; but neither was it, in his view, a

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protection against it. His contribution to this debate conveyed the turn against ideology that characterised French intellectual engagement from the late 1970s. A direct condemnation of Foucault by Jacques and Claudie Broyelle reflected far more explicitly upon this turn while indulging in some ad hominem attacks along the way. The Broyelles published their extremely sarcastic article in Le Matin on 24 March 1979, after news of summary executions by revolutionary tribunals had started to filter out of Iran. It began by suggesting that Foucault’s notion of popular justice was coming to life under Khomeini. They described the sweeping away by ‘benevolent Islamic committees’ of ‘the odious and stage-managed bourgeois courts with their well known and oppressive trail of interrogations, investigations, witnesses, proofs, hearings, and supposedly neutral judges’ and announced gleefully ‘this is the people’s justice for which Michel Foucault passionately yearned’.44 The Foucault they had in mind was the mentor of the Maoist movement who had lauded the September 1792 massacres as an expression of popular justice. They called on him to either welcome the realisation of his ideas on popular justice, or publicly recant and justify his error. Their antagonism was inflamed by the juxtaposition of Foucault’s revolutionary activism with his more recent involvement in sans-frontiériste and human rights campaigns. Former Maoists, the Broyelles repudiated their earlier revolutionary politics with nearly as much zeal as they had initially adopted them. And, crucially, they were participating alongside Foucault in the humanitarian campaign of the Bateau pour le Vietnam, which began just after Foucault’s second trip to Iran. In their March critique, although they didn’t name the boat people campaign, they protested bitterly that ‘when one realises that all models on the Foucauldian scale carry the same anti-(bourgeois) democratic, anti-legalist, anti-judiciary label, one has the right to protest in the name of deceptive advertising. These articles cannot be sold under the label of “defence of human rights”’.45 Returning to a common theme of the turn against tiers-mondisme, they insisted upon intellectual responsibility and the need to confront the reality of what supporting revolutionary movements entailed. Although he acknowledged their article, Foucault refused to fully engage with what he saw as a Stalinist call for self-criticism.46 However, the claim that he never revised his stance on Iran is incorrect. In April 1979, Foucault published an open letter to Iranian Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan expressing concern about the tribunals then operating

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in the country. Noting the temptation of despotism for a government in power, Foucault insisted that ‘revolutions are born from justice and injustice and it is because of these that often they get lost and die’.47 He refuted the notion that revolutionary government required absolute power and insisted upon the need for transparency in government. Though this was not the explicit self-criticism that the Broyelles demanded, it was evident that Foucault was distancing himself from the statement on popular justice he made in the early 1970s. It was clearly a sign of Foucault’s revising his support for Khomeinism. Foucault’s remaining public commentary on Iran continued in this vein. On the front page of Le Monde in May 1979, Foucault defended the compatibility of support for popular movements with the criticism of human rights abuses. He declared that ‘it is certainly not shameful to change one’s opinions, but there is no reason to say that one’s opinion has changed when one is against hands being chopped off today, after having been against the tortures of the SAVAK [secret police] yesterday’. He denied any error in his initial enthusiasm, arguing that ‘the spirituality of those who were going to their deaths has no similarity whatsoever with the bloody government of a fundamentalist clergy’. More than the advocacy of a particular line, Foucault justified his engagement (though this was a sort of intellectual sleight of hand) with the intertwined assertions that revolts of various kinds would continue to take place, that the task of paying attention to them remained, and that this was a situation that ‘all the disillusionments of history will not change’.48 This was his real response to the Broyelles’ call for self-criticism. For Eribon, it was ‘a superb outburst by a bitter, wounded man, standing up for things he had said’.49 Foucault, however, was defending not only the things he had said, but his right to say them. This was the consistent theme of his contribution to the debates about Iran and provided the continuity between his revolutionary engagement and his humanitarian activism of the same period, regarded by the Broyelles as a relationship of absolute conflict. In his open letter to Bazargan, Foucault justified his decision to speak out by saying that ‘it is good that a man, any man, even if he is on the other side of the world, can rise to speak because he no longer can stand to see another tortured or condemned’.50 He insisted that ‘this is not about interfering in the internal affairs of a state. Those who protested on behalf of a single Iranian tortured in the depths of a SAVAK prison were interfering in the most universal matter of all’. In his May article, he cast this engagement in terms of the responsibility of the intellectual. He described a balance in

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which ‘one must be respectful when a singularity arises and intransigent as soon as the state violates universals’.51 Once the spotlight had faded from his support for the Iranian Revolution, the remainder of Foucault’s intellectual campaigning was directed towards sans-frontiériste and human rights issues. His activism encouraged a close relationship with Bernard Kouchner.52 Following the founding of Médecins du Monde by Kouchner and other colleagues in January 1980, he participated in the running of the organisation’s journal, Ingérences. In September 1982, with the actress Simone Signoret, they offered assistance to the Polish movement Solidarity, subject to a brutal repression by government forces, in an operation called ‘Varsovivre’. They personally drove trucks filled with medical supplies to Poland, not because the Polish activists had great need of medical aid but because it represented a show of solidarity and provided cover to meet and deliver printing materials to dissident groups.53 Kouchner has claimed that Foucault privately requested to be assigned to a humanitarian mission because he ‘gave credence only to the specific, militant and almost military actions that we undertook’.54 They reportedly agreed that, once the next volume of Histoire de la sexualité was finished, Foucault would take over the management of the MDM mission in Chad and would be in charge of a proposed new Bateau pour le Vietnam project. In the meantime, the Académie Tarnier group established around Foucault, and including Kouchner, Glucksmann, and Brière-Blanchet, discussed global events and issues around the abuse of power. A humanitarian manifesto Foucault wrote in 1981 illuminated the way in which these campaigns functioned as a transferral for political engagements like those alongside the Iranian revolutionaries. This text, announcing a new committee against piracy in the China Sea, made an argument for personal responsibility in the face of government abuse or inaction. Foucault declared that ‘there exists an international citizenship that has its rights and its duties, and that obliges one to speak out against every abuse of power, whoever its author, whoever its victims’. This text thus built upon his defence in April–May 1979 of intellectual engagement in world affairs. He wrote of the need for direct action, because ‘experience shows that one can and must refuse the role of pure and simple indignation that is proposed to us’. In a call to action which could easily have found a place in his writing about the Iranian protests and popular will, Foucault insisted that ‘the will of individuals must make a place for itself in a reality of which governments have attempted to reserve a monopoly

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for themselves’.55 Citing the Bateau pour le Vietnam, MDM, Terre des Hommes, and Amnesty International, he identified the ‘new right’ of private individuals to intervene in the international political order when the suffering of others was at stake. This manifesto was, rhetorically at least, the clearest expression of Foucault’s humanitarian engagement. It was recognised by Maillard as ‘the credo of humanitarian action’.56 Yet many of the assertions in Foucault’s manifesto, which spoke of the solidarity of the governed, could equally have served in a tiers-mondiste call to action, on condition that references to ‘private individuals’ be replaced with allusions to ‘the people’ or – as Foucault wrote of Iran – the ‘collective will’. Both insisted upon the responsibility derived from ‘a certain shared difficulty in enduring what is taking place’, what in Foucault’s GIP phase was described as the right ‘to formulate what is intolerable and to tolerate it no longer’.57 Both consequently also emphasised the importance of témoignage or denunciation. The desire for action, which prompted some of the more questionable assertions in Foucault’s writing on Iran, also had an important place in sans-frontiérisme. Foucault’s support for the Iranian Revolution should not be considered the antithesis of his humanitarian activism. The one does not negate, belie or devalue the other. However, in emphasising the resonances between sans-frontiériste and tiers-mondiste forms of engagement, the point is not to say that they were the same, but rather that they were not incompatible. Undeniably, as demonstrated by the critical responses to the support Foucault and others gave to the Iranian Revolution, the tiers-mondiste mode was becoming obsolete.

a boat for vietnam While the Iranian protests gathered momentum in late 1978, the plight of Vietnamese boat people was also gaining attention in France. The joint campaign of Aron and Sartre on behalf of the Vietnamese boat people has repeatedly been singled out by historians of activism and humanitarianism as a sign of the post-ideological consensus in France.58 More specifically, as Claude Liauzu observed, it was the fate of tiers-mondisme that was at stake: ‘Sartre is reproached for his amphetamine catchphrases celebrating the murder of a coloniser by a colonised person; he is contrasted with the wisdom of Raymond Aron, but they are united in the rescue operation for the “boat people” fleeing communist Asia’.59 However, both beyond and within this consensus about ethical politics lay conflicts over the meaning and conduct of humanitarian engagement.

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The Bateau pour le Vietnam project quickly distinguished itself within the widespread mobilisation for the Vietnamese refugees. Though its committee had formed immediately after reports of the Hai Hong appeared on 11 November 1978, media interest dated from 22 November when its appeal was published in Le Monde. The appeal evoked the grave danger faced by the refugees and Western countries’ moral obligation to offer them asylum; their project was for a boat that could gather refugees directly from the China Sea.60 The committee itself featured many figures previously associated with tiers-mondisme, including Kouchner, the Broyelles, Glucksmann, Geismar, and Olivier Todd, the journalist who had written of his disillusionment in Vietnam; as well as Mario Bettati, a specialist in international law, and centre-right politician Bernard Stasi. Amongst those to endorse its project were Aron, Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir; Marek Halter; Claude Roy and Jean Lacouture of the Nouvel Observateur group; various other figures associated (either formerly or still) with the far left, including Jean-Pierre Le Dantec, Christian Jambet, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Maurice Clavel, Yves Montand, Jorge Semprun, and Philippe Sollers; Soviet dissidents Vladimir Bukovsky and Leonid Plyushch, as well as the former Chinese prisoner Jean Pasqualini; and French intellectuals of the centre-right – Jean-François Revel, Jean d’Ormesson, Alain Besançon – and centre-left – Ilios Yannakakis and Vladimir Jankélévitch, for example. Michel Foucault also signed the call, which was published a week after his second visit to Iran. In all there were nearly 150 signatories from a vast intellectual spectrum and generational range.61 With such an eloquent collection of names, the appeal’s power derived less from the text than from the momentum behind it. Positive responses to the project emphasised its incarnation of the ‘antiideological’ framework newly evident in French debates. Jean Daniel, for example, threw his weight behind the Bateau pour le Vietnam in an editorial on 4 December 1978. Drawing attention to the earlier militancy of its coordinators, he pointed out that ‘the same men who took the initiative of a “Russell Tribunal” to judge the United States’ war crimes in Vietnam decide today to send a boat to gather the victims of the new order’s “errors” [bavures]’.62 Emphasising the anti-ideological positioning of the Comité Un Bateau pour le Vietnam, Daniel declared that ‘we will always be in the camp of the oppressed; it is our choice. And it is not our fault if, in this camp, we find more and more ex-revolutionaries’. He described a new era in which, released from illusions about third-world progressive movements, no one would be persuaded to justify imperialism because of false revolutions.

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The Bateau pour le Vietnam campaign was a conscious revisitation of tiers-mondiste forms of political militancy. Their project made reference to an earlier ‘boat for Vietnam’ organised in support of the Vietnamese liberation struggle. The very name was the same. The first Bateau pour le Vietnam was organised in 1967–8 under the guidance of the PCF. It featured thirty-six organisations, of which thirty were inside the PCF’s sphere of influence.63 The remaining six – the PSU, Christianisme Sociale, Cimade, Etudiants Socialistes Unifiés, Parti de la Jeune République, Témoignage Chrétien – all reflected some influence of leftwing or far-left movements. The boat in this case was Soviet, and it set off from Marseille in February 1968 with, among other things, 2,100 bicycles, 33 motors for boats, 1,000 mechanical kits, an entire truck, and 37 tonnes of donations of various other kinds.64 Amongst this delivery were medical supplies worth 23,500 francs contributed by the Association Médicale Franco-Vietnamienne (AMFV).65 This association had its origins in one of the investigatory missions of the Russell Tribunal, following which the North Vietnamese Health Minister invited JeanMichel Krivine to establish a medical solidarity committee.66 Kouchner had participated in the AMFV’s 1967 campaign but in 1978 it was Geismar who drew the parallel and suggested the name be recycled for the refugee mobilisation.67 The comparison was then built into Kouchner’s portrayals of their humanitarian mission. Kouchner, and historians since, have emphasised how the format of the petition and the disregard of party mechanisms recalled the militant engagements of the 1960s.68 Echoing his tiers-mondiste hero Che Guevara, Kouchner called for the multiplication of theatres in which they would ‘create one, two or three boats’.69 However, the committee soon met with opposition: the ‘humanitarian consensus’ symbolised by the handshake of Sartre and Aron had in fact left some by the wayside. Criticism of the committee brought the conservative press baron Robert Hersant onto the same soapbox as the PCF, their opposing characterisations of the committee notwithstanding. In an open letter in Le Figaro, Hersant declared his refusal to ‘involve my journals with those who were the accomplices, for years on end, of the aggressors of South Vietnam’.70 Equally unexpected was that Hersant’s position could dovetail with that of Robert Linhart, leader of the Maoist UJC(ml) during the 1960s. Linhart disapproved of the boat people campaign because, he argued, it favoured the neglect of exploitation in France, where ‘you can die in your corner, beat your head against the walls, . . . there is little likelihood that the torturer’s portrait will be made

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public’.71 His criticism was directed at both the international nature of the Vietnam campaign and its fashionable, mediatic style. The PCF came out all guns blazing against the Bateau pour le Vietnam initiative. When most of the French press was reporting on the refugees aboard the Hai Hong, L’Humanité carried a story on the humanitarian crisis caused by flooding in the Mekong delta.72 When they could ignore the refugee issue no longer, the PCF’s affirmation of ‘solidarity’ with the sufferings of the Vietnamese people provided the pretext for attacks upon the initiative of the sans-frontiéristes. Though it made perfect sense for the Party to oppose a coalition of ex-gauchiste militants and right-wing notables, given their long-standing opposition to both groups and in light of the criticism directed against their Vietnamese ally, the tactical difficulties posed by opposition to such an ecumenical coalition showed in the PCF’s responses. A Communist declaration of 24 November denounced the appeal’s organisers as past supporters of colonialism who ‘emerge once again from the pools of blood to hypocritically brandish the flag of human rights’.73 In an editorial in L’Humanité the following day, René Andrieu warned that ‘those who filled the labour camps and cemeteries over there are in no position to brandish the flag of human rights and freedom against the survivors’.74 Members of the PCF later signed a petition against the exploitation of humanitarian sentiment by those who had backed the imperialists’ wars.75 These accusations may have had meaning when directed against critics of communism like Aron or Revel, but they made little sense as an invective against the younger activists who were the driving force of the committee and who had forged their political consciousness in hard-line support for the Algerian and Vietnamese liberation movements. The Bateau pour le Vietnam was vigorously defended by Jacques and Claudie Broyelle. On 17 December 1978, the couple portrayed the project as representing a new attitude that consisted of saying ‘first limit blood loss, save lives, then we will see’. They heaped scorn upon the ideological positioning of Hersant and the PCF: ‘refusing to sign an appeal to save lives, which you claim to approve, because a particular name is on it – yes, there are still people in France, in 1978, on the left as well as the right, who think and act in such a way’. They condemned this response as outmoded and parochial, even murderous, because it prevented action while people continued to die. As evidence of the committee’s popularity, the Broyelles referred to spontaneous donations totalling 750,000 francs received in under three weeks following its appeal. Because, they concluded pointedly, ‘a man’s life has still, or anew, a meaning for most of us’.76

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The committee’s project, the chartering of a vessel to assist boat people as they fled Vietnam, came to fruition in April 1979. The original proposal was to use it as an ‘ambulance of the sea’, rescuing refugees from the rickety boats in which they fled and in which they often drowned or faced attack from pirates.77 It was modified due to diplomatic difficulties and the attitude of the UNHCR.78 Eventually, with a boat called (no less) the Ile de Lumière converted into a medical centre, the sansfrontiéristes arrived at the Malaysian island Pulau Bidong on 19 April 1979. Over the three months it was moored there, the boat accommodated 1,926 hospitalisations from among the 40,000 refugees already on the island plus those who arrived subsequently; they performed 155 operations and delivered 19 babies.79 The first team on rotation was a mix of experienced activists and volunteers new to humanitarian work.80 They were accompanied by several journalists who also lived aboard, including Patrice Franceschi, who also reported on French doctors in Afghanistan, completely converted to the mission he described as ‘a humanitarian adventure probably without precedent’.81 The presence of these ‘embedded’ journalists, a practice some have also seen in the close collaboration between reporters and aid agencies during the Biafra–Nigeria War,82 indicated just how much the project was geared towards media representation. While the Ile de Lumière was in position as a floating hospital, the campaign in France on behalf of these refugees had a resounding publicity success with two joint press conferences of Aron and Sartre. The first, at the Hôtel Lutetia on 20 June 1979, was hosted by the Comité Un Bateau pour le Vietnam and appealed for asylum for refugees following the toughening of Malaysia’s immigration policy. Rights to the photograph of Sartre and Aron’s handshake were bought by press agencies in more than one hundred countries.83 The focus on their ‘reconciliation’ was so strong that, according to David Macey, it almost overshadowed the reason for their meeting.84 Several days later, on 26 June, Giscard d’Estaing hosted a delegation from the committee, including Sartre and Aron, again followed by a press conference. Although Aron was less pessimistic, Sartre declared they had met with ‘a flat refusal’: Giscard had decided to offer asylum to 5,000 Vietnamese refugees, as well as an extra 3,000 who might be picked up by the Ile de Lumière, but this number fell drastically short of the 45,000 the committee had requested.85 Unlike many commentators since, Aron and Sartre were not inclined to interpret their cooperation as the end of their long-standing differences. Sartre having died the year after their meeting, Aron’s memoirs are the

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best indication of the intellectuals’ view of the campaign. ‘Obviously’, he wrote, ‘the handshake did not put an end to thirty years of separation, no more in his eyes than in mine’. Yet Aron also argued that Sartre’s participation in the refugee campaign indicated an evolution in the latter’s attitudes to revolutionary violence: ‘he no longer mocked the “tender souls” of liberals and agreed to sympathise with the victims of despotism, even a Marxist-Leninist one’.86 Speaking on Sartre’s behalf, de Beauvoir claimed that he did not view it as a reconciliation of his disputes with Aron or as a repudiation of his earlier politics.87 Instead, she argued, he considered only the specific plight of the Vietnamese refugees. Nonetheless, favourable responses to the joint campaigning of Sartre and Aron emphasised the rejection of ideology it symbolised. Le Monde drew attention to the ideological range of the campaign for refugee rights as ‘an encouraging sign’, for it and for the Bateau pour le Vietnam mission in particular.88 Daniel proclaimed that a change had taken place in France – ‘suddenly the horror brought the politicians out of their intrigues, the intellectuals out of their cliques; the horror finally reunited Sartre and Aron . . . We no longer tolerate gulags, wherever they come from, for anyone’.89 He affirmed his journal’s approval of all measures being taken to support the refugees and declared that in France now ‘we think only of the victims’ – an example of the language of pity that has often inspired critiques of humanitarianism.90 The medical journal Impact Médecin, in selecting Kouchner and the other volunteers on the Ile de Lumière as its doctors of the year, celebrated the mission’s ability to mobilise a diverse spectrum of intellectuals.91 That Sartre and Aron, who had had few causes in common since the 1940s, agreed to unite their efforts for the boat people was a fitting symbol of the challenge to ideological partisanship by sans-frontiériste solidarity. However, the campaign had also faced opposition from the Communist PCF, radical Linhart, and conservative Hersant, as well as a blistering critique from within the sansfrontiériste movement, with the intervention of MSF co-founder Xavier Emmanuelli. Many of the exchanges discussed so far have been between intellectuals of various stripes – philosophers, writers, journalists – or other public figures, such as politicians. Humanitarian workers have contributed, but as public figures of a different kind and within broader debates. This changed somewhat with the Bateau pour le Vietnam: as tensions within the sans-frontiériste movement intensified they became visible in pages of the French press. The operational priorities of MSF in this period were inseparable from its political questions. Criticism of the Bateau pour

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le Vietnam from within Médecins Sans Frontières split the organisation irrevocably in two, leading to the departure of Kouchner and his allies from MSF and the creation of MDM. A year later, this time centring on the Cambodian refugee response, additional divisions within the French humanitarian sector would emerge. The most dramatic criticism of the Bateau pour le Vietnam, notable for both its severity and its element of surprise, was Emmanuelli’s article in Le Quotidien du Médecin of 4 December 1978, lambasting the project as ‘A boat for Saint-Germain-des-Prés’. Emmanuelli’s objections were manifold. He resented what he portrayed as the fashionability of the campaign, suggesting that ‘it takes advantage of the misery of these people to offer the spectacle of Parisian intellectuals discovering all of a sudden a tragedy that has lasted for more than three years’.92 He considered the project too ad hoc and limited given the global nature of the refugee issue. He attacked the impracticality of the plan, describing the wish to pick up refugees on the sea as illusory and a folly, even claiming that its inducement to flight meant that ‘it carries the seeds of death’.93 His article was published without the prior knowledge of any other MSF leaders, including notably the president, Claude Malhuret. This allowed Malhuret’s supporters to distance themselves from the publication of the text whilst avoiding a refutation of its content.94 Not insignificantly, Malhuret had also considered the possibility of a boat which would meet refugees on the water; preliminary enquiries by Brauman concluded that practical obstacles to finding the refugees were so great as to make the project unfeasible.95 The complex set of rivalries which provided the context for Emmanuelli’s attack have received enough attention elsewhere to allow them to be elided here.96 In the second half of the 1970s, differing conceptions of humanitarianism had begun to divide two generations of activists within MSF: the first, with Kouchner as its embodiment, advocated flash interventions and flexibility; the second, associated with Malhuret and Brauman, favoured logistics and organisation. Kouchner’s attitude to logistics can be understood by his declarations during the Bateau pour le Vietnam campaign, when he claimed that the response to refugees’ needs should be like the first steps to put out a fire: ‘we send ambulances immediately without worrying about the hospitals in which we will put the wounded’.97 In contrast, his colleagues had developed their emphasis on organisational support while working in the field, particularly in Southeast Asian refugee camps, when MSF offered almost no logistical structure to aid its volunteers. As Brauman remembered, their reformism did not initially entail an alternative programme, just the

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conviction that ‘we knew what we didn’t want – just being there with some drugs in a plastic bag and a few surgical tools’.98 The two sides represented two visions, in Maillard’s epigrammatic if slightly too schematic summary: ‘faire savoir contre savoir faire’.99 They were not, however, in conflict over the question of using spectacular gestures to promote humanitarian aid. If Kouchner appears as the advocate of ‘faire savoir’, it is not because others did not share his insistence upon the importance of témoignage, but because they coupled it with an emphasis on organisational professionalism which he did not endorse. In his view, rapid deployment was the key to speaking out – first, fastest, when the situation demanded – and these aims could not be met by a bureaucratic organisation. The conflicts came to a head in fierce debates at the MSF general assembly of 5–6 May 1979, resulting in the precipitate departure of the Kouchnerian faction from the organisation they had founded. After the group stormed out, a motion was passed stipulating that ‘the fact of belonging to MSF may in no circumstance serve as element of personal promotion. Any member of MSF speaking in the name of the organisation can only do so if duly authorised by the organisation’.100 This motion was a response to the Bateau pour le Vietnam mission, with its celebrity petitions and regular media features, but also reflected the exertion of control by the leadership.101 Emmanuelli became president, and Malhuret director. With the departure of Kouchner and the reinforcement of the new generation, as Weber summed up, ‘a page of MSF’s history is turned’.102

humanitarianism behind and beyond borders If the ethos of the sans-frontiériste movement demands the transgression of borders, the need to do so is suggestive not of their inconsequence but their strength. This is evident in cases when political boundaries isolate people seeking assistance as well as when those offering aid manage to overcome these boundaries, the latter being the archetypal mode of sans-frontiérisme if not its rule. Responding to conflict in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion of December 1979, a key cohort of aid organisations, many of them French, did work ‘cross-border’ without official permission. In the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge genocide and Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia a year earlier, however, most of the aid remained on the outside. For activists in MSF, who played a key role throughout these responses, both situations were interpreted through the prism of anti-communism.

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From December 1978, and after the rapidly successful invasion of the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea by Vietnam, rafts of information became available about the genocide of the Cambodian people. From this point on, the need for humanitarian assistance to Cambodia was seen as paramount and the campaign for aid ran concurrently with that supporting the Vietnamese refugees. However, the collapse of Pol Pot’s regime did not mean an end to Cambodia’s isolation. Kept at bay by the Hanoibacked authority in Phnom Penh, the aid effort operated largely outside Cambodia, focusing on the refugees who had fled across the border to Thailand – some 600,000 to 700,000 by the end of 1979.103 While civil war continued, the camps were maintained until 1993, when approximately 360,000 people were repatriated to Cambodia.104 This situation divided aid organisations. For French humanitarians, access to Phnom Penh was above all through the Comité Français d’Aide Médicale et Sanitaire à la Population Cambodgienne (henceforth referred to as the Comité d’Aide), an affiliation of the PCF. Operating within Cambodian territory was only possible under the aegis of the Communistcontrolled committee, an obligation accepted by organisations such as Secours Populaire Français, Cimade, and from the Catholic left the CCFD and Terre des Hommes. (Along with others such as Emmaüs and Solidarité Internationale, many of these would again collaborate in the Espoir Ethiopie collective which rejected MSF’s analysis of the manipulation of aid in Ethiopia.105 ) It meant complying with the demands of Vietnam as occupying power and was largely the reserve of left-wing organisations whose political sympathies increased their willingness to remain silent about conditions within the country.106 Tellingly, other organisations present in Cambodia included Red Cross National Societies from the Soviet Union and Poland and medical envoys from other Eastern bloc countries and Cuba.107 MSF remained pointedly in Thai territory just over the border. Public exchanges between French organisations on either side of the territorial – and political – divide revealed their perception of the opposition. Both sides invoked an essential incompatibility between politics and aid work to undermine their target’s legitimacy as a humanitarian agency. The flurry of accusations began on 28 December 1979, when Emmanuelli criticised the Comité d’Aide and its partners for disguising their allegedly communist orientation, labelling them ‘politicised organisations pretending to be apolitical’.108 He rejected claims that aid programmes within Cambodia were independent of the Vietnamese authorities and successful in reaching the intended recipients. The committee’s spokesperson,

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Jean-Yves Follezou, retaliated by labelling MSF’s activism a ‘massive campaign of anti-Cambodian and anti-Vietnamese slander’.109 The partner organisations also produced a joint rebuttal asserting the independence of their aid programmes in Cambodia and warning of the damage caused by MSF’s political agitation.110 One of these partners, the Comité Catholique contre la Faim et pour le Développement, espoused a political position at odds with that of the MSF leadership. The first incarnation of the CCFD came in 1961, after Pope Jean XXIII endorsed the Freedom from Hunger Campaign of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. It brought together fifteen Catholic associations, a collective that would foster activity amongst the Christian community rather than a new NGO dedicated to hunger.111 Later, under the influence of Louis-Joseph Lebret, founder of Economie et Humanisme and of the Institut International de Recherche et de Formation en Vue du Développement Harmonisé (IRFED), it added the notion of development to its work and name. Within the Catholic tradition, this turn towards development in the context of decolonisation and the Cold War sought to position Catholic social movements as a third way and brought a new type of missionary that relied upon their practical knowledge.112 Like others in the Catholic far left, the CCFD was influenced by liberation theology. It had a direct connection with key figures in its reception in France through Vincent Cosmao, theological counsellor of the CCFD in its first two decades and founder of the Centre Lebret.113 Claims about CCFD’s left-wing bias began in earnest in 1973, when it adopted the slogan ‘La terre est à tous’ (‘The earth belongs to everyone’), seemingly reminiscent of land collectivisation policy.114 They would accelerate in the 1980s in the context of fierce debates about the place and legacy of tiers-mondisme. The CCFD became the most prominent incarnation of Catholic tiersmondisme. This term, as Denis Pelletier has indicated, refers to ‘both the Catholic specificity of a certain engagement in favour of the development of poor countries and the encounter between this engagement and that of the French tiers-mondiste left in the 1960s’. That is, despite convergences in their objectives and critiques, Pelletier distinguished between the political, anti-imperialist tiers-mondisme of the generation of the Algerian War and the solidarity-based engagement for development on the Catholic far left.115 Ironically, these differences led to an upsurge of interest in Marxism on the part of Catholic tiers-mondistes when communist regimes in the third world were facing criticism from other tiers-mondistes in France. A radical orientation thus appeared to be reflected in some of the CCFD’s

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networks throughout the 1970s and beyond; its members, for instance, maintained links with Vietnam. From the signature of the Paris Accords in January 1973, Menotti Bottazzi, soon to become secretary-general of the CCFD, made annual visits to Vietnam.116 Jean-François Lambert, another of the organisation’s leaders, recalled the celebrations in the CCFD offices at news of the entry of Hanoi’s troops into Saigon in 1975.117 Lambert read and rejected Ponchaud’s revelations about the Khmers Rouges.118 After the unification of Vietnam, CCFD projects in the country multiplied. A moment of uncertainty occurred with the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, when CCFD members debated whether it was appropriate to maintain links with Vietnam, but the decision was made not to interrupt their humanitarian missions.119 Following a visit to Cambodia with other representatives of Catholic aid organisations, Bottazzi indicated that the situation was ‘neither all rosy nor all dark’: while aid was not being properly distributed, he felt that improvements were underway.120 In Cambodia, the CCFD’s position was in precise opposition to MSF’s. The earlier tiers-mondisme common to both MSF and CCFD activists had by the end of the 1970s evolved into two opposed political stances: although it was not explicitly acknowledged until later, those who arrived at the leadership of MSF in 1979 adopted a decisively anti-communist position. While MSF’s leaders spoke the language of anti-totalitarianism, they conceived of it as equivalent to anti-communism.121 ‘Beginning with the Marche pour la Survie du Cambodge in 1980 . . . , which was already a directly anti-communist protest, we began to think of forms of action, measures that would allow us to bring a kind of political tonality’ to MSF’s work.122 Although the precise contours of their ambition were not clearly defined at the time, ‘there was the idea of making MSF into a machine . . . [of] something of an anti-communist war, an anti-communist “soft war”’.123 On the eve of the 1980s this anti-communist agenda was less visible in their statements about MSF than in attacks on other organisations perceived to be in complicity, however well-intentioned, with left-wing abuses. Nonetheless, despite their opposing politics and public clashes, both MSF and the left-wing organisations involved with the Comité d’Aide were adamant about the need for large-scale relief operations in Cambodia. For the organisations affiliated with the Comité d’Aide it meant cooperation with the Vietnamese authorities; for MSF, advocacy of aid for Cambodia took the form of a gamble for publicity. The new generation of leadership at MSF conceived the Marche pour la Survie du Cambodge in a bid to gain access to people still inside the

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country without making concessions to Phnom Penh. The account of the protest in MSF’s Bulletin characterised it as ‘a cry of alarm whose components were famine, disease, misery and death’.124 This would be the first initiative in which the dynamic triumvirate of Claude Malhuret, Xavier Emmanuelli, and Rony Brauman made its appearance. As would be the case with Liberté Sans Frontières, the founders used the 1901 law of associations to establish a new body, called Cambodge: Marche pour la Survie, which would manage the project.125 Its statutes indicated the aims were to bring together individuals and organisations to offer assistance to Cambodia; to gather material and human resources for this aid, to be deployed with timeliness and professionalism; to gather other support to help its members carry out this mission; and to draw national and international public attention to the suffering of the Cambodian people.126 A dossier explained the need for direct action: although international aid was substantial it was not reaching its destination – the Khmer people, already victims of genocide and now threatened by starvation. ‘The hour is no longer for declarations of intentions or the signing of petitions’, it declared; ‘Lives are at stake, the role of medicine must take the form of action’.127 However, the organisers were evidently not optimistic about achieving their stated objectives, as logistical preparations for the march underscored that visas for Cambodia had not been obtained and relief supplies intended for operations in Cambodia would, failing access, be handed over to the Thai Red Cross for distribution in the refugee camps.128 MSF led this protest alongside European and American organisations. The International Rescue Committee (IRC), a US NGO founded during the Second World War, was one important partner. The other was Action Internationale Contre la Faim. Specialised in food aid and nutritional emergency, AICF (later ACF) was founded in 1979. It followed the model of specialisation common amongst French NGOs, which set them apart from many American and British organisations. According to documentation produced at the time, the march also brought together a number of other French and foreign organisations with a range of backgrounds including the Ligue Internationale Contre le Racisme et l’Anti-Sémitisme (LICRA), Terre des Hommes, Force Ouvrière, and the Comité Un Bateau pour le Vietnam (the latter included, according to Brauman, purely for form).129 The protest’s organisers claimed that the threat of genocide in Cambodia made immediate action essential. Their first statement, in December 1979, asserted that ‘today in Cambodia, in their hundreds of

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thousands, men and women abandon the land where they were born, fleeing an orchestrated famine, disease, death!’ The continued threat of genocide demanded action ‘so that the Cambodian people survives’.130 On 15 January, when announcing the planned protest, AICF spokesman Bernard-Henri Lévy insisted that ‘it depends on us too . . . that Cambodia is neither the Spanish Civil War nor the Auschwitz of the coming decade’.131 Like Kouchner and Glucksmann, Lévy cast the humanitarian devoir d’ingérence in the lineage of the resistance to fascism and his article was littered with turns of phrase – like ‘gas chambers of famine’ – that established parallels between the Holocaust and the suffering in Cambodia. Lévy hailed the march as ‘the first protest on the borders of a totalitarian country’.132 The use of this language of genocide and Holocaust was not simple instinct. Analysis done before the launch argued that global public opinion was in large part aware of the situation in Cambodia but lacked a clear channel of information, while also having its attention divided by other major world events. It concluded there was a ‘necessity to situate the suffering of the Khmer people in parallel with holocausts that no one can refute (without broaching the problem on a political level but uniquely in speaking the language of emotion [langage du cœur])’.133 Allusions to the Holocaust and the Final Solution were thus part of a concerted rhetorical strategy, although they also reflected the preoccupations of participants in these debates over several years. That it was a conscious strategy to increase profile is supported by the fact that, despite the strong language used to portray the crisis in Cambodia, the official documentation that accompanied the march did not develop historical comparisons to the same degree as when individual spokespersons addressed a wider public. The Marche pour la Survie du Cambodge confirmed that, despite their antagonism during the Bateau pour le Vietnam, the two former factions of MSF shared the willingness to use the media. The march staged on 5 February 1980 included Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, singer and anti–Vietnam War campaigner Joan Baez, and Soviet dissident Alexander Ginzburg. The ideological range of its participants was similar to that of the Vietnam committee headed by Kouchner. In fact, despite his animosity towards the ‘coalition of apparatchiks’ who succeeded him at MSF, Kouchner had almost perfectly foreshadowed their initiative with his own appeal calling for Nobel Prize winners and former Vietnam War protesters to demand access to Cambodia in the name of sans-frontiérisme.134 On the day, representatives of MSF, AICF, IRC, and other NGOs marched alongside parliamentarians, lawyers, writers, and the more famous

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participants, in front of a pack of journalists almost greater in number than the protesters themselves. The march received ample coverage across the spectrum of the French press, with portrayals ranging from enthusiastic to scornful. Jacques Guillaume of Libération declared it a ‘courageous gesture’, for instance, while Roland-Pierre Paringaux for Le Monde noted the ambiguities of a venture which combined the atmosphere of a ‘parish fair’ with the presence of celebrity.135 These public assessments echoed some of the reasons given privately for participating in or abstaining from the protest. The organisers approached a number of prominent figures from France and elsewhere,136 several of whom expressed support for the sentiment behind the march but concern at its political stance or potential ramifications. Jean Lacouture wrote to Rony Brauman to explain his decision not to join the protest despite his conviction that ‘pressure must be applied to the Vietnamese regime in occupation in Cambodia, and that the “right” to assist a people in distress is fundamental and imprescriptible’. Arguing that he could contribute more effectively through other channels, however, Lacouture cited difficulties in distributing aid, gaining access, and preventing the Khmer Rouge using the protest for their own propaganda purposes as reasons for his decision not to participate.137 The British novelist Doris Lessing, who sent her reply in English, was much curter: ‘I am sorry, I do not believe in the usefulness of this kind of gesture’.138 In contrast, Jean Ziegler sent a letter confirming that he ‘admire[d] and support[ed]’ the action and would both sign an appeal and join the march if necessary.139 The MSF archives also hold a telegram from novelist John le Carré in which he states that he was ‘in principal [sic] prepared to give support but not to participate in demonstrations’.140 The range of observer attitudes to the march was also mirrored by increasing divergences within MSF itself. Disagreements abruptly became public with an article published in Libération on 11 February, co-authored by Jean-Christophe Rufin, head of the MSF mission in Eritrea, and JeanMarc Dumas, a member of the direction. Rufin and Dumas were derisive about celebrities who ‘believed they were putting themselves on the line by going 800 metres on foot’ and criticised the lack of consultation by the MSF leadership amongst its membership. These objections echoed those directed at the Bateau pour le Vietnam organisers. However, Rufin and Dumas went further, asserting that the real power behind the protest was the US State Department and Congress and denouncing MSF’s transformation into an ‘instrument masking the initiatives of political forces’.141 Weber interpreted these criticisms as symptomatic of the ideological

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disjunction developing within the organisation: between leaders at the top of the hierarchy, who had abandoned their gauchiste interpretations of third-world politics, and grass-roots members, whose commitment to third-world development retained elements of progressive politics.142 AICF also faced public criticism when founding member Susan George disassociated herself from the organisation on the grounds that it had entered into contradiction with its own principles.143 Either by accident or design, she argued, the march was a provocation for the local governments and gift to Sino-American strategy in Cambodia. The initiators of the march vigorously defended their activist approach. On the MSF side, Rufin and Dumas received a sharp, public rebuke from Emmanuelli, dismissing their suspicions as a ‘pathetic spy novel’.144 AICF was equally scornful, if slightly less inflammatory, in a letter published in Le Monde declaring its resolve to ‘not to enter into the quarrels that divide the theoreticians of third-world aid over the advantages and disadvantages of world revolution’.145 It refused to allow Cambodia to become ‘the sole country from which we should discreetly turn our eyes’. Separately, as AICF spokesman, Lévy defended both the politically activist nature of the protest and its media-centric focus. The latter was, for Lévy, not a perversion of the humanitarian ethic but an asset; if journalists would rather ‘peddle Parisian gossip than relate the boundless misery to which they, just like us, were witnesses’, then it was their own pitiable choice.146 Lévy also argued that the refugees ‘didn’t take the trouble to ask the intellectuals, doctors and politicians who came to express their solidarity in what name and by what right they were doing it’. Like the Broyelles defending the Bateau pour le Vietnam, Lévy’s defence of the Cambodian protest made the rejection of ideology central to his claim to the moral high ground. Though the Marche pour la Survie du Cambodge did not have the effect of reopening the borders, it did help bring the Cambodian cause into the spotlight and increased the profile of the organisations that took part. It also accentuated conflicts within the French humanitarian sector and confirmed the ideological resolve of the MSF activists who had instigated it. As the profile of their campaigns grew in the 1980s, the new generation of leaders at MSF drew their organisation into ever more political confrontations. One of the most important terrains for an anti-communist reading of aid as well as for the sans-frontiériste idea of the crossing of borders developed at this time. On 27 December 1979, Soviet troops occupied Kabul’s

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key installations, beginning an occupation that would last nearly a decade and a war that endured in Afghanistan until 1992. In early 1979, Afghanistan had armed revolt in twenty-five of its twenty-eight provinces; in December, under the guise of the Treaty of Friendship and Good Neighbourliness signed the previous year, the Kremlin decided to intervene.147 It was, as observers pointed out, the first Soviet military excursion into a non-Warsaw Pact country since the Second World War. The war was conducted along the lines of a ‘scorched earth policy’ with the aim of terrorising the civilian population and thus exposing the mujahideen (fighters for the Muslim faith) who represented the main armed opposition. As a result, civilian deaths during the conflict were staggering and the mujahideen reported losses of 1–1.5 million; roughly 6 million people became refugees in the same period.148 In France, widespread consternation following the invasion of Afghanistan was intensified by the unqualified support that the PCF offered the Soviet Union. The 3 January editorial of the Communist newspaper L’Humanité approved of the invasion on the grounds of international solidarity against reaction, self-defence, and (somewhat paradoxically) the principle of non-intervention.149 Such declarations compounded pre-existing unease at the shaky cooperation between the PCF under the hardline leadership of Georges Marchais and the Parti Socialiste.150 In January 1980, Marchais took a PCF delegation to the Soviet Union for the first time since 1974 and in one particularly indigestible interview during this tour renewed his approval of Moscow’s action in Afghanistan and his criticism of the Socialists. Libération, a daily paper with gauchiste origins, devoted its front page to the interview, describing how Marchais ‘forgot all his lessons of telegenic good temper to recreate the retro Thorezian style of the Cold War era’.151 Equally critical, Le Figaro qualified his performance a ‘slapstick comedy’ and contended that the PCF was in a state of ‘total submission’ to Moscow.152 These and other negative reactions were represented by L’Humanité as a ‘hysterical anti-communist outburst’ and a load of ‘lies, slander, deceit’.153 The reactions of French intellectuals reflected the new paradigm for human rights. Emblematically, on 24 January 1980, a committee of illustrious yet politically diverse intellectuals called for the boycott of the Moscow Olympics as a censure of Soviet expansionism. They declared that ‘human rights are increasingly flouted in the USSR’, pointing to the arrest of Andrei Sakharov, the Russian physicist and civil activist.154 The group was headed by the liberal philosopher Raymond Aron, and brought together Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Julliard, Michel

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Foucault, André Glucksmann, and Bernard Kouchner, familiar from other parts of this story, as well as historian and former PCF member Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, scientist and Nobel Laureate André Lwoff, and filmmaker Robert Bresson. Though the boycott idea was controversial, few in France apart from the PCF expressed anything other than condemnation of Soviet foreign policy. First-hand accounts of Afghanistan also reflected the changed ideological context. Chaliand, by this time one of the leading critics of thirdworldist ideology, visited Afghanistan in June and October–November 1980, in the provinces of Paktia and Kunar, relying – as did all unofficial visitors – on the Afghan resistance movements for logistics, transport, and protection. Though his Rapport sur la résistance afghane was far from uncritical of the mujahideen, Chaliand affirmed that ‘whatever the contradictions and ambiguities of the Afghan combatants and resistance movements, there is no denying the legitimacy of their struggle, contained in the refusal to submit to a fate imposed by foreign tanks, even if in the name of “socialism” and “progress”’.155 The cynicism conveyed by the scare quotes was representative of the refusal to justify brutal means by their political ends. Patrice Franceschi was even more direct in his criticism of Communist belligerence. He drew attention to war crimes perpetrated by Soviet and Afghan troops, commenting sarcastically that ‘when they use a bulldozer to bury alive hundreds of opponents, they undoubtedly act – in the same way as Pol Pot – to promote the advancement of the world’.156 This was the conflict during which the rejection of borders by the sansfrontiériste movement took on its fullest significance. So tight was the collaboration with the resistance groups that, as one doctor discovered, it was possible to become ‘the personal doctor of the mujahideen, completely caught up with them in their struggle and accepting of that’.157 All of the missions by MSF, MDM, and Aide Médicale Internationale were without the consent of the Kabul government, made possible only by coordination with the Afghan resistance. By 1985, the three organisations combined had dispatched nearly 400 volunteers to the Afghan provinces, with 20–30 volunteers embedded at any given time, for periods of 3–8 months.158 MSF alone sent 550 doctors and nurses to Afghanistan over 10 years.159 While MSF and MDM are well known, the smaller AMI has received less attention.160 Founded in November 1979 by former MSF member Michel Bonnot, its missions in Afghanistan began in 1980. AMI rejected advocacy but amplified the border-crossing ethos of sans-frontiérisme,

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leading it to work without publicity amongst guerrilla movements in places such as Kurdistan, Eritrea, Myanmar, and Lebanon during the 1980s.161 The refusal of témoignage placed AMI further from human rights style engagements and advocacy than other sans-frontiériste organisations. Choosing volunteerism over paid employment, it stressed the training of local staff.162 AMI’s clandestine missions were extreme: according to Rufin, in order to enter Laos, Bonnot and another doctor donned camouflage and made a night-time journey up the Mekong River; others disguised themselves as musicians in order to get into rebel areas of Papua New Guinea.163 Close cooperation with the mujahideen was central to sans-frontiériste missions in Afghanistan. Entry to the country was for the majority via Peshawar, where resistance organisations had bases and where volunteers would receive training and prepare for their mission. (Peshawar was also the location of the single largest concentration of refugees and, therefore, the base for organisations like the ICRC and UNHCR.) One study suggested that at least fifty NGOs had conducted cross-border operations from Pakistan, and twenty-seven from other countries.164 Border crossings were handled by the mujahideen, with travellers in traditional Afghan dress to avoid attention. Depending on the destination, the subsequent march could last several days. Once arrived, doctors would work out of a field hospital, if the region was safe enough to construct one, or move between villages in a valley or province.165 The term ‘French doctor’, referring to the sans-frontiériste movement as distinct from the Red Cross/Red Crescent Movement or UN agencies, was adopted by American journalists in Afghanistan because of the dominance of French organisations in this type of cross-border mission.166 The impact of the humanitarian activists can be understood by their persecution at the hands of the Soviet authorities. In October–November 1981, Soviet forces began a series of military attacks on foreign-run hospitals in rural Afghanistan. According to Capucine de Bretagne, an AMI volunteer in Panjshir province, the region’s hospital was moved five times in eight months because of these bombings.167 In April 1982 a message was apparently conveyed via the French embassy in Islamabad to the effect that Soviet troops would henceforth not hesitate to capture or even kill any French doctors and journalists they encountered in Afghan territory.168 This was no empty threat, as evinced by the experience of AMI doctor Philippe Augoyard, who spent five months of 1983 in a Kabul jail. Forced to publicly repent for having ‘helped the counter-revolutionaries’, Augoyard was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment.169

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News of his detention was met with indignation and disgust in France, especially amongst humanitarians, and provoked a public campaign for his release. The appeal text circulated by MSF on Augoyard’s behalf affirmed that ‘the right to treatment has no borders, it is the right of man in sickness and suffering’.170 In this view, the defence of patients was only possible through the defence of those who sought to treat them. According to Augoyard, 700,000 people signed cards appealing for his release. Emmanuelli wrote a bitter article in the organisation’s member bulletin about how the arrest of Augoyard was designed to ‘kill the part of man that makes him great’ by attacking the ‘healers’ who offered hope to their patients and yet were ‘imprisoned, judged, reduced like Dr Augoyard to the level of the worst bandits, or simply killed by a bullet to the head’.171 Other French travellers in Afghanistan suffered a similar fate. The first had been journalist Jean-Paul Silve, who spent nine months in jail in 1981 and was released after a summary trial and several televised self-criticism sessions. After Augoyard, the French journalist Jacques Abouchar was picked up by Soviet troops in September 1984 and held in Sidorat prison.172 All of them were released within months despite lengthy prison sentences; the arrests thus appear to have been designed more as a deterrent for other aid workers or journalists than to punish the individuals concerned. MSF’s work in Afghanistan placed almost as much emphasis on témoignage as on medical work. Claude Malhuret, MSF president for part of the conflict, portrayed the French doctors as having to compensate for the outright ‘negligence’ of the press, arguing that ‘if a small organisation like ours can succeed in maintaining more than twenty physicians on permanent duty in four provinces in Afghanistan, despite government acts of violence against them, the news media could do likewise’.173 This was témoignage that dealt with the crimes of the Red Army, not the challenges of working with the mujahideen despite the impact the latter had on the medical missions.174 He spoke out about the human impact of Soviet military strategies: bombings, anti-personnel mines, looting, famine, displacement, desertification. Suggesting an anti-communist interpretation of the war, he identified these strategies as a feature of totalitarian countries’ response to guerrilla warfare, highlighting their use by Vietnam against remaining pockets of Khmer Rouge opposition.175 Malhuret later argued that ‘in denouncing what was happening there, we “took care of” more people than in bringing aid to the few Afghans that we could reach’.176 In terms of contemporary politics, MSF’s stance on Afghanistan was undoubtedly part of the anti-communist agenda of certain of its

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dominant personalities. But in the organisation’s mythology it was the element of témoignage, amplifying the dramatic circumstances, which imbued the Afghan engagement with the same legendary mystique as the Biafran mission of the 1960s.

conclusion Although the turn against ideology that took place across the 1970s undermined some of the foundations of intellectual engagement, it also provided the basis for a renewed commitment identified as a form of resistance to suffering. If intellectuals were no longer the privileged guides for this mode of action, they could participate in the new kinds of activism and exhort others to do the same. In Foucault’s words, the existence of suffering occasioned a ‘new right . . . of private individuals to effectively intervene in the sphere of international policy and strategy’.177 Direct action was paramount, as was the morality of impartiality. The reinvestment of the desire to change the world into ethics-based politics became one of the legacies of radical politics in the post-war period. Human rights and humanitarianism are perhaps the two most prominent aspects of this contemporary ethics-based politics. That they are historically and conceptually related is clear; on what terms, less so. For Stephen Hopgood, these ‘branches of the humanist tree’ (in which he also included international justice) grew out of the same ground of ‘wealth and power, suffering and resistance’.178 In the post-war period, they became conflated in such a way as to be considered – in Moyn’s words – a ‘humanitarian paradigm of human rights’.179 Yet many operational aid organisations now view the promotion of human rights as an undertaking apart from humanitarian action. At a field level, this distinction is undeniable, even if humanitarian organisations and human rights ones often find themselves in the same places. Their practices and channels are different and their goals, while often in sympathy, not always the same. The highly politicised trajectories of rights of different kinds during the Cold War, a time of important institutional developments in the international aid sector, contributed to the wariness. So too, has the subsequent rise of international judicial forums that have sought aid workers’ testimonies to alleged crimes against humanity, potentially jeopardising their acceptability within violent environments. The sense that human rights are political, while emergency aid in particular seeks to present as the opposite, has also encouraged a certain distance in recent years.

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However, this has not always been the case. In 1979, Xavier Emmanuelli informed MSF members that ‘The questions of human rights, freedom, and dignity are the motifs of the end of this century . . . and we are speaking today of orienting Médecins Sans Frontières’ action towards this field of morality and justice’.180 Like Amnesty in the field of freedom of opinion, he argued, MSF was fighting for human rights through their medical emergency work – they were not separate domains, rather one was a vehicle for the other. The comparison with Amnesty was also raised by Philippe Bernier, who similarly described MSF as sharing the ‘orientation towards the protection of human rights’ which set organisations of its generation aside from ‘slightly old-fashioned humanitarian organisations’ of an earlier vintage.181 They would contribute to change instead of simply patching up wounds, resisting atrocities not simply reacting to them. The utopian aspects of sans-frontiérisme thus encouraged a reading of this new engagement as a way to challenge the status quo. Ethical forms of politics presented a way out of the disappointments and destructiveness of ideology while also sustaining a certain kind of utopian ambition. The interconnectedness of human rights and humanitarianism in this moment was shaped by the decline of other ideologies, notably in as far as the sans-frontiéristes were concerned, revolutionary tiers-mondisme. Concurrently, however, for some of their advocates, engagement for human rights and humanitarianism was at least in part a transferral of the ideological confrontation, allowing the channelling of criticism of leftwing ideology through the promotion of citizen politics and emergency relief. This is seen in the skirmishes led by certain prominent members of MSF as well as others who were expressing new critiques of tiersmondiste politics. As would become more apparent with the acute antagonisms of the 1980s, the promotion of concepts like democratic liberties, human rights, and civil society arose from a critical position towards communism and a positive view of liberal capitalism. Brauman repeatedly told audiences that ‘communism brings famine like the clouds bring rain’; in this logic promoting domestic civil society or NGOs as a safeguard against inequality, conflict and famine became a way of attacking the perceived political ‘root causes’ of suffering.182 Their altruism and field credentials carried weight in these claims. As Claude Liauzu noted, the sans-frontiéristes appeared to ‘benefit from a presumption of innocence, which seems often to be misused and comes at a cost, if we look at the right/left confrontation’.183 Does this mean all French advocates of human rights or humanitarian action in this period were anti-communist? Clearly not. Many who

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participated in these debates maintained their commitment to left-wing ideas and, even when critical of the abuses or failings of communist countries, could have different reasons for driving the debates forwards. Even amongst the most prominent advocates of radical humanitarian action, the approaches varied. In the campaigns in Southeast Asia and in Afghanistan after 1979, Malhuret and Brauman were using the language of neutrality to cover their consciously anti-communist stance; Kouchner, it seems, was not.184 Regardless of what it contained or obscured, an apparent refusal of ideological politics was one of humanitarianism’s great appeals and most useful assets. Despite crucial differences the Bateau pour le Vietnam and the Marche pour la Survie du Cambodge both manifested the sansfrontiériste conception of responsibility for the suffering of others and appeal to the public conscience. The emphasis was upon morality and action: ‘there is no question of staying silent and it is a fundamental aspect of our ethic to try to do something when there is nothing left to attempt’.185 Respect for this avowedly moral stance and the commitment of the volunteers in the field, both of which were receiving ever greater coverage in the French press, undoubtedly contributed to the enormous popularity of sans-frontiérisme in France in the Mitterrand years.

7 Controversy in a humanitarian age Attacks on tiers-mondisme in the 1980s

Humanitarianism held a commanding position in France in the final decade of the Cold War. The spectacular protests for Vietnam and Cambodia had proved the power of relief work to capture the attention of newspapers and, more importantly, television cameras. As a result, MSF’s income from donations tripled from 1979–80.1 The dramatic missions of the French doctors in Afghanistan raised their profile not only in France but also internationally, especially in America. Novelistic portrayals emphasised the heroism and adventure of radical humanitarian missions.2 Veteran sans-frontiéristes were offered seats in government, beginning with Claude Malhuret’s appointment as Junior Minister [secrétaire d’état] of Human Rights in 1986 and followed in 1988 by the emblematic position of Junior Minister of Humanitarian Action for Bernard Kouchner. By the end of the 1980s, one third of French people said their ideal job was with MSF.3 The public image of the radical humanitarians was overwhelmingly positive. In contrast, tiers-mondisme had never seen such a deluge of negative portrayals. A whole genre of denunciatory deconstructions had emerged to prove that ‘utopia . . . cannot constantly escape all judgement’.4 One critic even claimed that ‘to fight Third-Worldism today is to continue the anti-colonial struggle of the past’.5 Paradoxically, by the mid 1980s, while attacks on tiers-mondisme had never been stronger, the ideology in its various manifestations had few supporters left. There were many who criticised the anti-tiers-mondiste campaign as overstated or misplaced, and some of them also defended elements associated with tiers-mondisme that they considered worth saving. But those who really sought to defend it as a political and revolutionary project were few and far between. 215

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Nonetheless, the public scrap over tiers-mondisme was an immensely important one for French humanitarians and not, as others would have it, part of ‘the retrospective construction of a straw doll for some writers to better prove their anti-Marxist credentials’.6 The encounter between tiers-mondisme and sans-frontiérisme in the 1980s generated not only intellectual controversy but reflection in humanitarian affairs. The peak of anti-tiers-mondiste debates for those in the aid industry came with the provocation of the Fondation Liberté Sans Frontières, the think tank founded by MSF in 1984. Its critics within MSF considered LSF ‘one of the defining moments in the history of MSF’.7 In what Barnett described as a ‘daring move’, MSF sponsored LSF’s creation as a forum for debate on the politics of the third world – one that, in the organisers’ words, would ‘get involved in the fight’.8 While other studies of MSF have skimmed over the ‘soap opera’ of reactions to LSF from within MSF or, in contrast, emphasised its continuity with ongoing issues related to MSF’s growth and the scope of its mandates, the following discussion places LSF in intellectual context.9 Indeed, it is impossible to understand either the dynamics of French aid in the 1980s or the tenor of public debate about the relationship of the West to the third world without reference to this particular provocation. The chapter therefore begins with an outline of LSF, its extremely controversial first conference, and the broader intellectual context in which it was situated. It demonstrates how the creation of Liberté Sans Frontières by MSF stimulated an intensification of the intellectual critiques of tiers-mondisme and represented the most ideologically aggressive phase of MSF’s political campaigning. The second section discusses MSF’s stand against human rights abuses in Ethiopia, which culminated in its expulsion from Ethiopia in December 1985 and a new articulation of the risks inherent in humanitarian action. It was not the first example of speaking out but is the earliest one regularly referred to and ‘the first time in MSF’s history that it had broken ranks with the entire aid system’.10 Section three analyses the impact of anti-tiers-mondiste debates, particularly LSF, on the sans-frontiériste movement. As MSF itself internationalised, these debates continued within its network of associations as well as between aid practitioners, journalists, and intellectuals in France. A number of the issues that would be associated with the difficult expansion of humanitarian action in the 1990s, including consideration of the manipulation of aid, a move towards consequentialist ethics, and reflection on norms of humanitarian intervention, would be foreshadowed by these debates as the 1980s drew to a close.

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humanitarianism against third-worldism Though its life was a short one – it gave rise to only a handful of publications before being dissolved a few years later – the Fondation Liberté Sans Frontières had a major impact on humanitarianism and tiers-mondiste ideology.11 Contemporaries perceived it as a ‘remarkable ideological war machine’ and a ‘blitzkrieg against the ideologues’.12 Yet its creators repeatedly insisted that LSF was free from any doctrinarianism, only later admitting that it was in reality ‘a full-frontal attack on tiersmondisme’.13 The political orientation of the MSF leadership in these years, anti-totalitarian and anti-communist, dictated the provocative positions adopted by the organisation, drove their decisive entry into ideological debates, and affected responses within France to their actions in the field and at headquarters. The context for LSF was the dismantling of revolutionary thirdworldist ideology from the second half of the 1970s onwards. Chaliand, who had already had notable success with Mythes révolutionnaires du tiers-monde, contributed again to the debates on this issue with Les faubourgs de l’histoire (1984), a combination of new writing on tiersmondisme and selections from previous work on specific countries. ‘Yesterday a fashionable myth, for several years tiers-mondisme has been bombarded and denounced’, he wrote. Chaliand described the rise of tiers-mondisme as an anti-colonial engagement, arguing that while it was ‘effective in the anti-colonialist struggle and against the Vietnam War, tiers-mondisme showed the fragility of its vision of the world in combats where, without a mass base, its engaged philosophy [volontarisme] and fantasies are projected alone and from a distance’. Chaliand’s goal, however, was not to demonise the movement and his insistence on the historical period of its development was one of the ways that he sought to nuance his interpretation. He cautioned that ‘it is still ideology when you despise everything for which you fought yesterday and defend with the same vehemence what formerly passed as the incarnation of evil’.14 He may well have been thinking of Pascal Bruckner’s Le sanglot de l’homme blanc (1983). This book was foremost among the attacks on tiers-mondisme and most frequently remembered subsequently. Bernard Pivot’s celebrated literary television show Apostrophes devoted an episode to it. It won notoriety largely through the severity of its assault on various forms of tiers-mondisme (in the original French, the labels he gave these categories were ‘solidarité’, ‘compassion’, ‘mimétisme’). Bruckner himself had been close to Maoist circles and then nouvelle philosophie,

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although never with the profile of some of their other practitioners. His most exaggerated claims in Le sanglot de l’homme blanc expressed his view of solidarité (political tiers-mondisme) as a masochistic movement of self-hatred in which ‘many “progressive” Europeans became living torches of self-punishment, ready to immolate themselves to redeem the debts incurred by their fathers’. He derided the emblematic text of the movement, Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, as ‘a treasure trove of theoretical nothingness, historical falsehood, and hateful demagoguery’. The subsequent disillusionment with third-world regimes was portrayed by Bruckner in crude and mocking terms: ‘we had gone to bed at night with a beautiful woman, and at dawn awoke beside a hideous hag who exhaled a repulsive breath into our faces’.15 The superficiality of his analysis became the object of criticism from other contemporary contributors to the debates.16 A more complex and empirically grounded contribution came from Yves Lacoste. Trained as a geographer, Lacoste had travelled to Vietnam in August 1972 to investigate US war crimes, in a tiers-mondiste mission that echoed the Russell Tribunal.17 He co-founded the geographical journal Hérodote, originally published by Maspero. Lacoste’s sympathies in Contre les anti-tiers-mondistes et contre certains tiers-mondistes (1986) lay primarily with the third-worldists, yet he also attributed the intellectual disarray of the period to ‘a certain way of thinking and speaking about the world, in large entities, by large ideas that are evoked as if they were maleficent or tutelary divinities, carrying our hopes and inventing destiny’ – Imperialism, the Proletariat, the Revolution, and so on. These concepts, he argued, eventually became so monolithic that ‘we forget that they were representations constructed to provide ways of understanding and not as opportunities for faith’. He admonished ideologues on both sides for their oppositional view of the world, arguing that ‘it is not because the world is unjust that we must represent it in quasi-religious terms as a confrontation between Good and Evil’.18 These debates were the intellectual terrain for the intervention of Liberté Sans Frontières. LSF’s aims were to ‘undertake research in the areas of human rights and development’, to study global events, and to disseminate the findings in order to encourage concrete progress in their practical application.19 Vallaeys gave an account of the mechanics by which LSF was created – from the preliminary proposal in 1982, continuing internal debates in 1983, to the approval of the MSF general assembly in 1984.20 To a certain extent it was facilitated by the rather autocratic way

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in which decisions were taken in the organisation at this time, with a small clique at the top essentially operating as it saw fit. Nonetheless, it is too simple to assume that it was a matter of top versus bottom: amongst the membership there were some who supported the LSF initiative and thinking, and some who didn’t; the same was true of those in positions of leadership, although the day was carried by those, most influential, who drove it.21 Despite some gestures towards even-handedness, there was no mistaking the signs of the ideological offensive of LSF. The objectives of the association were presented in an introductory document as follows: [T]o allow a debate freed from a priori assumptions. To foster pragmatic research beyond the idea that there is only one possible model, which must be followed. To analyse the problems of development and human rights without recourse to the idea of a Third World which in fact does not exist. Finally, to draw from this research the implications for action.

The dozen pages preceding this explanation of objectives ruled out any uncertainty about the precise theses being targeted. Firstly, they rejected an interpretation of global politics in which ‘one man’s misery is merely the mirror image of another man’s opulence’, seen as an economically simplistic derivative of the ‘triumphant political third-worldism’ of the 1960s and 1970s. It was an attack on dependency theory, which saw underdevelopment as a consequence of capitalism and emphasised the responsibility of Western societies for global suffering. This was a view, according to LSF, based on the equation ‘market = multinationals = famine’. Secondly, it criticised a vision of human rights in which social and economic rights associated with Marxist politics could be separated from – and even prerequisite to – civil and political rights such as freedom of thought or expression. Crucially, it concluded that the only contemporary societies to achieve a reasonable level of both were the ‘democratic regimes that combine a liberal conception of human rights with a high degree of economic evolution’.22 LSF’s political orientation was reflected in the many critics of revolutionary ideology associated with it. The composition of its council brought the humanitarians of MSF, broadly left-wing in formation, into the orbit of the liberal intelligentsia, including Jean-François Revel, Alain Besançon, and Jean-Claude Casanova. It came close to being named the ‘Fondation Raymond Aron pour le tiers monde’, in tribute to the philosopher who had died two years before. LSF’s council thus drew upon a

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generation of intellectuals who defined themselves against the Soviet Union; its first conference also incorporated the intellectual generation associated with the post-gauchiste turn against ideology, such as Chaliand and Bruckner. This was no accident. One of LSF’s stated aims was to disseminate the ideas of those already working according to its interpretations of human rights and development, and to convert others to their cause.23 Links between LSF and two anti-communist organisations, the Comité des Intellectuels pour l’Europe des Libertés and the Internationale de la Résistance, were identified in commentary at the time.24 Beginning with LSF’s launch on 10 January 1985, Claude Malhuret and Rony Brauman (who were, respectively, president and director of LSF while simultaneously director and president of MSF) conducted a press campaign portraying tiers-mondisme as dominating French attitudes to the third world.25 In an interview published in Paris Match, for example, Malhuret described how they reproached third-worldists ‘for repeating that the people of the third world are always right; that third-world regimes that refuse democracy are always right; that the West is responsible for the misery of the third world; that we are starving it by eating too much’.26 Brauman agreed that ‘if a country lines up with the progressives, by hurling abuse at imperialism and the cynicism of the rich . . . it immediately has all the tiers-mondistes behind it’.27 This coverage in Paris Match, a very widely read weekly news and celebrity magazine,28 offered the humanitarians an audience far exceeding the circles of their own supporters. LSF’s first conference, held on 23–24 January 1985 – only two weeks after its launch – generated extraordinarily high levels of interest. Invitations sent by Malhuret made much of the potential for controversy, noting that ‘the event will be widely repudiated because its goal is to challenge an idea shared by nearly all our contemporaries’.29 Yet, in spite of their desire to be noticed and efforts to promote it, the attention generated by the conference took its organisers by surprise.30 Held at the Palais de Luxembourg, attendance was so strong that would-be audience members had to be turned away.31 As Pierre Haski of Libération observed, interest in the conference was amplified by MSF’s profile at the time due to their work in Ethiopia, the famine having come to global prominence only a few months earlier.32 The choice of speakers was another factor in the controversy. The lineup favoured critics of development and opponents of communism and reflected the mixed desire for the conference to make a polemical gesture as well as an analytical contribution, including certain ‘questionable

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figures’, in Brauman’s words, because ‘it departed from the will not to do something academic and to be accessible, therefore to make an impact [cogner]’.33 It excluded those associated with third-worldism or development thinking, or any nationals of the third-world countries being discussed – a point stressed by its critics.34 Assembled in the front row of the audience on the first day, therefore, were a handful of militants prepared to defend the principles of tiers-mondisme and theories of development against the generalisations in which the LSF conference and its organisers indulged. One of them, René Dumont, an agronomer who had published extensively on the third world and had personal contacts with key figures like Fidel Castro, rose in the midst of discussion to cry: ‘I’ve finally worked out who is responsible for the famine: it’s me!’35 This tragicomic intervention conveyed the adversarial tone of LSF’s discussions. The primary question of the conference was the ideology of tiersmondisme. Brauman’s opening established their premise, arguing that despite the end of utopianism, tiers-mondiste ideas were still present in the representation of the third world as a victim.36 Ilios Yannakakis, a political historian whose own politics had moved from communism to liberalism, described the failure of tiers-mondisme to stand up to the test of history: In seeking elsewhere the solution to its own existential issues and the response to the haunting problem of ‘what to do’, the sixties generation, whose only language and analytical tool is the third-worldist vulgate, collided head-on with the hard realities, the facts, the horror of the massacres that others carried out in the name of a ‘shared’ vision of the world.37

Chaliand detailed the events contributing to this process: the impact of Solzhenitsyn, the violence of the Khmer Rouge, and the militarisation of Vietnam and the resulting refugee movements.38 Olivier Roy, a specialist on political Islam who was also speaking as a former gauchiste, characterised the decline of tiers-mondisme as a process by which ‘the critique of the course of history led to a refusal of history, a refusal of the historical perspective, and withdrawal to an ethical position’.39 The notion of a move from political ideology to an advocacy of human rights was perhaps the single most recurrent theme of the political interventions.40 One of the most striking contributions to the conference, because of the way it incarnated the anti-tiers-mondiste opposition to revolutionary ideology, came from Jacques Broyelle. Once vehemently pro-Vietnamese, ten years after the fall of Saigon he declared that ‘we fought the wrong

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war’ and argued that an American occupation of Cambodia would have been preferable to the Khmer Rouge. He argued that the one indispensable rule was ‘not to support in any case a destabilisation that could result in a communist regime’. In an inversion of the far-left militant logic, which forbade any criticism of a progressive regime for fear of weakening its defences against reactionary forces, Broyelle asserted that ‘in no case can the denunciation of injustices, whatever they may be (and I do not deny them), lead us to help install a communist power’.41 Thanks to its attacks on left-wing ideology, the LSF conference had the support of sections of the French right. Most conspicuously, LSF was welcomed by the far-right Catholic nationalist newspaper Présent, founded in 1982 and directed in this period by Jean Madiran, a former member of Action Française. Présent lauded the challenge to tiers-mondisme as a ‘praiseworthy intention . . . not only courageous, but also very timely’. Its journalist, Françoise Monestier, suggested that LSF had caused so much discomfort in left-wing circles because ‘men of goodwill, outside the classic milieux of right-wing criticism, have in turn become aware of the trap and are denouncing it’.42 The weekly review Valeurs Actuelles, also on the conservative side of the spectrum, though certainly not to the extreme degree of Présent, promoted what it described as LSF’s ‘indictment of the taboos of contemporary third-worldist discourse’.43 It featured an interview with Malhuret identified as leader of both MSF and LSF in which he asserted that ‘real situations had nothing to do with to the slogans of militant tiers-mondisme’.44 Those associated with tiers-mondisme in some form or another therefore perceived the conference as an unequivocal aggression. As described in an article in the journal Croissance des Jeunes Nations, founded in 1961 in Catholic development circles, they felt ‘harassed and even attacked on the level of their deepest convictions and, in a way, treated like lepers’. In April this journal published a special feature on LSF; the titles of each article conveyed their spirited counteroffensives. Dumont demanded whether the humanitarians wanted merely ‘political rights for corpses’ and questioned the medical ethics of LSF’s organisers. Jean-Pierre Cot, the former Minister of Cooperation who had not long before affirmed he was third-worldist ‘and proud of it’, accused MSF of ‘intellectual dishonesty’. Charles Condamines, an advocate of development theory, pleaded in the same feature that ‘ambulance drivers do not run over the road workers!’45 A dossier in Le Monde Diplomatique in May 1985 also took a stand against the intellectual project driving LSF. Given the journal’s status, in

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Rieffel’s description, as ‘the most effective champion of tiers-mondisme’ in the period of its decline, Le Monde Diplomatique was a frequent victim of anti-tiers-mondiste attacks and a predictable source of opposition to LSF.46 It was also, more than operational NGOs that may have been sympathetic to the same views, one of the main targets of LSF’s offensive.47 For his dossier, the review’s editor Claude Julien gathered twenty contributions, ranging from technical and economic analyses to the testimonies of humanitarians from other organisations. Himself rather scornful, highlighting the pose of repentant gauchistes adopted by several in the LSF conference (and the leaders of MSF), Julien railed that ‘this version of tiers-mondisme only existed in the heads of those who condemn it today with such fury’. ‘Africa and Asia’, he asserted, in a counter to the humanitarians’ field credentials, ‘are more than “mud” and “refugee camps”’.48 Criticisms of LSF in a range of forums were largely based on two objections. Firstly, there was the fear that the think tank, through its connections with MSF, would prove detrimental to the standing of humanitarianism and therefore the practice of relief work. As in disputes over Cambodia, critics pointed to an incompatibility between politics and humanitarianism. This concern was captured in the warning from Alain Gresh, a military historian long associated with Le Monde Diplomatique, that MSF’s political activities brought them onto a ‘minefield’ where they risked forfeiting their considerable financial means, technical skills, and devotion of their volunteers.49 Writing as a humanitarian worker, Gabriel Marc, president of the CCFD, described MSF’s activities as ‘suicidal’.50 Protests in the same vein also came from within the MSF movement, in the form of dissent from MSF Belgium, which had been established in 1980. As discussed in more detail below, MSF Belgium initially raised its concerns about LSF internally, with the section’s board of directors noting that the think tank contravened MSF’s own principle of not adopting political positions. In February 1985, field staff from the French, Belgian, and Dutch sections working in Chad (MSF Holland had been created in 1984) expressed ‘indignation’ at news of LSF’s creation. Their letter, addressed to the directors and membership of MSF, declared the think tank to be a violation of MSF’s charter and called for links between the two to be formally severed and officially repudiated.51 These privately expressed concerns became public in July 1985 with MSF Belgium’s separation from the French structure and Paris’ unsuccessful legal attempt to prevent Amsterdam from continuing to use the MSF brand.52 By this time – and with the mobilisation for Ethiopia in full steam – MSF

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France’s reputation was suffering from claims that it used humanitarian donations for politically defined projects, thanks largely to the LSF initiative.53 The second objection to LSF raised in Le Monde Diplomatique and by other external commentators was more to do with the content of its claims than the impact of its activities. It entailed a defence of certain aspects of tiers-mondisme, especially its solidarity with the poor, while at the same time denying its existence as a coherent concept. Inasmuch as antitiers-mondisme seemed to be retrospectively determining the nature of its target, definitions became paramount.54 Dumont, for example, described LSF as ‘an attempt to destroy anyone wanting to take an interest in the third world’ at the same time as it created ‘a third-worldist myth deriving from Marxism and a bastardised Christianity’.55 Gresh argued that ‘there is no single tiers-mondisme, and that defined by LSF is a myth in which is found, pell-mell, ideas that no serious organisation would defend, alongside elements essential to solidarity with the third world’.56 Liauzu, the colonialism expert, likewise insisted that ‘the “masochistic vulgate” and “self-hatred” are by no means the dominant ideology nor the principal danger today!’57 Yet he warned against turning away from the conceptual framework of third-worldism on the grounds that ‘renouncing any ambition to think on a global scale would prevent the pursuit of alternatives to the crisis’. Lacoste feared that critiques of tiers-mondiste ideas would assist the rise of the far right, particularly pressing since the emergence in the late 1970s of the ‘nouvelle droite’ around Alain de Benoist, a fear no doubt amplified by the support of tribunes like Présent for the LSF initiative.58 Reflecting a few years later, Georges Courade – like Lacoste, a geographer – saw LSF’s attitudes as a retooling of some of the theses of tropical geography, which had developed in the colonial period and transformed after decolonisation into ‘development geography’, though without, at the time Courade was writing, shedding the problematic baggage of its imperialist past. He saw LSF as combining tropical geography with liberal economics, to ‘denounce the negligence of local States and leaders in the African food crisis and minimise external responsibilities’.59 The sans-frontiériste attack on tiers-mondisme had a special significance for Catholic organisations, notably the CCFD, which became a kind of lightning rod for anti-tiers-mondiste diatribes while simultaneously facing challenges from within Catholic circles.60 In the wake of the LSF conference, representatives of the CCFD roundly rejected accusations of political bias: ‘the language LSF uses does not concern us’.61 In the

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continuing debates, critics such as Bruckner, Kouchner, Yannakakis, and Lacoste highlighted the role of the Catholic left and at times singled out CCFD for criticism, though always on ideological grounds rather than operational expertise.62 Concurrently with these accusations from exgauchiste and sans-frontiériste activists and intellectuals, the CCFD also became the subject of angry anti-Marxist campaign emanating from the far right. Journalist Jean-Pierre Moreau (using the pseudonym Guillaume Maury) accused CCFD of running a vast empire of Marxist-Leninist subversion in the name of charity.63 These accusations were repeated in Valeurs Actuelles and Présent, both of which had profiled LSF.64 CCFD activists including Gabriel Marc and its secretary general Bernard Holzer responded in a series of articles and books, fought off defamation charges, and received support from Abbé Pierre, a Catholic priest, member of the Resistance, founder of Emmaüs and French national treasure.65 They defended contact with rebel groups such as the Polisario Front of Western Sahara or Fretilin in East Timor (now Timor Leste) on the grounds that humanitarian action required dialogue but did not entail support. Sustained by a series of interventions for and against, the crossfire over LSF lasted almost a year. It was by no means displaced by the controversy over MSF’s stance in Ethiopia, which had its own dynamics but also served to amplify the LSF controversy. In November 1985, to the evident irritation of the journal’s editors, Brauman asserted his right of reply in Le Monde Diplomatique and defended LSF against its accusers.66 The same issue carried an article from Philippe Laurent, executive director of MSF Belgium, denouncing the way that ‘some leaders [of MSF] want to exploit the moral credit of the organisation for partisan ends’ and warning of the destructive effect this could have upon the aid sector internationally.67 On 7 November, Brauman again defended his project during a conference organised by Cot and Dumont with the theme ‘Against third-worldism or against the third world?’68 In February 1986, the collected interventions from the first LSF conference were published by Olivier Orban Publishers, under the direction of Gilles Hertzog. LSF hosted another, far less controversial conference, on 27 February 1986, and smaller publications in the LSF series appeared regularly, although never with the resonance of its 1985 inauguration.69 Responses to the Fondation Liberté Sans Frontières and its first conference were both aggressive and emotive, echoing the strong rhetoric used by LSF’s directors and the participants in its colloquium. LSF cemented the sans-frontiéristes’ position as public commentators and intellectual activists. It was one of the most prominent manifestations of MSF’s will,

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in Brauman’s words, to shed ‘the stereotypical image of the white lab coats and stethoscopes and assume that of the provocateurs, the agitators, with all its ramifications of suspicions, incomprehensions, awkwardness’.70 Nowhere were the ramifications of this approach felt more strongly than during the debate on Ethiopia.

‘msf have the biggest mouths’ The mobilisation for the Ethiopian famine was, for MSF, simultaneously a period of centrality in French thinking about the third world and isolation in the relief world. Immediately prior to being expelled from Ethiopia for publicising government abuses, MSF declared that ‘remaining silent in the face of such a tragedy is to become complicit in it’.71 After the termination of MSF’s missions, this assertion became the subject of a passionate and public debate in France. For the politically activist leaders of MSF, the reticence of other organisations to denounce the manipulation of aid efforts reflected the old habit of tiers-mondiste indulgence towards left-wing regimes. For their critics, the need to be present to offer assistance overrode such political considerations. The themes of témoignage and complicity, which had been so important to changing attitudes to political violence in the 1970s, therefore remained central as the attention of the Western world turned towards the suffering in Ethiopia. Part of the distinctiveness of MSF’s position was its insistence that this suffering was fundamentally a result of political violence, not natural disaster. By 1984, the situation in Ethiopia was dire. The reign of Emperor Haile Selassie having ended with a military coup in 1974, a decade of manoeuvres and political terror had brought Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam to the head of the government, known as the Derg.72 After celebrations of the tenth anniversary of the Ethiopian Revolution, on 11 September 1984, the Derg belatedly acknowledged famine in the north of the country. When foreign journalists were finally granted access to the famine zones, footage of the Korem refugee camp broadcast by the BBC in October 1984 awakened global public opinion. As Suzanne Franks has argued, the way this was catapulted into Western homes ‘characterised – once again incorrectly – as a sudden event (famine) which had a specific and easily explicable cause (drought)’, had little to do with the reality of its causes or the dynamics that sustained it.73 One of those spurred to action was singer Bob Geldof, whose association Band Aid debuted with a fundraising single called ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ and graduated in style with

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the staging of two star-studded Live Aid concerts on 13 July 1985, raising approximately forty million pounds.74 Roughly fifty humanitarian organisations were active in governmentcontrolled Ethiopia. In addition to the NGOs, the UN Emergency Office for Ethiopia (UNEOE) was established in 1984. Personnel were permitted to travel only one kilometre from their houses and the camps where they worked; that volunteers were advised to bring forty passport photographs indicates the level of bureaucratisation and surveillance in place.75 Foreign aid was coordinated by the Relief and Rehabilitation Commission (RRC), an official body established following the 1973–4 famine, but only recently brought under the control of the Derg. The effect of the political takeover of the RRC was directly felt by humanitarian organisations, whose negotiations became more difficult as a result.76 In this period – indeed, since 1975 – the Ethiopian authorities were fighting secessionist movements in Eritrea and Tigray. Repeated military offensives against the main rebel fronts, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) and the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), played an important role in creating the conditions for famine, including heavy-handed military operations, mass displacement, and disruption of agriculture and trade. They continued throughout the international relief effort. A TPLF press release in March 1985 put it bluntly: ‘the government is attempting to hit with force the same people who are dying of starvation’.77 Concurrently, the Derg was conducting a resettlement programme, officially declared to be rescuing residents of the droughtafflicted zones by enabling them to take up opportunities in the south, but in fact a significant component of the military campaign. This became common knowledge amongst aid workers, foreign officials, and journalists in Ethiopia. The international aid effort was implicated in the conflict in a number of ways. The resettlement programme was heavily reliant on equipment and logistics provided by Western donors; military raids upon aid distribution centres were used to gather people for transfer to the south; and local officials were coerced into participation in the programme by threats of a withdrawal of aid from their region.78 The forced transfers of civilians, designed to deprive secessionists of cover and resources, were conducted in atrocious conditions and have been attributed at least 300,000 deaths. It has been claimed that by 1985, when the international aid effort was at its peak, the resettlement programme was responsible for as many, if not more deaths, than the famine itself.79 The stance adopted by UNEOE in this situation – indeed, its very function – has been condemned

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by several accounts that emphasise its complicity in Derg abuses. In Alex de Waal’s summary, ‘the Ethiopian Government intensified its creation of famine and its manipulation of humanitarianism, and UNEOE was happy to act as its mouthpiece. . . . Rather than investigating the abuses, UNEOE consistently concealed disturbing evidence, including evidence produced by its own monitors’.80 A number of NGOs also worked in the northern conflict zones without official permission. These cross-border operations entailed the delivery of assistance from Sudan directly into rebel-held territory. They were based upon a close working relationship with the relief wings of the rebel fronts, above all the Eritrean Relief Association (ERA) and the Relief Society of Tigray (REST).81 Although some NGOs worked bilaterally with the relief wings, in general this engagement was characterised by the creation of collective bodies that allowed Western NGOs and donors alike to maintain a certain level of discretion regarding their transgression of Ethiopia’s sovereignty and, in some cases, a certain level of sympathy with the rebel fronts. The best known of these groups was the Emergency Relief Desk (ERD), an ecumenical grouping of nine religious agencies, which from 1981 until 1993 accounted for more than half of the cross-border relief operation into Eritrea and Tigray and a total value of cash and in kind assistance of approximately US$350 million.82 MSF was not part of these collectives, although its doctors visited the secessionist areas as early as 1978, with programmes in Eritrea dating from that year and others established in Tigray in 1982.83 Discrepancies and gaps in information abounded. For instance, a UNEOE report of August 1985 claimed that 75 per cent of people in Eritrea and Tigray were being reached from the government side and failed to acknowledge the cross-border operation; at the time, by another estimate, a maximum of only 15 per cent of the population were being reached by government programmes.84 Visits to resettlement zones in the south were tightly controlled in a manner reminiscent of the Potemkin village tours experienced by revolutionary travellers. As a result of the censorship, the first systematic studies of the nature of the suffering in Ethiopia and the Derg’s role were achieved through investigations among Ethiopian refugees in Somalia, by American anthropologist Jason Clay.85 While the Derg defended its resettlement policies and joined humanitarian organisations in calls for more international aid, a series of defections by high-profile officials, including the head and deputy head of the RRC, highlighted the violence of the system that had been built around the famine.

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Yet, as with Cambodia, and despite the maelstrom of misinformation, omissions, and contradictory claims, the humanitarian response to Ethiopia perpetuated and arguably relied upon a driving narrative of extraordinary catastrophe befalling the country. Much has been made of the way that the Derg objectives, media reporting styles, and NGO fundraising techniques shared a tendency or desire to present the famine as an act of god, or nature. Ethiopia had become in the collective imagination a ‘desert inhabited by corpses’.86 MSF was no exception to this rule, as its own documents and press releases indicate. Articles on the ‘Ethiopian tragedy’ featured in the MSF Bulletin throughout 1984, with director Francis Charhon warning in November that ‘the horror of the famine is indeed such that we cannot stop bearing witness [témoigner]’.87 Bearing witness, at that time, did not mean embroilment in the politics of the Derg war effort and its relocation programme. In March 1985, Charhon again called in the Bulletin for greater mobilisation and intensified efforts.88 Recalling these appeals is a reminder of the extent to which MSF’s priorities shifted with its denunciation of the ‘massive deportation, financed by international aid’.89 Yet the manipulation of aid in Ethiopia was no secret. In late May 1985, Le Monde’s Jacques de Barrin wrote of the consensus among experts that a significant part of international aid for famine victims was being diverted in ‘a situation that seems, today, to exceed the limits of what is tolerable’.90 Similarly, though with greater rhetorical flourish, René Backmann described a quagmire of ‘minor, villainous misappropriations, major, strategic misappropriations, deportation disguised as rescue, currency extortion, all against a background of bureaucratic harassment and ideological propaganda’.91 Haski for Libération was more cautious in his criticisms than either Backmann or de Barrin, but nonetheless drew attention to problems caused by ulterior motives, political cynicism, and human error.92 Hérodote, the geographical journal founded by Lacoste, also carried critiques.93 Comparable analyses were reported in both the UK and US press. It was thus not the substance of MSF’s charges against Mengistu’s regime that was controversial, but rather their public, owned disclosure by a humanitarian association. MSF’s criticisms of the Ethiopian government intensified over the course of 1985. It is important to note, as Laurence Binet’s reconstruction of the episode makes clear, that critical statements came from both the Paris headquarters and MSF France field staff. Protests were based on the belief that (as expressed during the 1985 general assembly) despite the

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risk of expulsion, ‘on an ethical level, as on that of the effectiveness of our missions, we cannot resign ourselves to conditions that are incompatible with the spirit that moves us’.94 MSF publicly questioned the military’s forced dispersal of Ibnat camp over three days in April as well as the government’s refusal to acknowledge the spread of cholera. The denial of the presence of cholera by the Derg and self-censorship by NGOs prevented the necessary treatment being offered on a large scale, raising despair amongst MSF field staff who were unable to prevent patients ‘dying like flies’ from the disease.95 In early October, at a meeting of the Anglo-American Press Club in Paris, Rony Brauman articulated explicitly for the first time that aid organisations had been co-opted by the government for a programme that threatened the very lives they were working to save. In November, an article in The Sunday Times on ‘the dark side of the exodus’ in Ethiopia featured quotes from Michel Fiszbin, head of the MSF office in Addis Ababa – the only NGO representative willing to go on record against the government.96 In response to these and similar comments, Brauman was summoned, unrepentant, to Addis Ababa. At a press conference on his return to Paris, he made the blunt allegation that ‘an extraordinary movement of solidarity is being turned against the people who are supposed to be being helped . . . the aid is being used not to save, but to oppress them’.97 The heart of the problem, as Brauman later articulated, was the realisation that ‘intentions can be turned against their objectives’.98 Although a number of forces were therefore moving MSF in the direction of témoignage, the process was not without confusion or discord. The volleys of criticism emanating from Paris more than once caught the staff working in Ethiopia off guard. Yet the latter had already been more outspoken than most other agencies on issues such as the conduct of population transfers, the actions of the military, and the management of the relief effort. Vacillations in mortality rates recorded by the MSF mission in Korem offer a haunting insight into why in-country criticisms were so persistent, despite the risks involved. Brigitte Vasset, medical coordinator in Korem from April 1984–May 1985, recalled camp mortality rates of 5–10 deaths per day in August 1984, which rose steadily throughout September to reach approximately a hundred deaths per day by the month’s end.99 In January 1985, the daily death toll was reported as being below ten, but by April twenty deaths per day were attributed to cholera alone. Later that year, the witnessing of violence in the name of the population transfers, against the backdrop of an unsuccessful push to open an

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intensive feeding centre at Kelala, also led to Korem staff airing criticism of the government’s relief policies. These were remembered by Brauman as independent of positions adopted in Paris.100 Nor was headquarters advocacy a smoothly choreographed process. This was exemplified by Brauman’s Press Club statements. It was recounting, on the spot, the sequence of events in Ethiopia – his comments were unplanned – that drew out a political analysis of the relief effort. As he later remembered, That’s the power of telling a story, in the sense that it gives shape to a narrative to be recounted to people who aren’t on the inside, who need you to lay out a chronology of the process and specific events. When we talked about it at MSF, we always took up the subject in the middle of things because we knew the whole story. We only talked about it with people who knew the story, whether in the field or here. We never went to the trouble of explaining the story from the beginning; to see how it developed over the 18 months we were there. It’s the retelling after the fact that shed light on the entire story. I say, ‘shed light’ because it wasn’t a wild revelation or a hallucination. It was really what happened.101

However, there were also a number of deeper influences that acted on this retelling. Brauman’s own reflection was assisted by two studies of responses to suffering. The first was British journalist William Shawcross’s revelations about the subversion by the Khmer Rouge of the international relief effort in Cambodia. Entitled The Quality of Mercy, it came out in France in February 1985. In a postscript added to the French edition, Shawcross drew explicit parallels between Cambodia and the ‘depressingly familiar’ situation in Ethiopia, arguing that in each case an abusive Marxist government, held in contempt by the international community, had been responsible for creating and amplifying the phenomenon of famine in its own country; in each case the West had ignored warning signs.102 The pertinence of Shawcross’s study was highlighted by contemporary French commentators on Ethiopia and in Brauman’s memoirs.103 The second influence was Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Brauman received a copy of the book from Pascal Bruckner, who had just published his diatribe against tiers-mondisme and who would participate in the LSF conference less than a year later.104 Arendt’s discussion of how the Jüdenrate (Jewish councils) had complied with Nazi orders in an effort to minimise suffering argued that the attempt to choose ‘the lesser evil’ resulted in co-option in the machinery of destruction.105 This reading shaped Brauman’s conclusion that, once the manipulation of aid by Mengistu had been identified, the

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excuse that as humanitarians this was not their intent was meaningless: ‘by remaining and staying silent, we pretended to believe that we were helping the population, while we were serving the interests of the executioners [bourreaux]’.106 Not acting was as political a position as taking a stand. This understanding of the need for témoignage differed markedly from Charhon’s earlier description of the famine and entailed explicit and public criticism of the government’s role. The regime retaliated: all members of MSF were promptly expelled. The threat of exile was one of the means of controlling foreign organisations working in Ethiopia and outspoken or uncooperative organisations were aware they ran a risk of expulsion. Hence the warning of an unnamed RRC representative a month prior to the expulsion: ‘Médecins Sans Frontières have the biggest mouths and they do the least. I am showing them the door and they can go straight through it’.107 After the expulsion was announced on 2 December, handovers of MSF missions to other organisations were obstructed, its assets seized and bank account frozen. Twenty-seven expatriate personnel had to be repatriated and fears for the 270 Ethiopian staff members who remained, and whose employment with MSF marked them as suspect in the eyes of the Ethiopian authorities, were quite justifiably running high. After the expulsion, MSF continued to operate in Eritrea and Tigray without government permission. Why exactly was their stance so controversial when official abuses were common knowledge? The question bears examination, especially since the passage of time and widespread recognition of the ‘paradoxes’ and ‘instrumentalisation’ of aid in Ethiopia and elsewhere have somewhat normalised MSF’s position. At the time, however, the intensity of the reaction reflected the shattering of a discourse adopted by almost all other humanitarian organisations in Ethiopia, which, even when acknowledging concerns, entirely conflated organisational presence with the interests of the intended beneficiaries. The break – the fact of speaking in a humanitarian’s voice, about ‘humanitarian’ issues, but offering a political analysis which left little room for humanitarian action – profoundly challenged the terms according to which the debate had hitherto been constructed. Three often interrelated factors can be seen to set MSF apart from the majority of the relief effort for Ethiopia in France, and also in other countries. The most obvious factor affecting MSF’s relationship with the aid industry was its willingness to prioritise témoignage over discretion. This can be seen in the minutes of a November 1985 meeting of MSF’s administrative council, summarising consultations by Brauman and Vasset, by

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that time the Ethiopia desk manager, with other international representatives in Ethiopia. They described NGOs such as Concern and Save the Children as being ‘completely in agreement with us on the substance of the problem’ but not on the approach, preferring gradual diplomatic engagement to public statements. They identified greater support from the local delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross, ‘in total agreement with our position and action’, although not necessarily from ICRC headquarters in Geneva. Political ambassadors were dismissed as showing an ‘evident refusal to debate the fundamental issues’. The greatest scorn, however, was reserved for UNEOE, the report evoking a ‘tempestuous interview’ with its then head, who was described as having ‘limply contested’ the facts and who received for his efforts a reminder of ‘the principles of freedom of the press and the UN Declaration of Human Rights’. In contrast, two meetings with MSF camp coordinators concluded that ‘all are in agreement on seeing it through, at risk of being expelled, the point of intolerability having already been exceeded’.108 The distinctiveness of this stance was later underlined in public debate about MSF’s departure. Françoise Giroud, the president of AICF, condemned MSF as having abandoned a people in need, in contrast with those organisations that remained to continue the relief programme.109 Giroud had previously denied allegations about the misuse of aid in Ethiopia, arguing that AICF was in total control of its relief supplies.110 Immediately after the expulsion, she acknowledged that the population transfers had given rise to some unpleasant practices but denied that ‘abandoning’ or ‘renouncing’ relief missions would save famine victims, who in her view only survived thanks to aid efforts.111 She sharpened her language in a second article, published in Libération as well as in AICF’s own journal, with the suggestive title ‘S’en aller, c’est déserter’. Giroud asserted that leaving Ethiopia was ‘the simplest way to dispose of the problem while keeping a clear conscience’ but that AICF would stay because ‘the great tragedies are always played out in silence’.112 In choosing the word ‘silence’, she placed herself in an awkward semantic position vis-à-vis AICF’s decision not to denounce human rights abuses committed by the Ethiopian Government. For Giroud, absence from the terrain was in essence synonymous with silence and remaining present was the only way to provide aid, though in effect silence was its price. In contrast, statements from MSF increasingly emphasised humanitarianism’s vulnerability to manipulation. From this perspective, the moral dilemma was not one of solidarity versus abandonment; instead they portrayed the choice as between meaningful humanitarian action and an

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effective complicity with human rights abuses. Members reading the MSF Bulletin were told that ‘assistance has its limits and we cannot remain hostage to a policy which runs directly counter to the action we are undertaking’.113 The evicted staff members agreed.114 A distinction emerged between AICF’s view of MSF as having left Ethiopia in protest and MSF’s own insistence that the criticism was verbal and the subsequent departure forced (although the predictability of their expulsion rendered MSF’s interpretation somewhat moot). The point was emphatically made by Malhuret in October 1986: The question is not staying or leaving. Leaving is an abdication. The question is: how to remain? Can we remain if it means swallowing everything? . . . The question is between a way of staying, mute, and a way of staying and saying what must be said, even if it means taking the risk of leaving, of being expelled.115

This idea emerged as of fundamental significance in thinking at MSF France. That it has remained a core concept is demonstrated by the continuing reflection on how it applied in the Ethiopian case and others since, most notably in the work of the Centre de Réflexion sur l’Action et les Savoirs Humanitaires (CRASH) in Paris. The emphasis on témoignage, despite the growth of MSF’s international movement and the complexity of its operational and political attitudes, has remained one of the strongest features of the global MSF brand.116 Standing on témoignage dovetailed with the second particularity of MSF France in the 1980s, their political activism against tiers-mondiste ideology. Anti-tiers-mondisme does not as such explain the organisation’s challenge to the Derg abuses – keeping in mind that objections came from both field and headquarters – but it did infuse its leaders’ attitudes to the country and their analyses of the international response. The ongoing international tolerance of Mengistu, according to an article Brauman published in June 1986, raised questions about the intellectual frameworks applied to the third world, particularly in that ‘support for implacable torturers’ came from ‘individuals engaged in a struggle for a fairer society, more respectful of human rights, whose sincerity cannot be called into question’.117 Brauman complained that despite the Derg’s demonstrated responsibility for the severity of the famine, Mengistu continued to benefit from Western support. The willingness to remain silent about human rights abuses was seen as ideologically motivated, further emphasising the complicity of those organisations that did not criticise the Ethiopian Government.

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Ideological divergences underpinned the stark contrast between MSF’s outspokenness and the apologist stance of Secours Populaire Français. During the Cambodian crisis, SPF had cooperated with Phnom Penh’s demands in return for permission to run its missions in-country. In the mid 1980s, SPF was among a tiny minority of NGOs that agreed to establish missions in the resettlement zones in southern Ethiopia. Accounts of these missions in SPF’s monthly magazine, Convergence, portrayed the population transfers as voluntary and the resettlement territories as welcoming and restorative.118 In September 1986, once it had become impossible to ignore the critiques of resettlement, SPF echoed the Ethiopian Government’s line. Even though the Derg itself – magnanimously, one article hinted – had acknowledged there had been ‘errors and precipitation’ in the handling of the transfers, any further criticisms would only force the victims of famine further into misery.119 It warned that ‘exaggerations and lies have never done the poor [les plus malheureux] any favours’ and would only erode the enthusiasm of volunteers. SPF was subsequently criticised for its complicity with abusive government programmes in the two conflicts; it was no coincidence, Rufin argued, that the head of the Comité d’Aide in Cambodia had become the leader of the SPF mission in Ethiopia.120 The contrast with MSF’s rejection of the political programmes in Ethiopia and Cambodia was striking. Exchanges across this divide were continued by both humanitarian organisations and intellectuals. Those continuing to work in Ethiopia such as CCFD and Cimade created Espoir Ethiopie. They defended their ‘very pragmatic decision’ to continue to aid victims of the Derg’s policies.121 In opposition, Glucksmann compared this attitude to the failure of the Red Cross faced with Nazi extermination camps.122 He collaborated with MSF activists on a campaign against human rights abuses in Ethiopia, creating the Comité de Vigilance sur les Droits de l’Homme en Ethiopie. The committee’s conference on 29 October 1986, on the theme ‘La pitié dangereuse, de l’aide aux victimes à l’aide aux bourreaux’, was financially supported by Malhuret by now in his ministerial role.123 Such collusion hinted at the complications that would later arise as humanitarian action – and actors – became increasingly integrated into government agendas. A final, related point of difference between MSF and many organisations prominent during the Ethiopian crisis was the former’s specialisation in the emergency relief (urgence) model. In operational terms, the French model of sans-frontiérisme developed from the 1970s onwards was

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characterised by expertise in emergency assistance, working in a specific situation of acute suffering, and above all in emergency medicine. With MSF as archetype, sans-frontiériste organisations have been associated with medical work and the figure of the French doctor, although as the examples of AICF, Solidarités International, and Handicap International (founded in 1979, 1980, and 1982, respectively) show, the expertise has been more diverse.124 The development model, in contrast, was stronger amongst Anglo-Saxon organisations and aimed at the more gradual improvement of socio-economic conditions. Its narrative of progress, in which countries move from ‘underdeveloped’, to ‘developing’, to ‘developed’, favours an emphasis on technical approaches and a related preference for cooperation with the host government. In many cases, such as the British organisations Save the Children and Oxfam, organisations created to respond to an emergency subsequently turned towards development work, decisively so (although not only) in the 1960s and 1970s. Emergency projects thus sat alongside longer-term work in socalled ‘multi-mandate’ organisations, fuelling NGO expansion in Mark Duffield’s words ‘on the back of the permanent emergency existing among the world’s non-insured peoples’.125 The rise of sans-frontiériste organisations that largely specialised in emergency response converged with significant changes in the international architecture and approaches to emergencies in the late 1970s and into the 1980s. Famines in the Sahel in the early and mid 1970s, when the international response was late to deploy, poorly organised, and inadequately integrated with domestic and local mechanisms, had highlighted some of the shortcomings of international aid. Efforts to address weaknesses in the UN response systems followed, with an attempt to reinforce the coordination capacity of its Disaster Relief Office (UNDRO).126 More attention also began to be paid to both the causes and workings of famine (seen for instance in Amartya Sen’s entitlement theory as articulated in Poverty and Famines, 1981) and related questions of how best to assist people affected by food shortages. Sharper analysis of the relationship between conflict and famine followed the Ethiopian famine and continued as a result of wars during the 1990s.127 These issues played out on a global stage, but they were also debated by French commentators and at the level of MSF programmes. In June 1985, Jean-Christophe Rufin, the former MSF member who had denounced the Cambodian march and was by this time editor of Tribune Médicale, complained in that journal of MSF’s stranglehold on fundraisers in France: ‘if singers have a hit and give the proceeds to humanitarian aid, it is

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Médecins Sans Frontières that receives the profits. If a gala is thrown in aid of the Third World, it is MSF that will receive the takings’.128 The objection though, ran deeper: Rufin’s real target was what he perceived as a simplistic attitude within the French aid community and its supporters, associating crisis relief with medical care, in opposition to long-term development and nutritional work.129 Indeed, this period saw the first of MSF’s emergency food aid and nutrition programmes. In 1985 MSF added food relief to its eight-year-long mission in Eritrea, which had previously focused on emergency medicine, and cooperated with Save the Children to run nutritional programmes in Wollo.130 The collaboration with SCF is also a reminder that field-level relationships had priorities distinct from the polemics going on in Paris. Ethiopia thus became a contested territory for different conceptions of humanitarian responsibility, influenced by two key sets of ideas. On one hand, there were operational questions to do with the relationship between acute emergency and sustained vulnerability, and the appropriate form of assistance. On the other, there were ethical and moral questions about the impact of aid within systems of suffering and injustice. Over these ideas of responsibility, and interacting with them, were laid further interrogations about political engagement, encapsulated in LSF. There was significant reverberation between these arenas of debate – when MSF was expelled, reports drew attention to the impact of LSF upon its parent organisation’s humanitarian activities – but they each connected to different and distinct issues as well.131

the fallout The creation of MSF Belgium in November 1980 marked the beginning of MSF’s organisational expansion out of France.132 The growing number of Belgians with experience of working for MSF with Cambodian refugees in Thailand had made the founding of a new section possible.133 MSF Belgium benefitted directly from the leaps in logistics and organisation achieved in Thailand. It sent eighty expatriates abroad in its first year.134 At the beginning, cooperation with MSF France was close and the two sections were able to work in complementarity, as in the case of early Belgian missions to Chad, where French troops were involved in the civil war of 1965–79, making missions more difficult for MSF France. The culture in the two sections, however, differed significantly. While press portrayals of MSF Belgium clearly reflected the broader organisational identity, with its emphasis on témoignage and political neutrality

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captured as ‘halfway between the Red Cross . . . and Amnesty International’,135 there were significant differences in background and therefore attitude. In the words of Philippe Laurent, a co-founding member and executive director of MSF Belgium in the mid 1980s: The MSF France leaders were people with political drive and political analyses. Even if, for all intents and purposes, they had left that world after May 1968 to work in the humanitarian setting, they maintained a political way of looking at things; in balance-of-power and East-West terms. . . . Things were completely different at MSF Belgium. Even though we were pretty close in age, we were from another generation. When we established MSF Belgium, we brought together people who did not have that political history but instead came from a background in non-profits. MSF France emerged from a political society and MSF Belgium from a civil society.136

Although MSF Belgium also attracted some gauchistes, Catholic activists and others, as the Paris leadership moved towards more explicit and public political and ideological positions, the differences became more acute. Willy Demeyer, who helped to establish the Belgian section after volunteering with MSF France, later described how the Belgians characterised MSF as a medical association, while the French in that period emphasised its human rights role. Given the conception of human rights that was in favour with the Parisian leadership at the time, this orientation brought with it a more hostile stance towards left-wing governments responsible for abuses. As Demeyer remembered it, ‘For MSF-F, the typical MSF intervention was Afghanistan. For MSF-B it was Chad. Those were two completely different kinds of missions’.137 These differences were therefore not purely political but also integral to divergent approaches on operational questions. While both sections had emergency medical missions and more long-term work – it should not be forgotten that, from the outset, MSF France was involved in longer-term projects beyond conflict medicine and natural disaster response – the Belgian section leaned more towards public health and long-term work than their French counterparts. This was what MSF Belgium programmes in Chad had come to represent, described by one historian as an ‘empire mission’ where the NGO resembled a Ministry of Health.138 MSF Belgium was willing to accept institutional and governmental financing, while MSF France avoided doing so. From 1980–87, up to 70 per cent of MSF Belgium’s budget came from the European Commission (EC).139 It also advocated the continued internationalisation of the movement, contributing actively to the establishment of new associations in Holland, Spain, and Luxemburg.

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After the creation of Liberté Sans Frontières, and following the Chad field staff’s open letter of February 1985, MSF Belgium took the radical step of separating itself from MSF France on the grounds that LSF was a breach of the organisation’s charter and a threat to its very existence. The objections, circulated to its membership in March, were summarised as follows: – The Foundation Libertés [sic] Sans Frontières is a political organisation. – There is confusion between the Foundation and the association Médecins Sans Frontières. – This confusion results in an ambiguous and unhealthy situation, which places MSF in an extremely perilous position regarding its fundamental principle of apoliticism. – This represents a deadly threat for MSF. – It is therefore urgent, in order to safeguard our organisation, to clarify the situation and to take measures to separate that which should never have been linked: Médecins Sans Frontières and Libertés Sans Frontières.140 More than simple confusion, however, the mix-up between LSF and MSF had been actively courted in order to increase the profile and standing of debates. The document called for MSF to stop hosting LSF at its offices and to cease funding it, for the leaders of MSF who wanted to remain in LSF to resign from their positions in the humanitarian organisation, and for MSF to publicly declare its separation from the political association. What followed was a total breakdown in the relationship between Paris and Brussels. How much was this a question of institutional rivalry or ideological differences? At the time, those in Brussels denied there was a division between the two national sections, citing years of collaboration and their ongoing wish to work within a movement divested of the political interference of LSF. While their dossier mostly refrained from engaging with the substance of LSF’s claims, it did note the correlation with right-wing discourse and observed that ‘numerous donors [to MSF] belong to groups denounced by LSF’.141 In effect, if there was rivalry it was not between the sections but directed against the Parisian leadership. Laurent characterised their view of the MSF movement as being ‘political down to its roots, its elemental or essential form was political’.142 Conversely, Malhuret later described MSF Belgium as being ‘like a bunch of Boy Scouts’, politically naïve and overstating their independence from Paris.143

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When it came to the trial, which was initiated by MSF France but held in Belgium, the confrontation was played out with systematic reference to the MSF charter. The French position was that, as a result of its opposition to LSF, MSF Belgium was refusing to cooperate, which in turn represented a failing of its responsibilities under the charter. Having dissociated in this way, the argument ran, MSF Belgium could no longer claim the right to use the MSF name. MSF Belgium, in contrast, drew upon its March document to show that LSF contradicted the charter and MSF’s fundamental principles. The Belgians’ trump card was a letter of support from MSF founders Kouchner, Récamier, and Bérès. These fathers of modern French humanitarianism pronounced that ‘it seems normal to support [MSF Belgium] in the face of the moral and intellectual swindle that the creation of LSF represents. It is MSF Belgium that maintains its practice and ideal in keeping with the Charter and statutes. MSF France is perverting them’.144 Like previous instances of public campaigning by sans-frontiéristes in the Bateau pour le Vietnam and the Marche pour la Survie du Cambodge, the LSF initiative thus exposed rifts within MSF, though this time across its own international borders, over the role of humanitarian organisations and the place of political activism. On 15 July 1985, the judge ruled in favour of MSF Belgium, on the basis that ‘there is an evident divergence between the philosophy and aims of MSF on the one hand and the philosophy and aims of LSF on the other’.145 The payment of expenses fell to MSF France. Brauman’s annual report for the year noted that ‘we must become accustomed, like numerous organisations that have broken up while internationalising, to dispassionately managing this reality’ in which ‘our two organisations, carrying the same name, function . . . as two totally distinct groups’.146 The two sections managed to effect a reconciliation, in part because of the departure of both Malhuret and Laurent; nonetheless, tensions within the MSF movement have resurfaced on a number of occasions since. While the fallout from LSF continued, so too did that from events in Ethiopia. A suite of publications offered interpretations of the challenge to humanitarianism that the episode represented, frequently returning to the issues of témoignage and tiers-mondiste ideology. The evidence and reasoning that drove MSF’s stance on Ethiopia was elaborated in a study of the famine by François Jean, then director of research at LSF. Jean first worked with MSF in Lebanon in 1982, later moving between field positions and research, helping to establish MSF’s Populations in Danger

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series and playing a highly influential role in MSF France throughout the 1990s.147 He warned that ‘for a “silent witness”, there is a high risk of becoming insidiously complicit’ when faced with human rights abuses. The idea that this was ‘a challenge to the very meaning of humanitarian action’ repeated MSF’s criticisms of the population transfers. Here, too, the opposition was presented as one between témoignage and complicity rather than as a choice between renunciation and continuation. Jean contended that the Derg’s main goal was not merely to reinforce its own power but to remodel the whole of society. In this context, he claimed, ‘donors seem to have an unlimited capacity, in the name of the victims, for fixing up the damage caused by the great leap backwards into the radiant future’.148 Endorsing témoignage and rejecting tiers-mondisme, Jean’s 1986 study encapsulated MSF’s position. His subsequent shorter commentaries returned to the themes of famine, politics, and the neglected lessons of history. In a piece published in Commentaire, Jean identified the role of ideology as a key factor in the increased human toll of famine in the twentieth century, linking the experiences of Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s, China in the 1950s and 1960s, and Ethiopia in the 1980s: ‘What was once a timeless scourge, a natural calamity, has become a phenomenon of the modern age and an act of government; no longer part of the toll of war, it has become an offering on the altar of ideology’.149 The continued interrogation of the dynamics of the aid response was also a reaction to the re-emergence of famine in Ethiopia towards the end of the decade. Drought, he argued, cannot explain the recurrent emergencies; nor, alone, could war, but rather the combination of these two with misplaced, ideologically driven policies of forced development and collectivisation. Famine had become a ‘mode of governing’ in Ethiopia. It provided international resources and rationale for domestic policies.150 Jean used the Ethiopian case to reflect upon the role of outside aid in emergencies as well as the lessons that should have been drawn not only in Ethiopia but in past experiences of famine and relief. Others who had participated in brief exchanges at the height of the controversies also contributed reflections in the years that followed. In 1986 Jean-Christophe Rufin published Le piège: quand l’aide humanitaire remplace la guerre, a significant analysis of the consequences of humanitarian action in conflict settings. This book was based on Rufin’s view of aid (referencing Clausewitz) as ‘the continuation of politics by means other than war’.151 Its content – including discussions of the distinctiveness of sans-frontiérisme, its relationship with tiers-mondisme, the place of human rights, and major recent cases including Cambodia and

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Ethiopia – reflected how embedded it was within contemporary debates. Nonetheless Rufin raised a number of issues that have since gained ground within literature on humanitarian action, including notably the idea of refugee camps as ‘humanitarian sanctuary’ for guerrilla fighters, an idea that would be further explored by Fiona Terry in her 2002 study Condemned to Repeat? With regards to Ethiopia and LSF, despite his earlier criticism of MSF’s use of the media, Rufin viewed the public denunciation of the Derg’s population transfers as courageous. He argued this act had the merit of demonstrating ‘the unavoidably political nature of decisions regarding emergency aid’. He identified Live Aid as representative of the synergy between the development model and the principles of tiers-mondisme. Although development theory and practice have roots in colonial investment funds and technical experts, as well as post-war liberal economics, in the Cold War ideological climate, development thinking could also dovetail with a political model favourable to progressive aspirations. This was the form of ‘developmentalism’ targeted by LSF. For Rufin, there was a misstep between the French debates on aid and the momentum of the global charity movement: ‘at the very moment when, following on from Pascal Bruckner, French intellectuals were beginning to take shots at a certain form of third-worldism, Geldof had just projected it live via satellite’.152 He saw the tendency of organisations in Ethiopia to abstain from criticism of abuses on the grounds of respect for sovereignty as tied to this ‘developmentalist’ attitude, a view that found some echo in the mea culpa of Oxfam member Tony Vaux.153 Another contribution, published the same year, was André Glucksmann and Thierry Wolton’s Silence, on tue, described as ‘a rant against the Ethiopian regime, Bob Geldof, and African socialism in general’.154 As this description suggests, it was a considerably less substantial work than Rufin’s and, on the level of its operational analysis, far less significant. Yet the authors shared with Rufin a view of humanitarianism as in part a continuation of the gauchiste sentiment of solidarity, though improved for Glucksmann and Wolton because it was divested of any messianic ambitions.155 They lamented the fact that Marxism – ‘dead in Paris’ – could still be found in the prisons of the third world. In this, as in their view of the international aid mobilisation in Ethiopia, Glucksmann and Wolton had much in common with the MSF leadership. The authors echoed Malhuret, arguing that ‘the question has never been to help or not to help, but how to help’. The lesson was that ‘murderous is the silence which

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blankets aid operations, as if it constituted a sine qua non condition for the assistance offered. . . . Silence, not aid, kills’.156 Their interpretation of the dynamics in Ethiopia substantially echoed that of MSF, Jean, and Rufin. In contrast, Bernard Kouchner’s Charité business (1986) conveyed the tensions between Kouchner and the MSF activists. Yet his book, something between a personal manifesto and a survey of the industry, also demonstrated their shared emphasis on témoignage. Kouchner acknowledged the dilemma facing organisations working in Ethiopia: ‘must the doctors of the humanitarian associations, fighting disease and death at the ends of the earth, stay silent when their conscience is confronted with the intolerable?’ Reiterating his credo developed since Biafra, he insisted that ‘we do not want to be the hostages of dictators who tolerate us at the price of our silence’. Nonetheless, in relation to MSF’s stance on Ethiopia, he argued that an unplanned or isolated stand risked appearing like a political manoeuvre and that the denunciations came too late to have an effect. Though he was also critical of the follies of tiers-mondisme, Kouchner’s scorn for LSF and his disapproval of its anti-tiers-mondiste crusade were unmistakable. He warned of the dangers when ‘the denunciation is often delivered with the same excess and the same rigidity as the defence of dogma had been beforehand’.157 While he advocated activism, he rejected the ideologically loaded nature of those campaigns. A critical perspective was put forward by Claude Liauzu, who had featured in the anti-LSF dossier in Le Monde Diplomatique and extended his contribution with L’enjeu tiers-mondiste (1987). Liauzu reconstructed debates about tiers-mondisme in a manner far more supportive of tiersmondiste principles, if not of the application of this label. He saw MSF’s stand in Ethiopia as having the unintentional merit of undoing the illusion of apolitical humanitarianism, challenging the portrayal of aid as separate from politics. Nevertheless, his attitude towards the episode was largely negative, reiterating that leaving meant ‘disregarding charitable deontology as well as renouncing any chance of putting pressure on the Ethiopian government’. However, insofar as it discussed MSF’s activities, Liauzu’s book was much more a response to LSF than it was to the expulsion. He described the ‘pathetic poverty’ of LSF’s discourse as ‘a pot-pourri of the most hackneyed ideas of ex- and neo-liberals’. He caricatured MSF, essentially because of LSF, as specialised in the ‘artificial life support of a moribund “third-worldism”’. He expressed concern about the sans-frontiériste emphasis on publicity, which ‘in privileging the image, the scoop, creates

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an artificial reality and tends to reactivate Eurocentric stereotypes’.158 As an alternative, Liauzu called for the reinvention of tiers-mondisme as an expression of solidarity across different societies. This chapter’s focus on the ideological disputes around LSF has sidelined the role of memory in the French humanitarian response to Ethiopia. Yet once again there was evidence that European traumas provided a lens for the interpretation of extreme suffering beyond Europe. The influence upon Brauman’s analysis of Ethiopia of Arendt’s reflection on the Holocaust and the banality of evil has already been mentioned. Public statements of celebrity campaigners evoked Auschwitz or the Holocaust.159 Glucksmann and Wolton claimed that in media coverage the ‘“Ethiopian holocaust” followed the “Cambodian holocaust”’ without proper analysis, trapping the viewer in a spectacle of guilt redolent of tiers-mondisme: ‘Marxism . . . offers you a little Black boy at Buchenwald. And you are confronted with the image. . . . Him dying, you in the role of Nazi. Or of the one starving him [l’affameur], or the indifferent allowing the murder to happen’.160 In Charité Business, Kouchner connected the practice of témoignage in Ethiopia (though he had not shared in it), via Biafra to the legacy of the Holocaust. ‘We are eyes and ears capable of speaking out about illness and suffering, torture, and deportation’, he wrote, ‘Children of a silence that, for four years, froze a Europe deaf and blind to the genocide of Jews and Gypsies, we are forewarned’.161 As Weizman noted, ‘the imaginary geography of humanitarianism seems to have taken a giant leap in mapping the horrors of European history onto the Cold War frontiers in Africa and the ethnic fissures that precipitated it, but this imaginary geography was also very present in the mind-set of many Europeans who in preceding years transformed the practice of humanitarian aid’.162 However, the role of multidirectional memories in Ethiopia was much more limited than in other major humanitarian discourses in the decades on either side. Michael Buerk’s October 1984 report had spoken of a ‘Biblical famine’ in the twentieth century, not a repetition of the century’s genocides. The comparatively limited application of the rhetoric of the Holocaust to Ethiopia in comparison with its extensive use in relation to Vietnam, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and, later, Rwanda, suggests that the perceived cause of suffering affected the degree to which memories of the Second World War were invoked in humanitarian discourse. Atrocities – not famine – seem to have been more likely to drive appeals to memory. The persistent use of Holocaust imagery in responses to the Biafra– Nigeria War is not an exception to this rule but a confirmation of it, the

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famine being perceived as part of a genocidal campaign rather than a natural disaster. That the famine in Ethiopia was also a result of human agency, not the random hand of nature, was a less important influence on rhetoric than perceptions or portrayals to the contrary.

conclusion The short-lived excitement about the Iranian Revolution had demonstrated that, at the beginning of the decade, there were still remnants of revolutionary idealism in France. After Iran, it was Nicaragua that became ‘the last landmark or last tiers-mondiste utopia’, in the words of one critic of this utopian tendency.163 For European tiers-mondistes in the 1980s, solidarity with the Nicaraguan Sandinistas could still represent the opportunity to engage for something instead of protesting against.164 Yet those in France who were on the receiving end of the anti-ideological attacks wondered whether ‘all the struggles against tiers-mondisme and the work of development NGOs really showed that there was an intellectual void and unfortunately no sense of how to fill it’.165 Brauman later acknowledged that ‘in effect tiers-mondisme was moribund, it was in its death throes, our blows landed on a body that was nearly dead’.166 By 1989 the convenors of Liberté Sans Frontières were confident enough to affirm that ‘our unsettling, even provocative theories and critiques about thirdworldist ideology have become commonplace’.167 Ilios Yannakakis wrote to express agreement at ‘the success of our action in favour of awareness and responsibility for the reality of the Third World’.168 Gilbert Etienne similarly felt that ‘some latecomers or die-hards remain . . . but our cause is on the whole understood’.169 The general assembly called to decide on LSF’s fate, however, elected not to completely disband it but to simply cease its activities and financing.170 Although the name was retained, nothing has been released under the auspices of LSF since 1989. Despite being embedded in domestic political debates in France, LSF had significant implications for different visions of humanitarianism and the beliefs that sustain it. It exposed divergences in the humanitarian community over attitudes towards political orientation, about the role of public campaigning based on that orientation, and about what legitimated actions in the field and at headquarters. For the MSF movement, LSF was not merely an attack on others or an external critique, it represented an offensive against parts of its own membership and a statement about what it would be in the future. Equally, the LSF controversy illustrated how issues connected to a field context could be translated into debates

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about ideas at home. It was perceived as a repudiation of the search for justice and for alternatives to the prevailing system, a search which tiersmondisme had cast in revolutionary terms and which in development theory, at least as seen from the 1980s, had taken a modernising form. In 1980, when justifying the Marche pour la Survie du Cambodge, Xavier Emmanuelli had insisted upon the need for decisive action: ‘there is no such thing as an innocent action, someone is always pleased when we act, someone shocked, but the best thing is to go ahead – in good faith – in the name of a humanist ethics’.171 With the Ethiopian crisis five years later, this faith in the intent of humanitarian action would be replaced by an insistence upon the end result of the action, declared by François Jean ‘the only possible criterion faced with a logic that feeds on assistance to victims in order to drive them further each day into deprivation and oppression’.172 This understanding motivated MSF’s public protest against the deaths and suffering caused by the resettlement programme and population transfers, under the cover of international aid. MSF’s political activism undoubtedly affected responses to their humanitarian engagements. While some observers shared in recognition that a humanitarian campaign could be manipulated to abusive ends, many regarded the decision to speak out as an attention-seeking abdication of responsibility. Nonetheless, the stance adopted by MSF in Ethiopia has become less controversial over time. After 1985, Europe and the US made their aid donations contingent on the discontinuation of population transfers; the Derg complied and the resettlement programme was suspended, albeit temporarily.173 Though Mengistu remained in power until 1991, when he fled to Zimbabwe to escape advancing TPLF troops, he was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity by the Ethiopian High Court on 12 December 2006. Charges against Mengistu and his 105 co-defendants included murder, genocide – including forced displacements – and false imprisonment. Shortly after this trial, when MSF was again in tension with an Ethiopian Government over what it had witnessed in a conflict zone, the Foreign Affairs Ministry revealed a file of press cuttings of MSF’s public criticisms of Ethiopia dating back to the period of the expulsion.174 MSF was not the only one for whom this episode mattered. In the literature on humanitarianism, Ethiopia is often remembered for the way media and celebrity propelled the Western aid effort, especially the Band Aid phenomenon.175 Its anniversaries have been characterised by equal parts triumphalism and hand-wringing, or at least celebration and critique. Other, briefer mobilisations in the same period also

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performed this spectacle of sympathy, notably following the volcanic eruption that destroyed Armero, in Colombia, in 1986. Coverage of the disaster was dominated by the ordeal of thirteen-year-old Omayra Sánchez, who died in front of reporters from across the world sixty hours after being pinned by debris in the mudslide.176 Two years later, with famine again striking the Horn of Africa, Jean reflected on the rapid succession of catastrophes moving across the modern consciousness: ‘Tragic images of starving children break our hearts, soon to vanish in the onrush of the news cycle’.177 Unlike war, he wrote, ‘deeply rooted in the Western imagination as the symbol of absolute evil’, the spectre of famine seemed to appear, destroy, and dissipate in the eyes of a forgetful public. The passage of time and succession of emergencies since Jean made this claim do not appear to have proved him wrong.

Conclusion

This book opened with events in 1954. It draws to a gentle close in 1988, because of a similar confluence of events in this year, this time pertaining to humanitarian affairs. In May 1988, Bernard Kouchner followed Claude Malhuret into electoral politics, taking up a position as a Junior Minister under Socialist Prime Minister Michel Rocard. Malhuret had been charged two years earlier with a human rights dossier; Kouchner’s portfolio rapidly went from ‘social integration’ to ‘humanitarian action’. Humanitarian affairs became a government post and, tellingly, remained one for a decade. On 7 December 1988, an earthquake struck Soviet Armenia, claiming perhaps 100,000 lives and leaving roughly 60 per cent of people in the affected areas homeless. The scale of the aid effort was enormous and, given Soviet attitudes, remarkable. Members of MSF France unexpectedly received visas despite its anti-communist activism.1 With Resolution 43/131 the following day, the UN General Assembly affirmed sovereign states’ obligations to facilitate their own populations’ access to humanitarian aid. This landmark resolution bore the influence of French diplomacy and Kouchner’s personal contribution.2 Three years later came Resolution 46/182, which again affirmed the importance of humanitarian action and established the architecture of international response that saw in the twenty-first century.3 In the 1990s, humanitarian action undeniably but by no means unambiguously strengthened its prominent place in international politics. Across the decade, funding for humanitarian assistance rose to more than ten times its 1989 total of $800 million.4 The weakness of responses to massacres in Rwanda and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, and the military response to abuses in Somalia and Kosovo, provoked bitter 248

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debates about the limits of relief and the dangers of intervention against mass violence. Terms like ‘humanitarian alibi’ and ‘humanitarian bombing’ arose to describe the governmental instrumentalisation of responses to crisis, while references to ‘disaster pornography’ and the ‘aid industry’ suggested the increasing mediatisation and commercialisation of relief work. For French humanitarianism the 1990s continued and amplified a number of trends that had already figured in previous decades. One of these was the promotion of humanitarian intervention which, while neither an invention of sans-frontiérisme nor its defining feature, had nonetheless featured in sans-frontiériste discourse. Perhaps the first articulation of what would be called the ‘devoir d’ingérence’ (roughly translated as the ‘duty of interference’) was the 1979 dialogue where Kouchner advocated the ‘right of intervention’ as ‘a new international law of civilians, a supranational duty to save them’.5 This idea was also at the foundation of Michel Foucault’s 1981 manifesto. Later that decade, as president of MDM Kouchner cooperated with international law specialist Mario Bettati in a series of initiatives promoting the devoir d’ingérence, including a conference in January 1987 that led to the drafting of a principle of access to populations in need, followed by a co-edited book.6 In its early appearances this concept was highly ambiguous, as it could seemingly refer to the right of access to aid (a conception closer to some aspects of the laws of war and expressed in Resolution 43/131) as well as the coercive use of force to prevent atrocities (historically the intervention d’humanité but in the late twentieth century often referred to in France as the ‘droit’, meaning right or law, of interference). Kouchner would later recognise the latter in the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect and has remained a forceful advocate.7 However, an initial engagement with these concepts gave way to a gradual scepticism about the latter conception of the droit d’ingérence on the part of many sans-frontiéristes. In 1983 MSF was willing to express their belief in the devoir d’ingérence as ‘an essential requirement of democracy’ and in 1984 Claude Malhuret argued that ‘the personal ethic that obliges a doctor to treat any person in danger and journalists to fulfil their duty to inform’ represented a ‘moral imperative’ of greater weight than the ‘political convention’ of non-intervention in sovereign affairs.8 In this period the leaders of MSF were much more comfortable embracing a position as defenders of human rights than was the case at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Nonetheless, these calls were often limited to the first conception of the devoir d’ingérence as a right

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to assistance or individual imperative to act. In the 1990s, particularly during the Balkans conflicts and the genocide in Rwanda, key individuals and organisations in the sans-frontiériste movement went a step further, issuing calls for intervention. In Sarajevo, MDM insisted ‘it is not humanitarian aid that can resolve the problem’.9 Appealing for action in Rwanda, MSF famously declared: ‘You can’t stop genocide with doctors’. Yet commentators on international law and humanitarianism argued that there was no normative change taking place, despite the clamour of advocates of intervention.10 By mid decade, French observers were reporting a pervasive negativity about the high profile of humanitarian action, viewed by many of its own practitioners as ‘merely smoke and mirrors, a feverish and media-centric agitation destined to hide the passivity of Northern States faced with wars in the East and the South’.11 The advocacy of the droit d’ingérence and the role of states in humanitarian action were closely intertwined, and both contributed to intense self-criticism in the humanitarian sector. Over time, ideas of the droit d’ingérence, humanitarian intervention, and the Responsibility to Protect would be subject to severe criticism from a range of sources, including notably members of MSF.12 French debates about atrocities in the 1990s continued to link the Second World War to contemporary events. Though few were as blunt as the controversial 1993 MDM campaign comparing Serbian leader Slobodan Milosovic to Hitler, such parallels served as a lens for the Balkan conflicts of 1991–5. Rony Brauman, then president of MSF France, described the reliance on humanitarian action in the Balkans as ‘the contemporary form of the Munich mindset’.13 Jacques Julliard warned that ‘a half-century after the hunting of Jews and the death camps, today the tracking down of Muslims and of Croats, the reappearance of concentration camps, ethnic cleansing, tortures, massacres, bombing of civilian populations are a shame for the Serbs who perpetrate them and for Europe which tolerates them’.14 Some of the themes reprised those of previous exchanges and many participants had been speaking on such issues for decades. Bernard-Henri Lévy, for instance, described political extremism in a manner redolent of the anti-totalitarian vulgate of the 1970s: ‘Mein Kampf was a fundamentalist book. Communism, when it sought to cleanse Russian lands of “pests”, was fundamentalism. Pol Pot was fundamentalist. . . . Vichy, our fundamentalism. Ethnic cleansing in Bosnia is, by nature, fundamentalism. Genocide in Rwanda, obviously, is part of the fundamentalist logic’.15 Lévy was one of the most vocal campaigners for intervention on behalf of Bosnia, his calls for action sustained by systematic

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references to fascism, Nazism, resistance, complicity, and responsibility.16 The coincidence of the war with the fiftieth anniversary of the defeat of Nazism figured heavily in this discourse, as it did in condemnations of inaction faced with the genocide in Rwanda.17 Two aspects of this moment bear underlining. Firstly, it returned the legacy of the Holocaust to European soil. Since the 1950s, the Holocaust had served as a way of understanding violence beyond the West. At the beginning of that decade Aimé Césaire had compared the dehumanisation and brutality of colonial oppression with Nazism. Over the following decade or so, many of what had been colonial territories achieved political independence and in the same period the idea of the Holocaust as a unique and unprecedented modern genocide gained ground. In noting this conjunction, historian Michael Rothberg argued it was important because the struggle for recognition, embedded in post-colonial societies because of their pluralism, has influenced the dynamics of collective memory.18 In other words, collective memories have transnational ties at least partly because our identities do too. Rothberg’s focus was on how these dynamics applied during the Algerian War, which stood out as one of the most ferocious episodes in the history of decolonisation. But they were just as strongly in evidence during key moments of postcolonial catastrophe such as the Vietnam War, the Biafra–Nigeria War, and the discovery of genocide in Cambodia. War in the former Yugoslavia saw this lens applied once again, and extensively, to conflict in Europe. Secondly, the 1990s saw the explicit linking of the memory of the Holocaust, French responsibility for Holocaust crimes, and contemporary violence. The direct nature of this link can be seen in debates surrounding the fiftieth anniversary of the ‘Vélodrôme d’Hiver round-up’ of Jews in July 1942, the largest of its kind during the Occupation and in which French administrators and police played a central role. Alain Finkielkraut captured the disgust of advocates of stronger action against ethnic cleansing, arguing that ‘if there were truly one ounce of a “duty to memory” in our commemorations, then the fiftieth anniversary of the Vélodrôme d’Hiver would have dictated a very different comportment vis-à-vis the conflict in the Balkans’.19 Others made similar points in relation to the trial of milicien Paul Touvier, as when Jean-Marie Colombani, editor of Le Monde, insisted that ‘memory can be authentically faithful to the past only if it takes the form of vigilance in the present’.20 The most noteworthy example of this discourse was in newly elected President Jacques Chirac’s July 1995 speech, in which he simultaneously recognised France’s responsibility for Holocaust crimes and appealed for intervention against

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ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. Acknowledging that during the Second World War ‘France, land of the Enlightenment and of Human Rights . . . delivered those it was protecting to their executioners’, Chirac stressed the need to ‘learn the lessons of History’ and concluded that, ‘if we want to, we can put a halt to an undertaking that destroys our values and which gradually risks threatening all of Europe’.21 The 1990s thus saw the explicit articulation of a connection between the Holocaust, Vichy, and contemporary suffering that had largely remained latent for several decades. Before this time, a specifically French sense of complicity in the Holocaust had been steadily gaining recognition in academic circles and public forums but was only intermittently connected to present-day violence. Some of the clearest connections were made by marginal voices. At the end of the twentieth century this tripartite linkage strengthened markedly. Of course, the French were not alone in their quests to revisit and harness the memories of the Second World War. Memories of mid century have been a powerful driver of debates in many countries, inflected by national experiences and cultures though not limited to events within national borders. Above all, memories of the Holocaust have been seen as the foundation for the rise of human rights and humanitarianism, ‘since the dark days of Auschwitz, the world’s most valuable universalistic moral and political credo’, by scholars in a range of disciplines.22 Because of the pervasiveness of references to the Holocaust in the early 1990s, Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider claimed that ‘It was the historical backdrop of the Balkan crisis and unsuccessful demands for NATO intervention in Bosnia that helped establish the link and thus the centrality of the Holocaust as a measuring stick for international human rights abuses’.23 In their argument, an overly optimistic view of the practical effect of the slogan ‘Never Again’ went hand in glove with a sidelining of those groups who used such rhetoric at various moments during the Cold War. As the French case shows, references to the Holocaust were widespread during this earlier period. Moreover, they occupied a significant place in multiple forms of intellectual engagement: not only those associated with the values of human rights and humanitarianism, but also radical militancy in the name of revolution. Memories of the Holocaust informed appeals to violence as well as appeals to protection. The Holocaust legacy has been persistently invoked in calls for action, but this development has been ambiguous. While some commentators have seen the Holocaust memory as driving a new set of global ethical norms, others have challenged both the supposed reach and claimed

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normative implications. Its effectiveness as a spur to action has been roundly criticised.24 Although there is undeniably a case to make for the importance of memories of the Second World War in structuring responses to the suffering of others, and despite the rise of non-state actors that in various ways seek to promote these values, it is difficult to see a causal relationship between a discursive practice that links acts of violence across time and fundamental changes in some kind of agreed international moral order. The difficulty arises in part because that order is so hard to discern. Its architecture and institutions are more or less apparent, but their achievements remain hard to assess and profoundly disappointing for many who placed hope in the idea of an activist global citizenry that would no longer tolerate widespread abuses, inequality, or injustice. Humanitarianism has come under attack for fuelling war. It has been accused of disguising imperialism as universalism. Its own practitioners have denounced its ineffectiveness. The end of ethical utopias has already been announced.25 Humanitarianism has also been criticised as a poor substitute for earlier political ambitions. The confluence of the Holocaust memory, the promotion of neo-liberal interventionism, and the ascent of media-driven Western aid has influenced this critique of sans-frontiérisme as the distortion and even betrayal of tiers-mondistes’ decentring of Europe towards the third world. Portrayals of people of the third world went from revolutionary agents to recipients of aid. Media played a part by seeking only sound bites of suffering and serving up palatable ‘humanitarian’, not political, analyses. The Holocaust often figures latently for its emphasis on victimhood, seen by many historians of memory as having supplanted earlier tropes of heroism as the pre-eminent status to which appeals to memory lay claim. This change implicated the rise of humanitarianism in that ‘the visibility of the civilian humanitarian victim is exactly contemporaneous with the visibility of the genocide of the Jews; and it is in part with the latter, articulated and codified, that the former becomes understandable’.26 Thus for Ross, in the ‘new regime of representation of the humanitarian victim . . . the “wretched of the earth” had become, quite simply, the wretched – stripped, that is, of any political subjectivity or universalising possibility and reduced to a figure of pure alterity: be it victim or barbarian’. She continued: ‘the new third world is still wretched, but its agency has disappeared, leaving only the misery of a collective victim of famine, flood, or authoritarian state apparatuses’.27 There is something in this critique, elements of which have been expressed by commentators within or close to the humanitarian sector as well. Challenges

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to the assumed division between donors and recipients, or to the distinction between solidarity and charity – that is, between politics and humanitarianism – manifest the desire to re-examine these portrayals.28 Of course, when activists reflected on their own experience of the turn away from revolutionary models, it was never articulated as a reorientation towards victimhood. Different people adopted different tones when evoking their tiers-mondiste beliefs, some melancholy and almost nostalgic, some dismayed by the justification of violence, others investing aspirations in other possibilities for the renewal of an unhealthy West.29 It is extremely difficult to generalise about these experiences, based as they were on a multiplicity both of starting points and of experiences. Backing Castro was not the same as following Mao. The experiences of a journalist might not be echoed by those of a French doctor; what holds for one doctor might not ring true for their colleague. For some a disillusionment with radical politics was accelerated by direct experience abroad. For others it was more strongly influenced by the accounts of third parties or an intellectual process. Chaliand, whose own knowledge of third-world countries was direct as well as theoretical, described disenchantment as the collapse of overly abstract ideas under the weight of historical events.30 Brauman evoked the pleasure to be had in the aftermath of disillusionment, rediscovering autonomy of thought and broaching new questions instead of predetermined answers.31 Those individuals who perhaps most fully embodied the ideas many shared were also very singular, and very distinct from each other. This book has proposed one answer, or perhaps a series of them, to a question that David Rieff summed up already more than a decade ago: ‘How, in less than thirty years, could an ethos that, for all its grandeur and moral ambition, was initially realistic enough to understand that it could aspire to do little more than alleviate suffering have become the principal vehicle for the moral hopes of so many in the West?’32 It is an answer that has focused on the national, intellectual context of this ‘hope for a disenchanted time’, to again take Rieff’s words, and on what this hope meant for French ideas of the third world. Precisely how this particular ethos related to the wider expansion of humanitarianism in the same period, which was clearly energised by sans-frontiérisme but cannot be equated to it, would require a study of a different nature. At the foundation of the sans-frontiériste vision of the world, as at that of revolutionary engagement before it, was a belief in moral responsibility for the suffering of others. One advocated addressing injustice by political

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revolution; the other sought a revolution in the models of humanitarian aid. For tiers-mondistes as for sans-frontiéristes, the rejection of silence meant the refusal of complicity. In both movements, the legacy of the Second World War shaped the moral imperative for action. Both claimed ‘an absolute right to stand up and speak to those who hold power’ in the name of the suffering of others.33 Although the faith in the effectiveness of témoignage has been challenged, the practice of speaking out against abuses has been a constant in the development of the sans-frontiériste movement. And yet, as was the case for the left’s revolutionary aspirations, humanitarian activists were brought to acknowledge the utopian construction of their engagement. Sans-frontiériste action, for all its rejection of progressive ideological frameworks, also had to go through the process of discovery that ‘the conviction of being on the right side’ did not guarantee the positive effects of activism.34 Tiers-mondistes had articulated this same realisation following repeated news of left-wing dictatorships, revolutionary terror, and radical terrorists. The refusal, from the late 1970s onwards, to whitewash the exactions of revolutionary regimes was a fundamental difference from attitudes of the preceding decades. It represented a monumental break with the revolutionary privilege that had set the parameters of tier-mondiste intellectual duty, insulating left-wing movements against criticism for abuses. In the tiers-mondiste period, certain militant ambitions found inspiration in the emancipatory politics of the third world. Militants and intellectuals looked beyond their own borders, convinced, as François Maspero asserted, ‘more than ever, that it is not from Paris that we will be able to generate the judgements and analyses indispensable to the revolution’.35 Yet their views of the third world were always filtered through a French imaginary, focused on the prospects for change in France. So important was the revolutionary struggle that it justified the wielding of violence against the oppressors. But despite sharing the conviction of the German RAF, the Italian Red Brigades, or the American Weather Underground about the importance of violent resistance to imperialism – and thanks in part to an ongoing dialogue with sympathetic intellectual elders – the majority of French tiers-mondistes avoided the downwards spiral of terrorism. They were spared the isolation that these groups suffered, or which shaped Action Directe in France in the 1980s, and which encouraged an acceleration of violent operations in a dialogue des sourds with state oppression. Instead, a complex set of processes interacted within the shift of political paradigms towards human rights and humanitarian models.

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Frameworks for violence which had once been considered revolutionary came, in the years after the Munich Olympics massacre, to be considered terrorist and counterproductive. Debates about the past explored questions of morality and complicity. Campaigns on behalf of radicals began to focus on their rights as prisoners rather than their acts as revolutionaries. ‘Red terror against white terror is only ever terror’, the left decided.36 There was no longer any space in this form of political militancy for a global mission. Rising into the breach in French universalism, therefore, came the advocacy of ethical politics, of which sans-frontiérisme was one politically important and highly visible expression. They transposed some of the ambitions of tiers-mondisme as an expression of solidarity with the third world and an attempt to shoulder responsibility for the sufferings of others. They allowed some activists to adjust their horizons without fully questioning their paths. They also provided a vehicle for ideological campaigns, the language of impartiality at times veiling very conscious and partisan political positions. Despite advocating an ideologically neutral engagement, sans-frontiérisme still channelled politics. These could be politics of the left or right, of the powerful as well as the disenfranchised. It is easy to get carried away when using such language. Tiers-mondiste militancy also involved drudgery, naïveté, and a profoundly objectionable offhandedness about certain types of suffering. Sans-frontiériste action has not entirely avoided bureaucracy, self-aggrandisement, or a perverse and at times cruel paternalism. I hope that my attempt to articulate how they related on the level of their idealism will not be mistaken for an idealisation of their realities. There is no gain in confusing flights of rhetoric with a noble cause. But I do wish to insist that, like aspects of tiers-mondisme and some other versions of humanitarianism, sansfrontiérisme was articulated as a form of resistance to the violence of the world as it appeared. The revolutionary adventures of one, in that sense, found an alternative voice in the revolutionising ideals of the other.

Notes

Introduction 1 Its owner, François Maspero, captured the period in his semi-autobiographical novel Le figuier (Paris: Seuil, 1988). 2 Miguel Bensayag, ‘Quelqu’un de la famille’, Les Temps Modernes 531–3 (October–December 1990): 1021. See also Chris Marker (dir.), On vous parle de Paris (1970). 3 For an introduction to third-worldism as a state-based project associated with the non-aligned movement, see Mark T. Berger, ‘After the Third World? History, Destiny and the Fate of Third Worldism’, Third World Quarterly 25:1 (2004): 9–39. 4 Robert Malley, The Call From Algeria: Third Worldism, Revolution, and the Turn to Islam (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1996), p. 2. 5 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Il n’y a plus de dialogue possible’, in Sartre, Situations, vol. VIII: Autour de 68 (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 19. Originally published in Le Nouvel Observateur (1 April 1965). 6 Christophe Bourseiller, Les maoïstes: la folle histoire des gardes rouges français (Paris: Plon, 1996), p. 18. 7 Kouchner uses this term systematically and it has been recognised as a defining feature of French sans-frontiérisme. See, for example, Bernard Kouchner, Le malheur des autres (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1991), pp. 193–212; Jonathan Benthall, ‘Le sans-frontiérisme’, Anthropology Today 7:6 (December 1991): 1. 8 Jonathan Benthall, Disasters, Relief and the Media (London: I.B. Tauris and Co., 1993), p. 132. 9 Paul Berman, Power and the Idealists, or, The Passion of Joschka Fischer and its Aftermath (Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2005), p. 230. 10 Bertrand Taithe, ‘Reinventing (French) Universalism: Religion, Humanitarianism and the “French Doctors”’, Modern and Contemporary France 12:2 (May 2004): 155.

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11 Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 12, 113. 12 Jacques Broyelle, ‘Commentaire’, in Rony Brauman (ed.), Le tiers-mondisme en question (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1986), p. 73. 13 Claude Liauzu, L’enjeu tiers-mondiste: débats et combats (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1987), pp. 13, 43. See also Jean-Pierre Cot, A l’épreuve du pouvoir: le tiers-mondisme pour quoi faire? (Paris: Seuil, 1984); Christian Corneliau, Mythes et espoirs du tiers-mondisme (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1986); Bertrand Nezeys, L’autopsie du tiers-mondisme (Paris: Economica, 1988). 14 Maxime Szczepanski-Huillery, ‘“L’idéologie tiers-mondiste”. Constructions et usages d’une catégorie intellectuelle en “crise”’, Raisons politiques 18 (2005): 31–2. 15 Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman, Génération, vol. 1: Les années de rêve (Paris: Seuil, 1987) and vol. 2: Les années de poudre (Paris: Seuil, 1988). 16 Jeannine Verdès-Leroux, La lune et le caudillo: le rêve des intellectuels et le régime cubain (1959–1971) (Paris: Gallimard, 1989); Bourseiller, Les maoïstes; Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007); Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 17 Olivier Weber, French Doctors: les 25 ans d’épopée des hommes et des femmes qui ont inventé la médecine humanitaire (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995); PierreEdouard Deldique and Catherine Ninin, Globe Doctors: 20 ans d’aventure humanitaire (Paris: Belfond, 1991); Anne Vallaeys, Médecins sans frontières: la biographie (Paris: Fayard, 2004). 18 See, for example, Peter Redfield, Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journal of Doctors Without Borders (London; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Renée C. Fox, Doctors Without Borders: Humanitarian Quests, Impossible Dreams of Médecins Sans Frontières (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (Berkeley; London: University of California Press, 2011); Elsa Rambaud, ‘L’organisation sociale de la critique à Médecins Sans Frontières’, Revue française de science politique 29: 4 (2009): 723–56. 19 Tony Judt, Appraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (London: Vintage Books, 2009), p. 5. 20 Tim Allen and David Styan, ‘A Right to Interfere? Bernard Kouchner and the New Humanitarianism’, Journal of International Development 12 (2000): 828. 21 Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (London; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), pp. 144–7; David Rieff, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), pp. 106–7; Marie-Luce Desgrandchamps, ‘Revenir sur le mythe fondateur de Médecins Sans Frontières: les relations entre les médecins français et le CICR pendant la Guerre du Biafra (1967–1970)’, Relations Internationales 146 (2011): 95–108; Valérie Gorin, ‘La mémoire symbolique de la souffrance: représenter l’humanitaire dans la presse magazine américaine

Notes to pages 7–13

22

23

24 25

26

27 28 29

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et française (1967–1994)’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Geneva (2013). See, for example, Fiona Terry, The Principle of Neutrality: Is it Relevant to MSF? (Paris: MSF, 2000); Rony Brauman, Dangerous Liaisons: Bearing Witness and Political Propaganda. Biafra and Cambodia – the Founding Myths of Médecins Sans Frontières (Paris: MSF, 2006); MSF, My Sweet La Mancha (Geneva: MSF, 2006); Claire Magone, Michaël Neuman, and Fabrice Weissman (eds.), Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experience (London: Hurst and Company, 2011). Hans Kundnani, Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust (London: Hurst and Company, 2009); Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory: The American Experience (London: Bloomsbury, 2000); William Shawcross, The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience (London: Andre Deutsch, 1984); Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza (London: Verso, 2011). Olivier Rolin, Paper Tiger (Lincoln; London: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), p. 129. See, for example, Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The Age of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009); Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge; London: Belknap, 2010); Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Stephen Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013). In addition to those cited in notes 27–30 below, see Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left: The Anti-Totalitarian Moment of the 1970s (New York; Oxford: Berghahn, 2004); David Drake, Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002); Pierre Grémion, Paris/Prague: la gauche face au renouveau et à la régression tchécoslovaques, 1968–1978 (Paris: Julliard, 1985); François Hourmant, Le désenchantement des clercs: figures de l’intellectuel dans l’après-Mai 68 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1997). Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics. Sunil Khilnani, Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 123–4. Robert Horvath, ‘“The Solzhenitsyn Effect”: East European Dissidents and the Demise of the Revolutionary Privilege’, Human Rights Quarterly 29 (2007): 882, 905. Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives; Paige Arthur, Unfinished Projects: Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (London; New York: Verso, 2010). Samuel Moyn, Human Rights and the Uses of History (London: Verso, 2014), p. 94. See Robert Linhart, L’établi (Paris: Minuit, 1978); his daughter published a moving profile of him and the impact of his militancy in Virginie Linhart, Le jour où mon père s’est tu (Paris: Seuil, 2008).

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33 Rieff, A Bed for the Night, p. 84; Miriam Ticktin, ‘Where Ethics and Politics Meet: The Violence of Humanitarianism in France’, American Ethnologist 33:1 (2006): 35. Davies used MSF in a similar way to represent humanitarian NGOs, in Thomas Davies, NGOs: A New History of Transnational Civil Society (London: Hurst, 2013), pp. 1, 3. 34 Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action (ALNAP), State of the Humanitarian System (London: Overseas Development Institute, 2012), p. 29. 35 See the special edition entitled ‘Utopie Missionaire, Militantisme Catholique’, Le Mouvement Social 177 (1996); Sheila Nowinski, ‘French Catholic Activism in Algeria between Colonisation and Development’, French History 27:3 (2013): 371–93. 36 International conference of the Fourth International, April 1946, cited in Sylvain Pattieu, ‘Le “camarade” Pablo, la IVe Internationale et la guerre d’Algérie’, Revue historique 619 (July–September 2001): 700. The trajectory of Jacky Mamou, former president of MDM, is evidence of the connection between Trotskyism and radical humanitarianism; see Jacky Mamou, L’humanitaire expliqué à mes enfants (Paris: Seuil, 2001). 37 Readers interested in this element may look to Axelle Brodiez, Le Secours populaire français, 1945–2000: du communisme à l’humanitaire (Paris: Presse de la Fondation National des Sciences Politiques, 2006). 38 Julian Jackson, ‘The Mystery of May 1968’, French Historical Studies 33:4 (2010): 626. 39 Philippe Artières and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel (eds.), 68: Une histoire collective 1962–1981 (Paris: La Découverte, 2008); Emile Copfermann, ‘Tout est encore possible’, Partisans 42 (May–June 1968): 3–7; ‘“L’esprit de Mai” et les grandes interrogations de la médecine libérale: Faut-il contester? Va-t-on relever les honoraires? La convention sera-t-elle révisée?’ Tonus 336 (1 July 1968), 1–2. 40 Philippe Ryfman, ‘L’humanitaire, enfant de Mai?’ in Artières and ZancariniFournel, 68: une histoire collective 1962–1981, pp. 736–45. 41 Pierre Goldman, Souvenirs obscurs d’un juif polonais né en France (Paris: Seuil, 1975), p. 70.

1 A revolution in aid: the creation of sans-frontiérisme 1 Dan Bortolotti, Hope in Hell: Inside the World of Doctors Without Borders (Ontario; New York: Firefly Books, 2004), pp. 11–12; see also Renée C. Fox, Doctors Without Borders: Humanitarian Quests, Impossible Dreams of Médecins Sans Frontières (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), p. 45. 2 An overly literal reading of David Rieff’s rightfully influential analysis in A Bed for the Night seems to have influenced this portrayal as well as the claim that the link between ICRC conduct in the Holocaust and during Biafra was articulated at the time. Rieff noted the strength of this discursive link in sans-frontiéristes’ retrospective accounts of the period and the absence of any

Notes to pages 21–5

3

4 5 6

7

8

9 10 11 12

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contestation of it despite detailed disputes about the legacy of Biafra. Correspondence with the author, 3 February 2015. C. B., ‘Sans abandonner les missions d’urgence, les Médecins sans frontières souhaitent aussi prendre en charge les besoins de santé de populations démunis’, Le Monde, 6 May 1977, 44. Peter Redfield, Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journal of Doctors Without Borders (London; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). Alex de Waal, Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 72, 77. Michael Aaronson, ‘The Nigerian Civil War and “Humanitarian Intervention”’, in Bronwen Everill and Josiah Kaplan (eds.), The History and Practice of Humanitarian Intervention and Aid in Africa (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), pp. 176–96; Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos, ‘Humanitarian Aid and the Biafra War: Lessons Not Learned’, Africa Development 34:1 (2009): 69–82; Peter Bush, ‘Biafra and the Canadian Churches, 1966–1970’, Historical Papers: Canadian Society of Church History (2003): 129–47; Marie-Luce Desgrandchamps, ‘Entre coopération et concurrence: CICR, UNICEF et organisations religieuses au Biafra’, Relations Internationales 152 (2012): 51–62; Kevin O’Sullivan, ‘Humanitarian Encounters: Biafra, NGOs and Imaginings of the Third World in Britain and Ireland, 1967–70’, Journal of Genocide Research 16:2–3 (2014): 299–315. Interview with Cristina Ruiz, London, 12 September 2013; interview with Brendan Gormley, London, 9 October 2013; interview with Ed Cairns, London, 16 October 2013. Craig Calhoun, ‘The Imperative to Reduce Suffering: Charity, Progress and Emergencies in the Field of Humanitarian Action’, in Michael Barnett and Thomas G. Weiss (eds.), Humanitarianism: Politics, Power, Ethics (Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2008), p. 76. Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianisim (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), pp. 37–40. Frank T. Carlton, ‘Humanitarianism, Past and Present’, International Journal of Ethics 17:1 (1906): 48–55. Maurice Parmelee, ‘The Rise of Modern Humanitarianism’, The American Journal of Sociology 21:3 (1915): 345–59. See, for example, Barnett, Empire of Humanity; Eleanor Davey with John Borton and Matthew Foley, A History of the Humanitarian System: Western Origins and Foundations (London: Overseas Development Institute [ODI], 2013); Peter Walker and Daniel G. Maxwell, Shaping the Humanitarian World (London: Routledge, 2009). Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 148–77; Marie Juul Petersen, ‘For Humanity or for the Umma? Ideologies of Aid in Four Transnational Muslim NGOs’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Copenhagen (2011). On the ‘master narrative’ see Katherine Davies, Continuity, Change and Contest: Meanings of ‘Humanitarian’ from the ‘Religion of Humanity’ to the Kosovo War (London: ODI, 2012). See also Daniel Palmieri, ‘An Institution Standing the Test of Time? A Review of 150 Years of the History of the

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16 17 18

19

20

21 22

23 24

25

26 27

28

Notes to pages 25–7

International Committee of the Red Cross’, International Review of the Red Cross 94:888 (2012): 1–26. This was the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71; see Caroline Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland, and the History of the Red Cross (London: Harper Collins, 1998), pp. 60–85. David Forsythe, The Humanitarians: The International Committee of the Red Cross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 30. Gary J. Bass, Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (New York: Vintage Books, 2009), p. 35. John Hutchinson, ‘Rethinking the Origins of the Red Cross’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 63:4 (1989): 557–78; Thomas Haskell, ‘Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility’, The American Historical Review 90:2/3(1985): 339–61; 547–66. K. David Patterson, ‘Epidemics, Famines, and Population in the Cape Verde Islands, 1580–1900’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies 21:2 (1988): 309. Keith David Watenpaugh, ‘Modern Humanitarianism and the Year of the Locust: American Relief in Palestine and Lebanon 1914–1918’, in Eleanor Davey and Eva Svoboda (eds.), Histories of Humanitarianism in the Middle East and North Africa (London: ODI, 2014), p. 34. Philippe Mesnard, La victime écran: la représentation humanitaire en question (Paris: Textuel, 2002), p. 55. For instance, the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) appeal for the Syrian conflict raised £25 million in just over a year, while in under three months overlapping with the same period the DEC received £90 million in response to its Typhoon Haiyan appeal. See www.dec.org.uk. On the history of the DEC, see Andrew Jones, ‘The Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) and the Humanitarian Industry in Britain, 1963–85’, Twentieth-Century British History (online 2014). Xavier Emmanuelli, Les prédateurs de l’action humanitaire (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991), p. 186. Bertrand Taithe, ‘Reinventing (French) Universalism: Religion, Humanitarianism and the “French Doctors”’, Modern and Contemporary France 12:2 (May 2004): 148; Philippe Ryfman, La question humanitaire: histoire, problématique, acteurs et enjeux de l’aide humanitaire internationale (Paris: Ellipses, 1999), p. 50. Peter Redfield, ‘Secular Humanitarianism and the Value of Life’, in Courtney Bender and Ann Taves (eds.), What Matters? Ethnographies of Value in a Not So Secular Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), pp. 144–78. Rony Brauman, Penser dans l’urgence: parcours critique d’un humanitaire. Entretiens avec Catherine Portevin (Paris: Seuil, 2006), p. 44. Jean-Hervé Bradol and Claudine Vidal (eds.), Medical Innovations in Humanitarian Situations: The Work of Médecins Sans Frontières (New York: MSF, 2011). Emily Baughan, ‘“Every Citizen of Empire Implored to Save the Children!” Empire, Internationalism and the Save the Children Fund in Inter-war Britain’, Historical Research 86:231 (2012): 124.

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29 Peter Burns cited in Maggie Black, A Cause for Our Times: Oxfam, the First 50 Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 107. 30 Stephen Hopgood, Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 59. 31 Pierre Boissier, History of the International Committee of the Red Cross: from Solferino to Tsushima (Geneva: Henry Dunant Institute, 1985), p. 275. 32 Bernard Kouchner, ‘De l’enthousiasme à l’épuisement’, Le Monde, 14 January 1970, 2. 33 Lasse Heerten and A. Dirk Moses, ‘The Nigeria–Biafra War: Postcolonial Conflict and the Question of Genocide’, Journal of Genocide Research 16:2–3 (2014): 169. 34 Valérie Gorin, ‘La couverture médiatique de la guerre civile du Biafra au regard des enjeux humanitaires dans les médias français, suisses et américains (1967–1970)’, Le Temps des Medias (2013): 176–95. 35 Alvin G. Edgell, ‘Nigeria/Biafra’, in Morris Davis (ed.), Civil Wars and the Politics of International Relief: Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1975), p. 50. 36 ‘Biafra Still a United Nation after One Year at War’, 9 July 1968, Document 227 in Biafran Overseas Press Division, Press Actions: Abridged Edition Covering Period February 2nd to December 31st, 1968 (Geneva: Markpress News Feature Service, no date), unpaginated. 37 Okechukwu Ibeanu, ‘Child Refugees and the Nigerian Civil War’, in Eghosa E. Osaghae, Ebere Onwudiwe, Rotimi T. Suberu (eds.), The Nigerian Civil War and its Aftermath (Ibadan: John Archers, 2002), p. 242. 38 Ian Smillie, The Alms Bazaar (London: Intermediate Technology Publications, 1995), p. 104; Smillie, ‘The Emperor’s Old Clothes: The Self-created Siege of Humanitarian Action’, in Antonio Donini (ed.), The Golden Fleece: Manipulation and Independence in Humanitarian Action (Sterling: Kumarian Press, 2012), pp. 30–31. 39 Lawrence Fellow, ‘Anger in Africa over West’s Help to Biafra Rises’, New York Times, 30 September 1968. 40 Federal Government of Nigeria Policy Statement on Relief Supplies to Displaced Persons and Other Civilian Victims of the Civil War, Lagos, 30 June 1939, reproduced in Thierry Hentsch, Face au blocus: la Croix-Rouge internationale dans le Biafra en guerre (1967–1970) (Geneva: Institut des hautes études internationales, 1973), p. 276. 41 Fiona Terry, Condemned to Repeat? The Paradox of Humanitarian Action (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 42. 42 ‘Notes on Relief Negotiations with I.C.R.C.’, undated [September 1969?], Document 720 in Biafran Overseas Press Division, Press Actions: Abridged Edition Covering Period July 1st to December 31st, 1969 (Geneva: Markpress, no date), unpaginated. 43 Smillie, ‘The Emperor’s Old Clothes’, p. 31. 44 Edgell, ‘Nigeria/Biafra’, p. 68. 45 De Waal, Famine Crimes, pp. 75–6. 46 Susan Durr cited in Brian McNeil, ‘“And Starvation is the Grim Reaper”: the American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive and the Genocide Question

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50 51 52 53

54 55 56 57

58 59 60

61 62 63

Notes to pages 30–3

during the Nigerian Civil War’, Journal of Genocide Research 16:2–3 (2014): 327. Pascal Grellety Bosviel and Sophie Bocquillon, Toute une vie d’humanitaire: 50 ans de terrain d’un médecin-carnettiste (Bordeaux: Elytis, 2013), p. 86. Bernard Kouchner, Charité business (Paris: Le Pré aux clercs, 1986), p. 213. ‘Biafran Head of State Calls for an American Peace Initiative as Nigerians Continue Bombing Biafran Civilians during Declared Truce’, 26 February 1969, Document 522 in Biafran Overseas Press Division, Press Actions: Abridged Edition Covering Period January 1st to June 30th, 1969 (Geneva: Markpress, no date), unpaginated. On the CRF hospital, see Anne Vallaeys, Médecins sans frontières: la biographie (Paris: Fayard, 2004), pp. 60–62. Raymond Debenedetti, ‘Exposé du Président’, in Croix-Rouge Française, Assemblée générale statutaire, Paris: 25 et 26 Novembre 1968, p. 6. ‘Le Croix-Rouge dans le monde: Epilogue d’un drame africain’, Vie et Bonté 197 (January–February 1970): 23. Marie-Luce Desgrandchamps, ‘Revenir sur le mythe fondateur de Médecins Sans Frontières: les relations entre les médecins français et le CICR pendant la Guerre du Biafra (1967–1970)’, Relations Internationales 146 (2011): 102. Max Récamier and Bernard Kouchner, ‘De retour du Biafra: deux médecins français témoignent’, Le Monde, 27 November 1968, 15. Grellety Bosviel and Bocquillon, Toute une vie d’humanitaire, p. 87; Vallaeys, Médecins Sans Frontières, p. 74; Ibid., p. 67. Ibid., p. 67. Douglas Anthony, ‘“Ours Is a War of Survival”: Biafra, Nigeria and Arguments about Genocide, 1966–70’, Journal of Genocide Research 16:2–3 (2014): 212–13. McNeil, ‘The American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive and the Genocide Question’, 328–9. Yves-Guy Bergès, ‘Dans quelques jours peut-être, le Biafra va mourir pour avoir cru en notre civilisation’, France Soir, 28 August 1968, 2. J.-C. Bercail, ‘Biafra ou les nocifs paradoxes de la charité’, Sud-ouest Dimanche, 18 January 1970, 6. Attributed to Guillebaud in two sources: Backmann in Rony Brauman and René Backmann, Les médias et l’humanitaire: éthique de l’information ou charité-spectacle (Paris: CFPJ, 1996), p. 71; Denis Maillard, L’humanitaire, tragédie de la démocratie (Paris: Michalon, 2007), p. 28. Bernard Kouchner, ‘Un médecin accuse . . . ’ Le Nouvel Observateur 271 (19– 25 January 1970), 21. Yves Lavoinne, ‘Médecins en guerre: du témoignage au “tapage médiatique” (1968–1970)’, Le Temps des Medias 1:4 (2005): 114–26. See Rounaq Jahan, ‘Genocide in Bangladesh’, in Samuel Totten, William S. Parsons, and Israel W. Charny (eds.), Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts (New York; London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 297–321; Nicholas Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 55– 77.

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64 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, The State of the World’s Refugees: Fifty Years of Humanitarian Action (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 65. 65 Karen E. Smith, Genocide and the Europeans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 65–104. 66 A. Dirk Moses, ‘The United Nations, Humanitarianism, and Human Rights: War Crimes/Genocide Trials for Pakistani Soldiers in Bangladesh, 1971–1974’ in Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (ed.), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 261–7. 67 Jean-Claude Guillebaud, Les années orphelines, 1968–1978 (Paris: Seuil, 1978), p. 43. 68 Alain Guillemoles, Bernard Kouchner: la biographie (Paris: Bayard, 2002), p. 107. 69 Hervé Chabalier, ‘La longue course des médecins sans frontières: I. Baroudeurs en blouses blanches’, Le Matin de Paris, supplement, 26–27 January 1980, 7– 8. 70 Emmanuelli, Les prédateurs de l’action humanitaire, pp. 147–51; Emmanuelli, L’homme en état d’urgence (Paris: Hachette, 2005), pp. 17–33. 71 In Vallaeys, Médecins sans frontières, pp. 104–5. 72 Axelle Brodiez, Le Secours populaire français, 1945–2000: du communisme à l’humanitaire (Paris: Presse de la Fondation National des Sciences Politiques, 2006), p. 160. 73 Frederick Cuny, Disasters and Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 20. 74 Notably in the creation of the Office of the UN Disaster Relief Coordinator and coordination bodies for NGOs. Randolph Kent, Anatomy of Disaster Relief: The International Network in Action (London: Pinter Publishers, 1987), pp. 46–54. 75 Cited in Patrice Hovald, Toutes ces années . . . et André Malraux (Paris: Cerf, 1978), p. 26. 76 ‘Des centaines de volontaires répondent oui à Malraux pour écrire un nouveau chapitre de L’espoir’, Paris Match 1170 (9 October 1971), 57. 77 Cited in Hovald, Toutes ces années, p. 25. 78 André Malraux, Foreword to How Pakistan Violated Human Rights in Bangladesh (New Delhi: Indian Council of World Affairs, 1972), pp. ix–x. 79 Yves-Guy Bergès, ‘On demande un nouveau Dunant’, L’Express (22–28 November 1971), 76. 80 Bergès, ‘Le Biafra va mourir pour avoir cru en notre civilisation’, 2. 81 Bergès, ‘On demande un nouveau Dunant’, 76. 82 Ibid. 83 ‘Inde: aidez-les à survivre! Un appel du Prince Sadruddin Khan’, Tonus 486 (15 November 1971):1, 7; Philippe Bernier, ‘Des conditions de vie révoltantes’, Tonus 486 (15 November 1971): 7. 84 Raymond Borel, ‘Que M.S.F. disparaisse . . . ’ Bulletin MSF 30 (December 1986 to January–February 1987), 3. See also Joelle Tanguy, ‘The Médecins Sans Frontières Experience’, in Kevin M. Cahill (ed.), A Framework for Survival: Health, Human Rights and Humanitarian Assistance in Conflicts and Disasters (New York; London: Routledge, 1999), p. 229.

266

Notes to pages 37–9

85 Kouchner, Charité business, p. 218. 86 Ibid., p. 208. 87 ‘Création à Paris d’un comité de lutte contre le génocide au Biafra’, Le Monde, 14 December 1968, 4. 88 Bernard Kouchner, Le malheur des autres (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1991), pp. 114–15. 89 The term is Kouchner’s, in ibid. One study of NGO workers found a range of attitudes: a turn to humanitarian action because of a rejection of politics; humanitarian engagement as as prolongation of political militancy; and a move towards politics as part of recognition of the limits of humanitarian action. Kouchner’s description would appear to correspond to the second experience. Pascal Dauvin and Johanna Siméant, Le travail humanitaire: les acteurs des ONG, du siège au terrain (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 2002), p. 80. 90 Jean-François Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises: manifestes et pétitions au XXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1990), p. 242. 91 Pierre Vidal-Naquet, ‘De mai à août et de Paris à Prague’, Partisans 43 (1968): 155. 92 See, for example, Philippe Decraene, ‘La guerre civile au Nigéria: l’intervention de l’Union soviétique aux côtés du gouvernement fédéral donne à la crise une dimension internationale’, Le Monde Diplomatique 162 (September 1967), 22; Edouard Pellissier, ‘Aggravé par l’intervention des grandes puissances, le problème du Biafra devrait être résolu dans le cadre du continent africain’, Le Monde Diplomatique 174 (September 1968), 1, 14. 93 Robert Cornevin, ‘Les Biafrais semblent condamnés à accepter tôt ou tard un compromis’, Le Monde Diplomatique 182 (May 1969), 6. 94 Edouard Pellissier, ‘L’évolution du continent africain: au Nigéria, la paix des cœurs doit passer avant celle des armes’, Le Monde Diplomatique 171 (June 1968), 8. 95 Edouard Pellissier, ‘Après la cessation des combats au Nigéria: la République du Biafra fut avant tout l’aventure personnelle du général Ojukwu’, Le Monde Diplomatique 191 (February 1970), 3. 96 Cited in Lavoinne, ‘Médecins en guerre’, 115. 97 ‘Lettre ouverte sur le Biafra de vingt-deux intellectuels de gauche’, Le Meilleur des Mondes 5 (2007): 38. Originally published January 1969. Also reproduced in Humanitaire 1 (2000): 6–7. 98 ‘An interview with Sartre’, New York Review of Books XIV:6 (26 March 1970): 30. 99 Ann Curthoys and John Docker, ‘Defining Genocide’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of Genocide (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), pp. 9–41. 100 Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory: The American Experience (London: Bloomsbury, 2000). 101 Heerten and Moses, ‘The Nigeria–Biafra War’. 102 Roy Doron, ‘Marketing Genocide: Biafran Propaganda Strategies during the Nigerian Civil War, 1967–70’, Journal of Genocide Research 16:2–3 (2014): 230–40.

Notes to pages 39–41

267

103 Hentsch, Face au blocus, p. 94. 104 Namdi Azikiwe in ‘Biafra Will Emerge Victorious, Former Nigerian President Tells Troops’, 29 February, 1968, Document 14 in Biafran Overseas Press Division, Press Actions, unpaginated. 105 ‘Excerpts from an Address by His Excellency Lt. Col. Odumegwu Ojukwu in Umuahia on November 13, 1968’, 14 November, 1968, Document 406 in ibid., unpaginated. 106 ‘“Certain overtones of genocide” in Nigeria’s conduct of her war against Biafra, says I.C.R.C. Chief Delegate’, 25 November, 1968, Document 414 in ibid., unpaginated. 107 See McNeil, ‘The American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive and the Genocide Question’; Karen E. Smith, ‘The UK and “genocide” in Biafra’, Journal of Genocide Research 16:2–3 (2014): 247–62; Lasse Heerten, ‘“A” as in Auschwitz, “B” as in Biafra: The Nigerian Civil War, Visual Narratives of Genocide, and the Fragmented Universalization of the Holocaust’, in Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno (eds.), Humanitarian Photography: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015): pp. 249–74. 108 Bergès, ‘Le Biafra va mourir pour avoir cru en notre civilisation’. 109 Yves-Guy Bergès, ‘Biafra: les camps de réfugiés sont des Buchenwald pour moins de 13 ans’, France Soir, 25–26 August 1968, 2; Bergès, ‘Je viens de vivre les heures atroces du Biafra agonisant’, France Soir, 22 August 1968, 5. 110 ‘Création à Paris d’un comité de lutte’, 4. 111 Heerten, ‘“A” as in Auschwitz, “B” as in Biafra’. 112 ‘Une conférence de presse donnée par des médecins de retour du BIAFRA’, Supplement, Bulletin du Comité d’Action Pour le Biafra 5, 18 November 1969, 3. 113 Bernard Kouchner, ‘Un médecin accuse . . . ’ Le Nouvel Observateur 271 (19– 25 January 1970), 21. 114 ‘Des personnalités de gauche dénoncent “un gangstérisme aux dimensions de la planète”’, Le Monde, 13 January 1970, 4. 115 Heerten, ‘“A” as in Auschwitz, “B” as in Biafra’. 116 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 11. 117 Jean-Claude Favez, The Red Cross and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 54. 118 Rieff also pointed to the secondary factors of anti-Semitism within the ICRC itself and a desire not to jeopardise Switzerland’s neutral position. David Rieff, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), p. 77. 119 The ICRC continues to offer penance for its ‘failure’ and ‘impotence’ with regard to the victims of the Nazi death camps. See www.icrc.org/eng/ resources/documents/misc/history-holocauste-020205.htm, last accessed 13 September 2014. In contrast, Sébastien Farré has made a convincing plea for historical research and the broader debate to move beyond the preoccupation with ethical calculations in favour of a fuller operational investigation. Sébastien Farré, ‘The ICRC and the Detainees in Nazi Concentration Camps

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120 121 122 123

124 125

126 127 128 129 130 131

132 133 134 135 136 137 138

139

140 141

Notes to pages 41–4 (1942–1945)’, International Review of the Red Cross 94:888 (2012): 1381– 408. Rieff, A Bed for the Night, p. 82. Récamier and Kouchner, ‘De retour du Biafra’, 15. ‘Des personnalités de gauche dénoncent “un gangstérisme aux dimensions de la planète”’. See, for example, André Glucksmann and Bernard Kouchner, ‘La preuve par le Cambodge’, Le Nouvel Observateur 785 (26 November 1979), 118; Rony Brauman, Humanitaire: le dilemme, entretien avec Philippe Petit (Paris: Textuel, 2002), pp. 24–8. Bernard Kouchner, ‘L’humanitaire a changé le monde’, Les Temps Modernes 627 (2004): 12. Philippe Ryfman, ‘L’humanitaire, enfant de Mai?’ in Philippe Artières and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel (eds.), 68: Une histoire collective 1962–1981 (Paris: La Découverte, 2008), p. 742. Jean-Pierre Le Crom, Au secours maréchal! L’instrumentalisation de l’humanitaire (1940–1944) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013). Kouchner, Le malheur des autres, pp. 13, 45, 50. André Glucksmann, ‘Bernard Kouchner: Angel of Mercy’, Time, 26 April 2004, 121. Kouchner, ‘L’humanitaire a changé le monde’, 12. Maillard, L’humanitaire, tragédie de la démocratie, p. 25. See, for example, Bernard Kouchner, Preface to Jacques Lebas, Florence Veber, and Gilles Brücker (eds.), Médecine humanitaire (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), p. xiii. See, for example, Brauman, Penser dans l’urgence, 93. On the lack of evidence for genocide, see also de Waal, Famine Crimes, p. 77. Kouchner, Charité Business, p. 214. Brauman and Backmann, Les médias et l’humanitaire, p. 27. Bernard Kouchner, L’Ile de Lumière (Paris: Editions Ramsay, 1980), p. 224. Rony Brauman, ‘Ennemis publics’, in Aymeric Mantoux and Sophie Delassein (eds.), Kouchner vu par . . . (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2008), p. 118. See Juliette Senik (dir.), Kouchner–Brauman, duel sans frontières. First screened on France 5, 13 March 2014. Vallaeys, Médecins sans frontières, p. 76. See also Vallaeys, ‘Le paravent humanitaire: l’Etat s’est souvent caché derrière les actions des French doctors pour faire valoir ses intérêts’, Libération, 29 May 2007, 25. She was responding to an elegiac profile of Kouchner after his entry into François Fillon’s government: Alain Duhamel, ‘Kouchner, le boomerang bien-aimé’, Libération, 23 May 2007, 23. Patrick Aeberhard, ‘Biafra: en défense de Kouchner’, Le Meilleur des Mondes 5 (2007): 37; Aeberhard, ‘A Historical Survey of Humanitarian Action’, Health and Human Rights 2:1 (1996): 38. Pierre Péan, Le monde selon K. (Paris: Fayard, 2009), pp. 40–56. Rony Brauman, ‘Médecins Sans Frontières and the ICRC: Matters of Principle’, International Review of the Red Cross 94:888 (2013): 1525.

Notes to pages 44–7

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142 Desgrandchamps, ‘Revenir sur le mythe fondateur de Médecins Sans Frontières’, 101. 143 Ibid., 103–4. 144 Marie-Luce Desgrandchamps, ‘Dealing with “Genocide”: the ICRC and the UN during the Nigeria-Biafra War, 1967–70’, Journal of Genocide Research 16:2–3 (2014): 292. 145 ‘Hommage aux équipes de la Croix-Rouge Française au Biafra’, CroixRouge Française Assemblée générale statutaire, Paris, 24–25 November 1969, 14; ‘Le Croix-Rouge dans le monde’, Vie et Bonté 196 (December 1969): 28; ‘Hommage aux pilotes, médecins, infirmiers et secouristes volontaires pour le Biafra’, Vie et Bonté 197 (January–February 1970), 16– 17. 146 Hentsch, Face au blocus, pp. 6–8. 147 The Red Cross movement has seven ‘fundamental principles’: humanity, impartiality, neutrality, independence, unity, voluntary service, and universality. Jean Pictet, The Fundamental Principles of the Red Cross Proclaimed by the Twentieth International Conference of the Red Cross, Vienna, 1965: Commentary (Geneva: Henry Dunant Institute, 1979). 148 Jacques Freymond, ‘Le Comité international de la Croix-Rouge dans le système international’, Revue Internationale de la Croix-Rouge 54:641 (1972): 271. 149 Ibid., 277. 150 Jacques Freymond, ‘La Croix-Rouge internationale et la paix’, Revue Internationale de la Croix-Rouge 54:638 (1972): 72. 151 ‘Annexe No. 15: Charte de Médecins sans frontières’, in Lebas, Veber, and Brücker, Médecine humanitaire, p. 358. 152 Philippe Bernier, Des Médecins Sans Frontières (Paris: Albin Michel, 1980), pp. 49–50. 153 Olivier Weber, French Doctors: Les 25 ans d’épopée des hommes et des femmes qui ont inventé la médecine humanitaire (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995), pp. 101–3. Bernier was also at the Brasserie Lipp on 29 October 1965 for a meeting with Moroccan opposition figure Mehdi Ben Barka, when the latter was abducted from the street, never to be seen again. 154 Bernier, Des Médecins Sans Frontières, p. 45. 155 Kouchner, Le malheur des autres, p. 216. See also the description in Daniel Pierrejean, Bernard Kouchner: du Biafra au Kosovo, biographie (Paris: Editions Editeur Indépendant, 2007), pp. 104–5. 156 Bernier, Des Médecins Sans Frontières, pp. 63–8; Hervé Chabalier, ‘La longue course des médecins sans frontières: II. Le cri étouffé du Kurdistan’, Le Matin de Paris, 28 January 1980, 16; Guillemoles, Bernard Kouchner, p. 125. 157 Cited in Vallaeys, Médecins sans frontières, p. 165. 158 Ibid. 159 Gérard Chaliand, ‘La question kurde’, Partisans 1 (1961): 79; Maxime Rodinson, Preface to Gérard Chaliand (ed.), Les Kurdes et le Kurdistan (Paris: Maspero, 1978); Jean Pradier, Les Kurdes: révolution silencieuse (Bordeaux: Ducros, 1968); Gérard Chaliand, ‘Les Kurdes et le droit des peuples minoritaires’, in Les faubourgs de l’histoire: tiers-mondismes et

270

160

161 162 163 164

Notes to pages 47–51 tiers-mondes (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1984), pp. 223–5. Originally published in Le Monde, 17 March 1976. See, for example, Kouchner’s interview in Jacques Paugam, Génération perdue: Ceux qui avaient ving ans en 1968? Ceux qui avaient vingt ans à la fin de la guerre d’Algérie? Ou ni les uns ni les autres? (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1977), p. 154; Kouchner, ‘Que plus un mort ne bouge!’ Le Nouvel Observateur 665 (8–14 August 1977), 11; Kouchner and Glucksmann, ‘La preuve par le Cambodge’, 18; Kouchner, L’Ile de Lumière, pp. 40, 407; Kouchner, Le malheur des autres, pp. 67, 75, 213–25; Bernard Kouchner, Ce que je crois (Paris: Grasset, 1997), pp. 62–3. Ibid. See Marc Payet, Logs. Les hommes-orchestres de l’humanitaire (Paris: Editions Alternatives, 1996). Eleanor Davey, ‘French Adventures in Solidarity: Revolutionary Tourists and Radical Humanitarians’, European Review of History 21:4 (2014): 577–95. Cited in Lavoinne, ‘Médecins en guerre’, 115.

2 Aiding the revolution: influences on tiers-mondisme 1 John Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954–1962 (London: MacMillan, 1977); Martin Evans, Algeria: France’s Undeclared War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 2 Raphaëlle Branche, ‘FLN et OAS: deux terrorismes en guerre d’Algérie’, European Review of History 14:3 (2007), 327–8. 3 John Ruedy, Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), p. 176. 4 Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2006). 5 By the mid 1970s, the official figures of the Ministry of the Interior were 1,013,000 repatriated of French background and 180,000 of Muslim or Arab background. Pierre Baillet, ‘L’intégration des rapatriés d’Algérie en France’, Population 30:2 (1975): 303; for the harkis, see Charles-Robert Ageron, “Le ‘drame des harkis’, mémoire ou histoire?” Vingtième Siècle, Revue d’Histoire 68 (2000): 5. 6 Jeremy Jennings, ‘Introduction. Mandarins and Samurais: The Intellectual in Modern France’, in Jennings (ed.), Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century France: Mandarins and Samurais (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993), p. 20; Bernard Droz, ‘Le cas très singulier de la guerre d’Algérie’, Vingtième Siècle, Revue d’Histoire 5 (1985): 89. 7 Simone de Beauvoir, La force des choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), p. 339. 8 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). 9 One example of this is the events of October 1961. See Richard J. Golsan, ‘Memory’s bombes à retardement: Maurice Papon, Crimes against Humanity, and 17 October 1961’, Journal of European Studies 28:1 (1998): 153–72; Jim House, ‘Antiracist Memories: The Case of 17 October 1961 in Historical Perspective’, Modern and Contemporary France 9:3 (2001): 355–68.

Notes to pages 52–6

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10 Benjamin Stora, La gangrène et l’oubli: la mémoire de la Guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 1991), pp. 13–18. 11 Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 80–81. 12 Raphaëlle Branche, ‘Torture of Terrorists? Use of Torture in a “war against terrorism”: Justifications, Methods and Effects: The Case of France in Algeria, 1954–1962’, International Review of the Red Cross 89:867 (2007): 543–60; Fabien Klose, Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence: The Wars of Independence in Kenya and Algeria (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), pp. 182–86. 13 Darius M. Rejali, Torture and Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 482. 14 Paul Aussaresses, The Battle of the Casbah: Counter-Terrorism and Torture (New York: Enigma Books, 2002), p. 121. 15 Branche, ‘Torture of Terrorists?’, 545–56. 16 National Liberation Front, ‘Proclamation, November 1, 1954’, in Todd Shepard (ed.), Voices of Decolonization: A Brief History with Documents (Boston; New York: Bedford/St Martin’s Press, 2014), p. 99. 17 Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution. 18 Jennifer Johnson Onyedum, ‘“Humanize the conflict”: Algerian Health Care Organizations and Propaganda Campaigns, 1954–62’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 44 (2012): 715. 19 Jacques Fremeaux, ‘Les SAS (sections administratives spécialisées)’, Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains 4:208 (2002): 55–68. 20 Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 21 Klose, Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence, p. 127. 22 Perret Françoise, and François Bugnion, ‘Between Insurgents and Government: The International Committee of the Red Cross’s Action in the Algerian War (1954–1962)’, International Review of the Red Cross 93:883 (2011): 736–7. 23 Raphaëlle Branche, ‘Entre droit humanitaire et intérêts politiques: les missions algériennes du CICR’, Revue Historique 301:1 (1999): 106–7. 24 Letter from Pierre Mendès-France, French Prime Minister, to William Michel, head of the ICRC delegation in France, 2 February 1955, in Perret and Bugnion, ‘Between Insurgents and Government’, 738–9. 25 Branche, ‘Les missions algériennes du CICR’, 109. 26 Letter from Omar Boukli-Hacène, President of CRA, to British Red Cross Society, 7 February 1957, cited in Onyedum, ‘Humanize the conflict’, 720. 27 Piero Gleijeses, ‘Cuba’s First Venture in Africa: Algeria, 1961–1965’, Journal of Latin American Studies 28:1 (1996): 159–95. China first sent doctors to Algeria in 1963. 28 André François-Poncet, ‘Exposé du Président’, in CRF, Assemblée Générale Statutaire, Paris: 5 et 6 décembre 1955, p. 6. 29 André François-Poncet, ‘Exposé du Président’, in CRF, Assemblée Générale Statutaire, Paris: 5 et 6 décembre 1960, p. 5.

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Notes to pages 56–9

30 André François-Poncet, ‘Exposé du Président’, in CRF, Assemblée Générale Statutaire, Paris: 10 et 11 décembre 1956, p. 8. 31 Jean Malmejac, ‘Rapport de la Commission de l’Union Française’, in CRF, Assemblée Générale Statutaire, Paris: 5 et 6 décembre 1955, pp. 25–6. 32 Dr Malmejac, ‘Commission de l’Union Française’, in CRF, Assemblée Générale Statutaire, Paris: 10 et 11 décembre 1956, p. 19. 33 André François-Poncet, ‘Exposé du Président’, in CRF, Assemblée Générale Statutaire, Paris: 7 et 8 décembre 1959, p. 7. 34 In Jules Lefevre-Paul, ‘Exposé sur la situation de la Croix-Rouge en Algérie’, in CRF, Assemblée Générale Statutaire, Paris: 4 et 5 décembre 1961, p. 16. 35 André François-Poncet, ‘Exposé du Président’, in CRF, Assemblée Générale Statutaire, Paris: 3 et 4 décembre 1962, p. 2. 36 See for example François-Poncet, ‘Exposé du Président [1959]’, p. 6. 37 Francois Bugnion, The International Committee of the Red Cross and the Protection of War Victims (Oxford: Macmillan, 2003), p. 479. 38 André François-Poncet, ‘Exposé du Président’, in CRF, Assemblée Générale Statutaire, Paris: 9 et 10 décembre 1957, pp. 8–9. 39 Bugnion, The International Committee of the Red Cross and the Protection of War Victims, p. 474. 40 Ibid., p. 479. 41 François-Poncet, ‘Exposé du Président [1957]’, p. 10. 42 François-Poncet, ‘Exposé du Président [1958]’, p. 8. 43 François-Poncet, ‘Exposé du Président [1962]’, p. 2. 44 Piero Gleijeses, ‘Cuba’s First Venture in Africa’; Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, South-South Educational Migration, Humanitarianism and Development: Views from Cuba, North Africa and the Middle East (Oxford: Routledge, 2015). 45 Colette and Francis Jeanson went to Algeria in 1955 and on their return cowrote, amongst other shorter texts, L’Algérie hors la loi (Paris: Seuil, 1955). Gérard Chaliand had worked there for six months but in 1952–3, before the outbreak of war. Other French participants in the anti-war campaign knew Algeria from their military service; however, the experience of desertersturned-militants was distinct from the revolutionary tourists of the years after independence. See Maurice Maschino, Refus: récit (Paris: Maspero, 1960); Maschino, L’engagement (Paris: Maspero, 1961); Maurienne, Le déserteur (Paris: Minuit, 1960). 46 Sylvain Pattieu, Les camarades des frères: trotskistes et libertaires dans la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Editions Syllepse, 2002), pp. 205–6. 47 Christophe Bourseiller, Les maoïstes: la folle histoire des gardes rouges français (Paris: Plon, 1996), p. 59; Robert Gildea, James Mark and Niek Pas, ‘European Radicals and the “Third World”: Imagined Solidarities and Radical Networks, 1958–73’, Cultural and Social History 8:4 (2011): 459. 48 Bourseiller, Les maoïstes, p. 199. 49 Martin Evans, The Memory of Resistance: French Opposition to the Algerian War (1954–1962) (Oxford; New York: Berg, 1997). See, for example, the testimony of Jean-Marie Boeglin, pp. 66–69; Jean Guéricolas, pp. 109– 13; Jean-Louis Hurst, pp. 129–35.

Notes to pages 59–63

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50 Michel Crouzet, ‘La bataille des intellectuels français’, La Nef 12–13 (October 1962–January 1963): 51; Bernard Droz, ‘Le cas très singulier de la guerre d’Algérie’, Vingtième Siècle, Revue d’Histoire 5 (1985): 81–4. 51 Pierre Vidal-Naquet, La torture dans la République: essai d’histoire et de politique contemporaines (1954–1962) (Paris: Minuit, 1972); Bachir Boumaza et al., La gangrène (Paris: Minuit, 1959). 52 Klose, Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence, pp. 185–7. 53 Simone de Beauvoir and Gisèle Halimi, Djamila Boupacha (Paris: Gallimard, 1962). 54 Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution, p. 132. 55 Henri Alleg, The Question (Lincoln; London: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), p. 39. 56 Jean-Paul Sartre, Preface to Alleg, The Question, pp. xxxiv, xliv. 57 Axelle Brodiez, ‘Le Secours populaire français dans la guerre d’Algérie: mobilisation communiste et tournant identitaire d’une organisation de masse’, Vingtième Siècle, Revue d’Histoire 90 (2006): 48. 58 Vérités sur les tortures (Paris: Secours Populaire Français, 1957), p. 29. 59 Parce qu’il n’y a pas d’étrangers sur cette terre: 1939–2009, une histoire de la Cimade (Paris: Cimade, 2009), pp. 25–8. 60 ‘La déclaration’, Le droit à l’insoumission: ‘le dossier des 121’ (Paris: Maspero, 1961), p. 18. Italics in original. 61 Rémy Rieffel, ‘L’empreinte de la guerre d’Algérie sur quelques figures intellectuelles “de gauche”’, in Jean-Pierre Rioux and Jean-François Sirinelli (eds.), La guerre d’Algérie et les intellectuels français (Paris: Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent, 1988), p. 140. 62 David L. Schalk, War and the Ivory Tower: Algeria and Vietnam (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 99. 63 Aussaresses, The Battle of the Casbah, p. 146. He claims that the attacks were not carried out because a series of attacks on 3 June 1957 diverted their attention back to Algiers. 64 Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman, Les porteurs de valises: la résistance française à la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1979); Jacques Charby (ed.), Les porteurs d’espoir: les réseaux de soutien au FLN pendant la guerre d’Algérie: les acteurs parlent (Paris: La Découverte, 2004). 65 On the trial of the Jeanson network and its repercussions, see Marie-Pierre Ulloa, Francis Jeanson: A Dissident Intellectual from the French Resistance to the Algerian War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 206– 21. 66 Hamon and Rotman, Les porteurs de valises, pp. 249–52. 67 ‘Deux mois de guerre . . . ’ in Le droit à l’insoumission: ‘le dossier des 121’ (Paris: Maspero, 1961). 68 See Barbet Schroeder (dir.), L’Avocat de la terreur (2007). 69 Abdessamad Benabdallah, Mourad Oussedik and Jacques Vergès, Nuremberg pour l’Algérie (Paris: Maspero, 1961); Abdessamad Benabdallah et al., Défense politique (Paris: Maspero, 1961). 70 Jacques Vergès, J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1998), p. 147.

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Notes to pages 63–6

71 Jacques Vergès, ‘Légitime défense’, Partisans 5 (June–August 1962): 188. Vergès is referring to Mohammed Larbi Ben M’hidi, an FLN leader who died in French custody; Félix-Roland Moumié, the Cameroonian leader killed by the French secret service; and killings in contested colonial holdings in presentday Angola and Democratic Republic of the Congo. 72 Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization. 73 ‘Salut à la paix’, Partisans 4 (April–May 1962): 2. 74 Alfred Sauvy, ‘Trois mondes, une planète’, L’Observateur (14 August 1952): 5. Translation available in Shepard, Voices of Decolonization, pp. 60–62. 75 Claude Roy, Clefs pour la Chine (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), pp. 337–8. 76 Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (London; Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992). 77 Cited in Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution, p. 81. See Jamie Mackie, Bandung 1955: Non-Alignment and Afro-Asian Solidarity (Singapore: Editions Didier Millet, 2005). 78 Claude Liauzu, ‘Intellectuels du Tiers Monde et intellectuels français: les années algériennes des Éditions Maspero’, in Rioux and Sirinelli, La guerre d’Algérie et les intellectuels français, p. 110; Mauricio Segura, La faucille et le condor: le discours français sur l’Amérique latine (1950–1985) (Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2005), p. 54. 79 Robert Malley, The Call From Algeria: Third Worldism, Revolution, and the Turn to Islam (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1996); Claude Liauzu, ‘Le tiersmondisme des intellectuels en accusation: le sens d’une trajectoire’, Vingtième Siècle, Revue d’Histoire (1986): 74–5; Claude Liauzu, L’enjeu tiers-mondiste: débats et combats (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1987), pp. 31–3; Rémy Rieffel, Le tribu des clercs: intellectuels sous le Ve République (Paris: Calman-Lévy, 1993), p. 463. On European solidarity committees see Gildea, Mark and Pas, ‘European Radicals and the “Third World”’, 455. 80 Marie Jocher, ‘Ces pieds-rouges qui épousèrent la cause de l’Algérie algérienne’, Historia 613 (1988): 67. 81 Pierre Vidal-Naquet, ‘Une fidélité têtue: la résistance française à la guerre d’Algérie’, Vingtième Siècle, Revue d’Histoire 10 (April–June 1986): 12. 82 Fanon had already published Peau noire, masques blancs (1952) and L’an V de la révolution algérienne (1959); after his death a collection of his political writings was released, Pour la révolution africaine (1964). 83 Jean-Paul Sartre, Preface to Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004), pp. xlvi, lv, lvii. Originally published in Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre (Paris: François Maspero, 1961). 84 Ibid., pp. li, lviii, lix. 85 Pascal Bruckner, The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt (New York: The Free Press, 1986), p. 185, originally published as Le sanglot de l’homme blanc: tiers-monde, culpabilité, haine de soi (Paris: Seuil, 1983); Liauzu, L’enjeu tiers-mondiste, p. 39; Liauzu, ‘Les années algériennes des Éditions Maspero’, p. 111; Jeannine Verdès-Leroux, La lune et le caudillo: le rêve des intellectuels et le régime cubain (1959–1971) (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), p. 436; Jean-François Sirinelli, Deux intellectuels dans le siècle, Sartre et

Notes to pages 66–9

86

87 88

89 90 91 92

93

94 95

96 97

98 99 100

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Aron (Paris: Fayard, 1995), p. 350; Noureddine Lamouchi, Jean-Paul Sartre et le tiers monde: rhétorique d’un discours anticolonialiste (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996), p. 126; Kristin Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 162; Roger Navarri, ‘Sartre et la “névrose” algérienne’, in Philippe Baudorre (ed.), La plume dans la plaie: les écrivains journalistes et la guerre d’Algérie (Pessac: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2003), p. 144; Paul Clay Sorum, Intellectuals and Decolonization in France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), p. 172. Paige Arthur, ‘Remembering Sartre’, Theory and Society 36:3 (2007): 236; Paige Arthur, Unfinished Projects: Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (London; New York: Verso, 2010). She argues in the latter pp. 92–4 that Sartre’s preface to Fanon should be read alongside his La critique de la raison dialectique (1960). François Maspero in Miguel Bensayag, ‘Quelqu’un de la famille’, Les Temps Modernes 531–3 (October–December 1990): 1019, 1021. Homi K. Bhabha, Foreword to Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. xxi; Marnia Lazreg, Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 220–21. Lamouchi, Jean-Paul Sartre et le tiers monde, p. 229. Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre on Cuba (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1961), pp. 14–15, 115. De Beauvoir, La force des choses, p. 619. Lamouchi, Jean-Paul Sartre et le tiers monde, p. 117; François Bondy, ‘JeanPaul Sartre and Politics’, Journal of Contemporary History 2:2 (1967): 40; Verdès-Leroux, La lune et le caudillo, p. 209; François Hourmant, Au pays de l’avenir radieux: voyages des intellectuels français en URSS, à Cuba et en Chine populaire (Paris: Aubier, 2000), p. 41. Robert Horvath, ‘“The Solzhenitsyn Effect”: East European Dissidents and the Demise of the Revolutionary Privilege’, Human Rights Quarterly 29 (2007): 882–92. Judt, Past Imperfect, pp. 117–38. Elizabeth Franzer and Kimberly Hutchings, ‘Argument and Rhetoric in the Justification of Political Violence’, European Journal of Political Theory 6:2 (2007): 180–99. Judt, Past Imperfect, p. 289. Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Jean-Pierre Le Dantec, Les dangers du soleil (Paris: Presses d’aujourd’hui, 1978), p. 29. Emile Copfermann, ‘Tout est encore possible’, Partisans 42 (May–June 1968): 3. See, for example, Bernard-Henri Lévy in Jacques Paugam, Génération perdue: Ceux qui avaient ving ans en 1968? Ceux qui avaient vingt ans à la fin de la guerre d’Algérie? Ou ni les uns ni les autres? (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1977), p. 165; Alain Geismar, L’engrenage terroriste (Paris: Fayard, 1981),

276

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104 105 106

107 108

109 110

111

112

113

114

Notes to pages 69–72 p. 54; Evans, The Memory of Resistance, p. 38; Jean-Pierre Le Dantec, Etourdissements (Paris: Seuil, 2003), p. 67. Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 96; see also Alain Geismar, Mon Mai 1968 (Paris: Perrin, 2008), pp. 137, 163, 240. An estimated 25,000 people were slaughtered in the two weeks following the overthrow of the Commune; see Alistair Horne, The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870–71 (London: Papermac, 1965; 1990), pp. 417–18. See, for example, ‘Elargir la résistance’, Cahiers prolétaires 1 (1971), reproduced in Geismar, L’engrenage terroriste, ‘Annexe 2: Illégalisme et guerre’, p. 166. Claire Brière-Blanchet, Voyage au bout de la révolution: de Pékin à Sochaux (Paris: Fayard, 2009), p. 158; Claudie Broyelle, La moitié du ciel: le mouvement de libération des femmes aujourd’hui en Chine (Paris: Denoël/Gonthier, 1973), p. 158. ‘Cuba et le castrisme en Amérique Latine’, Partisans 37 (April–June 1967): 62. ‘Information-discussion’, Partisans 12 (October–November 1963): 3. Judt, Past Imperfect, p. 111; Sunil Khilnani, Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 191. Claude Roy, Nous (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 493. Philippe Artières, ‘Les cent visages du gauchisme’, in Philippe Artières and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel (eds.), 68: Une histoire collective 1962–1981 (Paris: La Découverte, 2008), pp. 352–3. Guy Hermet, La guerre d’Espagne (Paris: Seuil, 1989), p. 237. Ibid., pp. 228–9; Vincent Brome, The International Brigades: Spain, 1936– 1939 (London: Mayflower-Dell, 1967), p. 13. See also, though he estimates French volunteers as one quarter of the total number, Verle B. Johnston, Legions of Babel: The International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War (University Park; London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1967), pp. 28– 32. Olivier Rolin, Tigre en papier (Paris: Seuil, 2002), p. 89. See also Robert Gildea, ‘Utopia and Conflict in the Oral Testimonies of French 1968 Activists’, Memory Studies 6:1 (2013): 41. K.S. Karol, Les guérilleros au pouvoir: l’itinéraire politique de la Révolution (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1970), p. 49. See also Pierre Broué and Emile Témime, La Révolution et la guerre d’Espagne (Paris: Minuit, 1961). Arthur Koestler, The Invisible Writing, Being the Second Volume of Arrow in the Blue. An Autobiography by Arthur Koestler (London: Collins, 1954), pp. 327–8; David Caute, The Fellow-Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 189. Robert S. Thornberry, André Malraux et l’Espagne (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1977); Stanley Weintraub, The Last Great Cause: The Intellectuals and the Spanish Civil War (London: W.H. Allen, 1968), pp. 289–91.

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115 Régis Debray, L’indésirable (Paris: Seuil, 1975), p. 155; see also recognition of Malraux as the ‘major intertext’ of Debray’s novels, in Bill Marshall, ‘From Guevara to Mitterrand: The Masks of Régis Debray’, Nottingham French Studies 30:1 (1991): 79. 116 Jean-Paul Dollé, L’Insoumis: vies et légendes de Pierre Goldman (Paris: Grasset, 1997), p. 128. 117 Bernard Kouchner, Ce que je crois (Paris: Grasset, 1995), p. 16. He was referring to the most famous scene from Malraux’s film L’espoir-Sierra de Teruel when the pilots descend from the mountain, past the silent salute of local villagers. 118 Bernard Kouchner and Abbé Pierre, Dieu et les hommes (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1993), p. 114. See also Jean-François Duval, ‘Les livres essentiels de Bernard Kouchner, toubib baroudeur’, Le Temps Stratégique 25 (1988): 112–14. 119 Xavier Emmanuelli, Les prédateurs de l’action humanitaire (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991), p. 100. 120 ‘Taking Medicine to the People’, Economic and Political Weekly 9:39 (28 September 1974), 1655; Anne-Marie Brady, ‘“Treat Insiders and Outsiders Differently”: The Use and Control of Foreigners in the PRC’, The China Quarterly 164 (December 2000): 952. 121 Rony Brauman, Penser dans l’urgence: parcours critique d’un humanitaire. Entretiens avec Catherine Portevin (Paris: Seuil, 2006), pp. 39–40. 122 Henry Rousso, ‘Vichy, le grand fossé’, Vingtième Siècle, Revue d’Histoire 5 (1985): 55. 123 Serge Klarsfeld, Mémorial de la déportation des Juifs de France (Paris: Beate et Serge Klarsfeld, 1978). 124 Olivier Wieviorka, Divided Memory: French Recollections of World War II from the Liberation to the Present (Stanford; California: Stanford University Press, 2012); Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). 125 Johannes Heuman, ‘Entangled Memories: A Reassessment of 1950s French Holocaust Historiography’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 28:3 (2014): 409–29. 126 Alain Finkielkraut, La mémoire vaine: du crime contre l’humanité (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), p. 40. 127 Jacques Chirac in Eric Conan and Henry Rousso, Vichy: An Ever-Present Past (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1998), p. 39. 128 Cited in William B. Cohen, ‘The Algerian War, the French State and Official Memory’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 28:2 (2002): 222. 129 ‘Vérité-Liberté: Editorial du numéro 1’, in Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Face à la raison d’Etat: Un historien dans la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 1989), pp. 83–4. For additional information and commentary on his own experience, see Vidal-Naquet’s introduction in the same volume. 130 Vercors, ‘Nous sommes des partisans’, Partisans 1 (September–October 1961): 3–4. 131 ‘Et bourreaux, et victimes’, Les Temps Modernes 15 (December 1946), unpaginated; see Arthur, Unfinished Projects, pp. 4–5.

278 132 133 134 135 136

137 138 139

140

141 142

143

144

145 146 147

148 149

150 151

Notes to pages 74–7 ‘La Déclaration’, 16. Sartre, Preface to Alleg, The Question, p. xxviii. Rejali, Torture and Democracy, pp. 145–66. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, pp. 227–66. House, ‘Antiracist Memories’, 357, 359. House also emphasised the importance of connections between anti-Semitism and postcolonial racism in the memories of 17 October 1961 as well as in contemporaries’ reactions. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, p. 243. Daniel Lindenberg, Choses vues: une éducation politique autour de 68 (Paris: Editions Bartillat, 2008), p. 181. Yaïr Auron, Les Juifs d’extrême gauche en mai 68: Cohn-Bendit, Krivine, Geismar . . . une génération révolutionnaire marquée par la Shoah (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998), p. 81. Pierre Goldman, Souvenirs obscurs d’un juif polonais né en France (Paris: Seuil, 1975), pp. 28, 32. While in prison for the murders, Goldman had a picture of Rayman on his wall. Auron, Les Juifs d’extrême gauche en mai 68, p. 149. Oswiecim is the Polish name for the town that became the centre of the Auschwitz camps, renamed by the Germans after invasion. Goldman, Souvenirs obscurs d’un juif polonais né en France, p. 33. Auron, Les Juifs d’extrême gauche en mai 68, pp. 252–3; François Azouvi, Le mythe du grand silence: Auschwitz, les Français, la mémoire (Paris: Fayard, 2012), pp. 268–9. See also Holger Nehring, ‘The Era of Non-Violence: “Terrorism” and the Emergence of Conceptions of Non-Violent Statehood in Western Europe, 1967–1983’, European Review of History 14:3 (2007): 348–9. Rieffel makes this point in Le tribu des clercs, p. 138; see also Pierre Nora, ‘Tout concourt aujourd’hui au souvenir obsédant de Vichy’, Le Monde, 1 October 1997, VIII. These links were not always only imagined: during the Vietnam War, for instance, the Solidarité network that supported American soldiers who deserted from Vietnam saw the cooperation of former resistance members with anti-OAS activists and opponents of the Vietnam War. Gildea, Mark and Pas, ‘European Radicals and the “Third World”’, 458. Gildea, ‘Utopia and Conflict in the Oral Testimonies of French 1968 Activists’, 40. Interview with the author, Paris, 11 December, 2013. Giuliano Garavini, ‘The Colonies Strike Back: The Impact of the Third World on Western Europe, 1968–1975’, Contemporary European History 16:3 (2007): 302–3. Gildea, Mark and Pas, ‘European Radicals and the “Third World”’, 459. Jon Piccini, ‘Travel, Politics and the Limits of Liminality during Australia’s Sixties’, PORTAL Journal of Multidisiplinary International Studies 10:1 (2013): 1–20. François Maspero, ‘Amérique latine – Solidarité – Guérillas’, Partisans 38 (1967): 3. Paul Berman, Power and the Idealists, or, The Passion of Joschka Fischer and its Aftermath (Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2005), pp. 232, 234.

Notes to pages 81–4

279

3 The struggle for international justice: tiers-mondiste engagement on the outskirts of May 1 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Il n’y a plus de dialogue possible’, in Sartre, Situations, vol. VIII: Autour de 68 (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 18. 2 Jean-François Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises: manifestes et pétitions au XXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1990), p. 229. 3 ‘To Create Two, Three . . . Viet Nams’, Tricontinental Bulletin 15 (June 1967): 40–41. The theorists of the Gauche Prolétarienne, for instance, began their chapter on ‘Le droit de faire la révolution’ by quoting this appeal. Alain Geismar, Serge July and Erlyne Morane, Vers la guerre civile (Paris: Editions et publications Premières, 1969), p. 20. 4 Mike Gonzalez, ‘The Culture of the Heroic Guerrilla: The Impact of Cuba in the Sixties’, Bulletin of Latin American Research 3:2 (1984): 70. For examples of Castro’s appeal, see de Beauvoir, ‘Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Où en est la Révolution cubaine’, France-Observateur, 7 April 1960, 13; Claude Julien, La Révolution cubaine (Paris: Julliard, 1961), p. 226; Robert Merle, Moncada: premier combat de Fidel Castro (26 juillet 1953) (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1965), p. 80; Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre on Cuba (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1961), p. 140. 5 Jean-Pierre Le Dantec, Etourdissements (Paris: Seuil, 2003), p. 83. 6 Sartre, ‘Il n’y a plus de dialogue possible’, 18. 7 Bertrand Russell, ‘Bertrand Russell’s Final Address to the Tribunal’, in John Duffett (ed.), Against the Crime of Silence: Proceedings of the Russell International War Crimes Tribunal (New York; London: O’Hare, 1968), p. 653. 8 Chris Marker (dir.), Le fond de l’air est rouge (1977). 9 ‘Vietnam: notre guerre de trente ans’, Partisans 68 (November–December 1972): 2. 10 Robert Gildea, James Mark and Niek Pas, ‘European Radicals and the “Third World”: Imagined Solidarities and Radical Networks, 1958–73’, Cultural and Social History 8:4 (2011): 459. 11 ‘Creation en France d’un “Front Solidarité Indochine”’, Le Monde, 23 April 1971, 2. 12 Kristin Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 90; Jean-Jacques Becker, ‘Les “gauchistes” et la guerre du Vietnam en France’, in Christopher Goscha and Maurice Vaïsse (eds.), La guerre du Vietnam et l’Europe, 1963–1973 (Brussels: Bruylant, 2003), p. 253. 13 Laurent Jalabert, ‘Aux origines de la génération 1968: les étudiants français et la guerre du Vietnam’, Vingtième Siècle, Revue d’Histoire 55 (1997): 69– 81; Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives, pp. 91–2; Becker, ‘Les “gauchistes” et la guerre du Vietnam en France’, pp. 255–6. 14 Sabine Rousseau, ‘Du Vietnam héroïque à la défense des droits de l’homme’, in Philippe Artières and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel (eds.), 68: Une histoire collective 1962–1981 (Paris: La Découverte, 2008), p. 482. 15 For one emotive attempt see Christiane Fournier, La famille mutilée: romantémoin du Sud Vietnam (Paris: Editions SOS, 1973).

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16 See Marc Lazar, ‘Le Parti communiste français et l’action de solidarité avec le Viêtnam’, in Goscha and Vaisse, La guerre du Vietnam et l’Europe, pp. 241–51. 17 Richard A. Falk, ‘International Law and the United States Role in the Viet Nam War: A Response to Professor Moore’, in Falk (ed.), The Vietnam War and International Law, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 451. 18 Russell, ‘Bertrand Russell’s Final Address to the Tribunal’, p. 312. 19 Bertrand Russell, Introduction to Duffett, Against the Crime of Silence, p. 5. 20 Tariq Ali, Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties (London; New York: Verso, 2005), p. 194. 21 For a discussion of the Tokyo hearing, convened by the Japan Committee for Investigation of US War Crimes in Vietnam, see Arthur Jay Klinghoffer and Judith Apter Klinghoffer, International Citizens’ Tribunals: Mobilizing Public Opinion to Advance Human Rights (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 150– 52. 22 Ibid., p. 161. 23 Falk, ‘International Law and the United States Role in the Viet Nam War’, p. 451; Paige Arthur, Unfinished Projects: Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (London; New York: Verso, 2010), pp. 157–9. 24 Klinghoffer and Klinghoffer, International Citizens’ Tribunals, pp. 127–9. 25 Gildea, Mark and Pas, ‘European Radicals and the “Third World”’, 457. 26 Noureddine Lamouchi, Jean-Paul Sartre et le tiers monde: rhétorique d’un discours anticolonialiste (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996), p. 109. 27 Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), pp. 580, 583. 28 Arthur, Unfinished Projects, p. xix. 29 The list of submissions for both tribunals is available in Duffet, Against the Crime of Silence, and the texts are published as part of this collection. 30 ‘The Russell Tribunal’, Bulletin Tricontinental 22–23 (January–February 1968): 39. 31 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Jean-Paul Sartre’s Inaugural Statement’, in Duffett, Against the Crime of Silence, pp. 42, 43; see also Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Imperialist Morality’, New Left Review 41 (January–February 1967): 10. 32 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Douze hommes sans colère’, in Sartre, Situations, vol. VIII, pp. 64–5. Interview by Serge Lafourie, originally published in Le Nouvel Observateur (24–30 May 1967). 33 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘From Nuremberg to Stockholm’, Tricontinental 3 (November–December 1967): 17. 34 For an overview of the creation and significance of the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals, see Antonio Cassese, International Criminal Law (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 329–33. 35 See, for example, Telford Taylor, Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970). 36 Klinghoffer and Klinghoffer, for example, noted the frequency of references to the Nuremberg Trials as well as the Tokyo tribunals of 1945, in contrast with the lack of any allusions to the Armenian genocide. See Klinghoffer and Klinghoffer, International Citizens’ Tribunals, p. 156.

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37 See Timothy L.H. McCormack, ‘Selective Reaction to Atrocity: War Crimes and the Development of International Criminal Law’, Albany Law Review 60 (1996): 720; Gerry Simpson, Law, War and Crime: War Crimes Trials and the Reinvention of International Law (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), p. 72. 38 Francine Hirsch, ‘The Soviets at Nuremberg: International Law, Propaganda, and the Making of the Postwar Order’, The American Historical Review 113:3 (2008): 701–30. 39 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘On Genocide’, in Duffett, Against the Crime of Silence, p. 615. Originally published in Les Temps Modernes 259 (December 1967). Vergès, too, referred to the Sétif massacre in his closing summation at the Barbie trial. See Guyora Binder, ‘Representing Nazism: Advocacy and Identity at the Trial of Klaus Barbie’, The Yale Law Journal 98:7 (May 1989): 1362. 40 Sartre, ‘On Genocide’, pp. 624–5. 41 Ibid., p. 626. 42 Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, Les écrits de Sartre: chronologie, bibliographie commentée (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), p. 457. 43 Arthur, Unfinished Projects, pp. 162–3. 44 Sartre, ‘Imperialist Morality’, 6. 45 Bertrand Russell, ‘Message from Bertrand Russell to the Tribunal’, in Duffett, Against the Crime of Silence, p. 38. 46 Bertrand Russell, ‘Closing address to the Stockholm Session’, in Duffett, Against the Crime of Silence, p. 311. 47 ‘Appeal to American and World Opinion’, read by Dave Dellinger, in Duffett, Against the Crime of Silence, pp. 651–2. 48 ‘Vous aussi vous pouvez écrire, télégraphier, téléphoner à Nixon’, Le Monde, 21–2 January 1973, 4. Published as an advertisement; capitalisation in original. 49 ‘Nous accusons’, Le Monde, 21–2 January 1973, 4. Capitalisation in original. 50 Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises, p. 253. 51 Arthur, Unfinished Projects, p. 165. 52 François Azouvi, Le mythe du grand silence: Auschwitz, les Français, la mémoire (Paris: Fayard, 2012), p. 249. 53 Philip Mendes, Jews and the Left: The Rise and Fall of a Political Alliance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 238. 54 Joan B. Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust: The Politics of Memory in France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 25–50. 55 Azouvi, Le mythe du grand silence, pp. 246–50. Note that Azouvi opposed Wolf’s argument in Harnessing the Holocaust that the Six-Day War represented the ‘first chapter’ of the history of French consciousness of the Holocaust. 56 Press conference of 27 November 1967, in Charles de Gaulle, Discours et messages, vol. 5: Vers le terme, janvier 1966 – avril 1969 (Paris: Plon, 1970), p. 232; Walter Laqueur, ‘Israel, the Arabs and World Opinion’, Commentary 44:2 (1967): 55–6. 57 For example, the UCJ(ml) protested against Israel’s conduct and Tony Lévy (brother of Benny, who went under the pseudonym of Mahmoud Hussein)

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Notes to pages 93–5

created a short-lived Comité des Etudiants Juifs Anti-sionistes. Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman, Génération, vol. 2: Les années de poudre (Paris: Seuil, 1988), p. 91. Azouvi, Le mythe du grand silence, p. 253. Coverage was heaviest in Le Nouvel Observateur and Le Monde reported consistently on the sessions while Le Figaro and L’Express reported only minimally; perhaps surprisingly given the Tribunal’s gauchiste line-up, L’Humanité covered some of the sessions in detail and seized on the genocide claims. See Arthur, Unfinished Projects, pp. 164–5. Henry Tanner, ‘Russell Trial: Flogging a Dead Horse’, New York Times, 14 May 1967, E3. Klinghoffer and Klinghoffer, International Citizens’ Tribunals, p. 156. Simpson, Law, War and Crime, p. 75. Richard Falk, ‘Is Israel Guilty of the Crime of Apartheid?’ Al Jazeera, 5 December 2011. In 2005 Falk co-convened a World Tribunal on Iraq, examining the war that had begun two years earlier, citing the Russell Tribunal on Vietnam and other citizens’ tribunals amongst the ‘legal framework’ for that work. It referenced a 1971 dossier on US crimes in Vietnam. See Richard Falk, Irene Gendzier and Robert Jay Lifton (eds.), Crimes of War: Iraq (New York: Nation Books, 2006). In addition to these hearings, the Permanent People’s Tribunal was created by Lelio Basso, an expert in international law who participated in the Vietnam and Latin American sessions, to continue the initiative of the Russell Tribunal. An Iran Tribunal was staged in 2012 by a collective of campaigners, modelled on the Russell Tribunals although not established by the Bertrand Russell Foundation. Régis Debray, ‘Régis Debray’s Speech to the Military Court in Camiri, Bolivia, November 1967’, in On Trial: Fidel Castro/Régis Debray (London: Lorrimer Publishing, 1968), p. 84. Lee Hall, ‘In Bolivia, captured Marxist becomes a cause célèbre’, Life 63:7 (18 August 1967): 32. Horvath, ‘The Solzhenitsyn Effect’, 892. Jean-Claude Guillebaud, Les années orphelines, 1968–1978 (Paris: Seuil, 1978), p. 27. Interview with a fellow student and friend who had been on the same trip to Tunisia, in report by Josette Barellis, ‘Régis et la Révolution’, screened on Zoom, 13 June 1967. Berman, Power and the Idealists, p. 212. Régis Debray, ‘Quinze jours dans les maquis vénézuéliens’, in Debray, Essais sur l’Amérique latine (Paris: François Maspero, 1967), pp. 11–46. Keith Reader, Régis Debray: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 1995), p. 7; David Drake, Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), p. 127. Gonzalez, ‘The Culture of the Heroic Guerilla’, 67. François Maspero, Foreword to Debray, Essais sur l’Amérique latine, p. 9. Firk’s engagement ended with her suicide in Guatemala on 8 September 1968; Goldman spent fourteen months in Venezuela, in part because he felt that ‘no

Notes to pages 95–7

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91

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youth meant anything that did not involve the risk of a violent death’, but was circumspect about whether the experience suggested any ‘revolutionary bravery’ on his part. François Maspero, ‘La mort de Michèle Firk’, Partisans 43 (1968): 2–4; Goldman, Souvenirs obscurs d’un juif polonais né en France, pp. 58, 77. Régis Debray, ‘Lettre à ses amis’, in Le procès Régis Debray (Paris: Maspero, 1968), p. 23. Régis Debray, Révolution dans la révolution? Lutte armée et lutte politique en Amérique latine (Paris: Maspero, 1967), p. 9. Régis Debray, ‘Le rôle de l’intellectuel’, Partisans 37 (1967): 60. Régis Debray, Revolution in the Revolution: Armed Struggle and Political Struggle in Latin America (New York; London: MR Press, 1967), p. 116. Italics in original. Ibid. Italics in original. In the introduction to his book, Debray acknowledges his debt to Castro, and it has generally been received as an expression of the Cuban view of revolutionary theory. This was confirmed by Debray in his interview in the television episode ‘La fête cubaine’, from Géneration (1988), France TV5. See also, for example, Gonzalez, ‘The Culture of the Heroic Guerrilla’, 67; Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman, Génération, vol. 1: Les années de rêve (Paris: Seuil 1987), p. 375. Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 56–7; Jamie Trnka, ‘The West German Red Army Faction and its Appropriation of Latin American Urban Guerilla Struggles’, in Steve Giles and Maike Oergel (eds.), Counter-Cultures in Germany and Central Europe: From Sturm und Drang to Baader-Meinhof (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004), pp. 317–19. Paul Berman, Power and the Idealists, or, The Passion of Joschka Fischer and its Aftermath (Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2005), p. 49. On this episode, see notably Régis Debray, Les masques (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), pp. 77–80; Donald Reid, ‘Régis Debray’s Quest: From France to Bolivia and Back’, History of European Ideas 14:6 (1992): 839–62; Hamon and Rotman, Génération, vol. 1. Ernesto Guevara, Bolivian Diary (London: Pimlico, 2004), pp. 69–95. Debray, ‘Lettre à ses amis’, p. 18. Dominique Ponchardier, La mort du condor, où il est question d’un gorille bombardé Ambassadeur de France dans un petit monde aux rivages perdus (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), pp. 254–5, 269. Hall, ‘In Bolivia, captured Marxist becomes a cause célèbre’, 32. Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises, p. 228. Italics in original. Daniel Albo, ‘“Trois grands” au secours de Régis Debray’, Le Figaro Littéraire, 17–23 November 1969, 7. See, for example, ‘Les autorités boliviennes considèrent M. Régis Debray comme un déliquant de droit commun’, Le Monde, 7–8 May 1967, 3; ‘En Bolivie: “les aventures de Régis Debray se termineront ici” déclare le président de la république’, Le Monde, 9 May 1967, 5. ‘Cuba et le castrisme en Amérique Latine’, Partisans 37 (April–June 1967): 3.

284

Notes to pages 97–101

92 ‘“Les aventures de Régis Debray se termineront ici” déclare le président’, 5. 93 ‘Cinq mois après son arrestation: Régis Debray devant ses juges’, 4. Ponchardier felt that much of Barrientos’ posturing was designed to accommodate hardliners and that there was always a marked difference between the extremism of his official stands and the greater flexibility of his private attitudes. Ponchardier, La mort du condor, pp. 262, 267, 281, 310. 94 ‘Plusieurs appels en faveur de M. Régis Debray demandent que lui soient accordées les garanties juridiques normales’, Le Monde, 10 May 1967, 5; ‘En Bolivie: “Régis Debray va payer très cher ses violences” déclare le général Barrientos’, Le Monde, 13 May 1967, 7; Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises, p. 228. 95 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Le crime monstrueux de Régis Debray’, in Le procès Régis Debray, p. 9. 96 He made the same argument in an interview with Italian newspaper Paese Sera, 4 September 1967, translated into French in ‘M. Jean-Paul Sartre: Régis Debray a vu avec beaucoup d’intelligence et de lucidité la situation en Amérique latine’, Le Monde, 5 September 1967, 5. 97 Debray, ‘Lettre à ses amis’, p. 26. 98 François Maspero, ‘Les “revelations” de Régis Debray’, Le Nouvel Observateur 138 (5–11 July 1967), 9; see also ‘“Le C.I.A. n’a jamais perdu la trace de ‘Che’ Guevara” affirme Régis Debray’, Le Monde, 24 November 1967, 4; and the anger of the French ambassador at this slur campaign, in Ponchardier, La mort du condor, p. 293. 99 Philippe Nourry, ‘Au procès de Régis Debray: le spectacle, hier, était dans la rue où une petite foule réclamait “spontanément” la tête des accusés’, Le Figaro, 28 September 1967, 3. 100 Paul L. Montgomery, ‘Bolivia asks 30-year term as Debray trial opens’, New York Times, 27 September 1967, 3. 101 ‘Surprise et malaise à Camiri’, Le Figaro, 27 September 1967, 1, 3; Irénée Guimaraes, ‘Le procès de Régis Debray s’est ouvert par un réquisitoire passionné du procureur militaire’, Le Monde, 28 September 1967, 1, 4. 102 ‘Editorial’, Tricontinental 2 (September–October 1967), 2. 103 ‘Declaration of the Executive Secretariat of the OSPAAAL, on the Occasion of the Death of Comandante Ernesto Che Guevara’, Bulletin Tricontinental 20 (November 1967), unpaginated. 104 ‘Régis Debray évoque l’ “aventure mystique” d’Ernesto “Che” Guevara’, Le Monde, 4 November 1967, 5. On the Guevara myth and French intellectuals, see Verdès-Leroux, La lune et le caudillo, pp. 358–448. 105 Régis Debray, ‘Lettre à ses juges’, in Le procès Regis Debray, p. 31. 106 The English language publication of Debray’s speech drew attention to the parallels with Castro’s earlier one by publishing the two together. 107 Régis Debray, ‘Régis Debray’s Speech to the Military Court in Camiri, Bolivia, November 1967’, in On Trial: Fidel Castro/Régis Debray (London: Lorrimer Publishing, 1968), p. 86. 108 Ibid., pp. 83, 100. 109 Ponchardier, La mort du condor, p. 325.

Notes to pages 101–3

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110 Régis Debray, Conversación con Allende: ¿logrará Chile implantar el socialismo? (Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores, 1971); published in French as Debray, Entretiens avec Allende sur la situation au Chili (Paris: Maspero, 1971). 111 See his description of this period in Régis Debray, Les rendez-vous manqués (Paris: Seuil, 1975), pp. 11–12. 112 Régis Debray, Journal d’un petit bourgeois entre deux feux et quatre murs (Paris: Seuil, 1976), p. 53. 113 Stéphane Spoiden, ‘Régis Debray: de l’idéologie à la médiologie’, L’Esprit Créateur XLI:1 (Spring 2001): 76. 114 Régis Debray, La critique des armes, in 2 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1974). 115 Régis Debray, L’indésirable (Paris: Seuil, 1975), p. 194. 116 In ‘La fête cubaine’. 117 Régis Debray, ‘Il faut des esclaves aux hommes libres’, in Jean Daniel and André Burguière (eds.), Le tiers monde et la gauche (Paris: Seuil, 1979), p. 94. Originally published in Le Monde Diplomatique (October 1978). 118 Kouchner was particularly disappointed by Debray’s refusal to sign the petition for Vietnamese refugees, in November 1979. Bernard Kouchner, L’Ile de Lumière (Paris: Editions Ramsay, 1980), p. 38. 119 Régis Debray, interviewed in Marcel Ophüls (dir.), Hôtel Terminus: Klaus Barbie, sa vie, son temps (1988). 120 See ibid.; Tom Bower, Klaus Barbie: The Butcher of Lyons (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984). 121 Ibid., pp. 15–16. 122 Debray, L’indésirable, pp. 270–76. The setting has been identified as Venezuela, which Debray visited in 1963–4. See Marshall, ‘The Masks of Régis Debray’, 75. 123 Bower, Klaus Barbie, pp. 16–17; Donald Reid, ‘Régis Debray’s Quest’, 842; and Binder, ‘Representing Nazism’, 1327. Mitterrand stated that the impetus came from Robert Badinter, then Minister of Justice, though Azouvi also noted Debray’s potential to channel Klarsfeld’s influence. Azouvi, Le mythe du grand silence, p. 347. 124 Guevara, Bolivian Diary, p. 111. 125 Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 226; David Caute, The Fellow-Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 416; Jeannine Verdès-Leroux, La lune et le caudillo: le rêve des intellectuels et le régime cubain (1959–1971) (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), p. 508; François Hourmant, Au pays de l’avenir radieux: voyages des intellectuels français en URSS, à Cuba et en Chine populaire (Paris: Aubier, 2000), p. 47; Olivier Languepin, Cuba: la faillite d’une utopie (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), p. 158; Pierre Rigoulot, ‘Cuba: un gâchis de près d’un demi-siècle’, Le Meilleur des Mondes 3 (2007): 21. The Padilla affair was also decisive in the alienation of the Cuban cultural avant-garde from its political leadership; see Judith A. Weiss, Casa de las Americas: An Intellectual Review in the Cuban Revolution (Chapel Hill: Estudios de Hispanòfila, 1977), p. 158.

286

Notes to pages 104–7

126 ‘Cuba ou le peuple populaire’, Partisans 2 (November–December 1961): 4. 127 See Manuel Barcia, ‘“Locking horns with the Northern Empire”: AntiAmerican Imperialism at the Tricontinental Conference of 1966 in Havana’, Journal of Transatlantic Studies 7:3 (2009): 208–17; Hollander, Political Pilgrims; Hourmant, Au pays de l’avenir radieux; Verdès-Leroux, La lune et le caudillo. 128 Simone de Beauvoir, La force des choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), p. 515. 129 Chris Marker (dir.), Cuba si! (1961). 130 See, for example, de Beauvoir, ‘Où en est la Révolution cubaine’; Ania Francos, La fête cubaine (Paris: Julliard, 1972); Julien, La Révolution cubaine; K.S. Karol, Les guérilleros au pouvoir: l’itinéraire politique de la Révolution (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1970); Merle, Moncada. 131 Julien, La Révolution cubaine, p. 121; Sartre, Sartre on Cuba, p. 62. 132 Verdès-Leroux, La lune et le caudillo, pp. 312–14; Lourdes Casal, ‘Literature and Society’, in Carmelo Mesa-Lago (ed.), Revolutionary Change in Cuba (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971), p. 468 n. 50. For a compact if somewhat outdated discussion of the poems designed to address their neglect in accounts of the political affair, see Luis M. Quesada, ‘“Fuera del juego”: A Poet’s Appraisal of the Cuban Revolution’, Latin American Literary Review 3:6 (Spring 1975): 89–98. 133 Weiss, Casa de las Americas, p. 11. 134 Yves Guilbert, Castro l’infidèle (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1961), pp. 49, 52–3; Jacobo Machover, Cuba, totalitarisme tropical (Paris: 10/18, 2006), pp. 42–3. 135 See Huber Matos, Cómo llegó la noche (Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 2002); Verdès-Leroux, La lune et le caudillo, pp. 197–9. 136 Ibid., pp. 259–60. 137 Julien, La Révolution cubaine, pp. 101–5. 138 De Beauvoir, La force des choses, p. 485. 139 Françoise Sagan, ‘Ce n’est pas si simple’, L’Express, 11 August 1960, 23. 140 Heberto Padilla, Self-Portrait of the Other (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1990), p. 150. 141 Antoni Kapcia, Cuba: Island of Dreams (Oxford; New York: Berg, 2000), p. 130. 142 ‘An Open Letter to Fidel Castro’, New York Review of Books XVI: 8 (6 May 1971), 36. Originally published as ‘De nombreuses personnalités s’émeuvent de l’arrestation du poète cubain Heberto Padilla’, Le Monde, 9 April 1971, 32. 143 English translation published in Index on Censorship 1:2 (Summer 1972): 82–3. 144 Sartre, Sartre on Cuba, p. 140. 145 Hourmant, Au pays de l’avenir radieux, p. 47; Machover, Cuba, totalitarisme tropical, p. 83. 146 Statement by Heberto Padilla at UNEAC, Index on Censorship 1:2 (Summer 1972): 114. 147 Juan Arcocha, ‘Le poète et le commissaire’, Le Monde, 29 April 1971, 2. This article accompanied the publication of Padilla’s speech, in ‘J’ai diffamé

Notes to pages 108–10

148 149

150 151 152 153

154

155

156 157

158 159

160

161 162 163

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chacune des initiatives de la révolution’, Le Monde, 29 April 1971, 2. See also, for suspicions about the use of torture, Adriano González León, ‘Le cas d’Heberto Padilla: le poète, le socialisme et la liberté’, Les Temps Modernes 299–300 (June–July 1971): 2328. ‘La lettre des intellectuels à M. Fidel Castro’, Le Monde, 22 May 1971, 2. Marcel Niedergang, ‘Après l’autocritique de M. Heberto Padilla: des intellectuels français et étrangers rompent avec le régime cubain’, Le Monde, 22 May 1971, 6. Carlos Fuentes, ‘La véritable solidarité avec Cuba’, Les Temps Modernes 299–300 (June–July 1971): 2318–21. Caute, The Fellow-Travellers, p. 418. Cited in Index on Censorship 1:2 (Summer 1972): 122. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Autoportrait à soixante-dix ans’, in Sartre, Situations, vol. X: Politique et autobiographie (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 194. Reproduction of an interview with Sartre by Michel Contat, originally published in extracts in Le Nouvel Observateur (23 June, 30 June, 7 July 1975). On the treatment of writers and the poet himself during his internal exile, see Padilla, Self-Portrait of the Other, pp. 200–201. He was eventually given permission to leave Cuba in 1980. One exception to this rule was Ignacio Ramonet, editor of Le Monde Diplomatique from 1991. In 2002 Ramonet went to Havana at the invitation of the Cuban government and later published an authorised interview with its leader; see Ignacio Ramonet, Fidel Castro, biografía a dos voces (Madrid: Debate, 2006), published in French as Fidel Castro, biographie à deux voix (Paris: Fayard; Galilée, 2007). Caute, The Fellow-Travellers, p. 411; Hollander, Political Pilgrims, p. 226. Hourmant, Au pays de l’avenir radieux, p. 47; Hamon and Rotman, Génération, vol. 1, p. 594; Caute, The Fellow-Travellers, p. 414. Padilla, too, was aware of how this context may have affected his case; see Padilla, SelfPortrait of the Other, p. 147. Verdès-Leroux, La lune et le caudillo, pp. 453–4. Pierre Golendorf, 7 ans à Cuba: 38 mois dans les prisons de Fidel Castro (Paris: Editions Pierre Belfond, 1976). He later criticised the ongoing failure to acknowledge the extent of Cuban repression. See Pierre Golendorf, ‘Après vingt ans de régime castriste’, Le Nouvel Observateur 744 (12–18 February 1979), 12–13. Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 4. Ibid., pp. 318–19. L’assassinat de George Jackson (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). See Jean-Paul Besset, Amnesty International: la conspiration de l’espoir, trente ans au service des droits de l’homme (Paris: Editions du Félin, 1991), pp. 61–196; interview with co-founder Marie-José Protais by Jeane Molia, ‘La Section française a vingt ans!’ La Chronique (1991); Benoît Guillou, ‘Naissance section française’, La Chronique (May 2001) numéro spécial 40ème anniversaire.

288

Notes to pages 110–15

164 Rousseau, ‘Du Vietnam héroïque à la défense des droits de l’homme’, p. 485. 165 See, for example, the dossier ‘Les prisonniers politiques ouest-allemands accusent’ in Les Temps Modernes 332 (March 1974). 166 See ‘Appel pour la libération du Dr Augoyard’, Bulletin MSF 16 (January– March 1983), 16; Xavier Emmanuelli, ‘La nuit tombe’, Bulletin MSF 16 (January–March 1983): 2–3.

4 Complicity, conscience, and autocritique: reconfiguring attitudes to political violence 1 Bernard Kouchner, Ce que je crois (Paris: Grasset, 1997), p. 16. 2 Alain Geismar, Serge July and Erlyne Morane, Vers la guerre civile (Paris: Editions et publications Premières, 1969); Alain Geismar, L’engrenage terroriste (Paris: Fayard, 1981), p. 125. 3 Giuliano Garavini, ‘The Colonies Strike Back: The Impact of the Third World on Western Europe, 1968–1975’, Contemporary European History 16:3 (2007): 316–18. 4 The Russian version appeared in December 1973. Hourmant argues that the ‘Solzhenitsyn affair’ was in fact most intense at the end of 1973 and start of 1974, with Solzhenitsyn’s expulsion from Russia in February of that year another contributing factor. François Hourmant, Le désenchantement des clercs: figures de l’intellectuel dans l’après-Mai 68 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1997), p. 64. For a discussion of this period see Pierre Grémion, Paris/Prague: la gauche face au renouveau et à la régression tchécoslovaques, 1968–1978 (Paris: Julliard, 1985), pp. 272–82. 5 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, vol. 1–2 (New York; London: Harper and Row, 1973), pp. 177–8. Italics in original. 6 Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (London; Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), p. 102. 7 See Chapter 1, ‘From Fellow-Traveling to Revisionism: The Fate of the Revolutionary Project, 1944–74’, in Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left: The Anti-Totalitarian Moment of the 1970s (New York; Oxford: Berghahn, 2004), pp. 27–88. 8 Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge; London: Belknap, 2010), p. 170; Moyn, Human Rights and the Uses of History (London: Verso, 2014), p. 97. Italics in original. 9 Julian Bourg, ‘Principally Contradiction: The Flourishing of French Maoism’, in Alexander C. Cook (ed.), Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 225–44. 10 Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 287. 11 In a different vein, in 1971 the conservative politician Alain Peyrefitte headed the first foreign delegation to the PRC since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Alain Peyrefitte, Quand la Chine s’éveillera . . . le monde tremblera (Paris: Fayard, 1973).

Notes to pages 115–18

289

12 See Christophe Bourseiller, Les maoïstes: la folle histoire des gardes rouges français (Paris: Plon, 1996), pp. 49–53. 13 See Danielle Marx-Scouras, The Cultural Politics of Tel Quel: Literature and the Left in the Wake of Engagement (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), especially pp. 166–74; Ieme van der Poel, Une révolution de la pensée: maoïsme et féminisme à travers Tel Quel, Les Temps modernes et Esprit (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1992), pp. 71–122. 14 Julia Kristeva, Des Chinoises (Paris: Editions des Femmes, 1974), p. 15. See also the special number ‘En Chine’, Tel Quel 59 (1974). 15 Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, De la Chine (Paris: Maspero, 1971). 16 Claude Roy, Clefs pour la Chine (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), p. 211. 17 Ibid., p. 222. 18 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘La Chine que j’ai vue’, France Observateur 290 (1 December 1955): 10; Simone de Beauvoir, La Longue Marche: essai sur la Chine (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), p. 118. 19 Noureddine Lamouchi, Jean-Paul Sartre et le tiers monde: rhétorique d’un discours anticolonialiste (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996), p. 74. 20 De Beauvoir, La Longue Marche, pp. 8–9. 21 Ibid., pp. 76, 104. 22 Simone de Beauvoir, La force des choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), pp. 354– 5. 23 Bourseiller, Les maoïstes, p. 42. 24 Julian Bourg, ‘The Red Guards of Paris: French Student Maoism of the 1960s’, History of European Ideas 31:4 (2005), 476–8; A. Belden Fields, Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and the United States (New York: Praeger, 1989), pp. 87–130; Bourseiller, Les maoïstes, pp. 33–63. 25 Jean-Luc Godard (dir.), La Chinoise (1967); Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 117. 26 Bourg, ‘The Red Guards of Paris’, 478–86. 27 Virginie Linhart, Volontaires pour l’usine, vies d’établis 1967–1977 (Paris: Le Seuil, 1994); Marnix Dressen, De l’amphi à l’établi, les étudiants maoïstes à l’usine (1967–1989) (Paris: Belin, 1999); Dressen, Les établis: la chaîne et le syndicat. Evolution des pratiques, mythes et croyances d’une population d’établis maoïstes 1968–1982. Monographie d’une usine Lyonnaise (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000). 28 Isabelle Sommier, La violence politique et son deuil: l’après 68 en France et en Italie (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 1998), p. 117. 29 Bourg, ‘The Red Guards of Paris’, 474. 30 Edwin E. Moise, Modern China: A History (New York: Longman, 1994), p. 161. 31 Roderick MacFarquhan and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2006), p. 118. 32 Claude Roy, ‘La “Révolution Culturelle”: sept cent millions de saints?’ in Roy, Sur la Chine (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), p. 51. Originally published in Le Monde, 8 September 1966. 33 Roy, Sur la Chine, p. 24.

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Notes to pages 118–22

34 Letter to Nicole Linhart, reproduced in Virginie Linhart, Le jour où mon père s’est tu (Paris: Seuil, 2008), p. 31. 35 Jean-Pierre Le Dantec, Les dangers du soleil (Paris: Presses d’aujourd’hui, 1978), p. 86. 36 Claire Brière-Blanchet, Voyage au bout de la révolution: de Pékin à Sochaux (Paris: Fayard, 2009), p. 19. 37 Claudie Broyelle, La moitié du ciel: le mouvement de libération des femmes aujourd’hui en Chine (Paris: Denoël/Gonthier, 1973), p. 110. 38 David Caute, The Fellow-Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 354. 39 Wolin, The Wind from the East, pp. 20, 348. 40 In Michèle Manceaux, Les Maos en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 188. 41 Sommier, La violence politique et son deuil, p. 238. 42 Bourg, ‘The Red Guards of Paris’, 476. 43 Wolin, The Wind from the East, pp. 20, 348. 44 Simon Leys, Les habits neufs du président Mao: chronique de la ‘Révolution culturelle’ (Paris: Editions Champ Libre, 1971), p. 174. Leys is a pseudonym; he was born Pierre Ryckmans. 45 Ibid., p. 23. 46 Philippe Artières, ‘Paris-Pékin, aller-retour: de l’aveuglement à la méfiance’, in Philippe Artières and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel (eds.), 68: Une histoire collective 1962–1981 (Paris: La Découverte, 2008), p. 499. The same was true of Jean Esmein, La Revolution Culturelle Chinoise (Paris: Le Seuil, 1970). 47 Leys, Les habits neufs du président Mao, p. 20. 48 See, for instance, his account and interpretation of the destruction of the monuments of Beijing in Simon Leys, Ombres chinoises (Paris: Union Générale d’éditions, 1974), pp. 86–101. 49 Ibid., p. 90. 50 René Goldman, ‘Second Thoughts on Democracy and Dictatorship in China Today: Review Article’, Pacific Affairs 51:3 (Autumn 1978): 474. 51 Hector Mandarès et al. (eds.), Révo. cul. dans la Chine pop.: anthologie de la presse des Gardes rouges (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1974), p. 10. 52 According to Todd’s own account, he covered the war from 1965–73, visiting both South Vietnam and North Vietnam. The latter part of the trip, with Ron Moreau, was relatively free from interference from Hanoi because Moreau spoke Vietnamese. Olivier Todd, Cruel Avril, 1975: la chute de Saigon (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1987), p. 14; Olivier Todd, Un fils rebelle (Paris: Grasset, 1981), pp. 213–15. 53 Olivier Todd, ‘Comment je me suis laissé tromper par Hanoi’, Réalités 332 (September 1973): 39–40. 54 Todd, Cruel Avril, 1975, p. 14. 55 Jean Pasqualini and Rudolph Cheminski, Prisoner of Mao (New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1973), p. 10; Pasqualini, Prisonnier de Mao: sept ans dans un camp de travail en Chine (Paris: France Loisirs, 1975). 56 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Autoportrait à soixante-dix ans’, in Sartre, Situations, vol. X: Politique et autobiographie (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 221.

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57 Alain Geismar in ‘Enquête: la Chine dans nos têtes’, Pouvoirs 3 (1977): 21; Claudie Broyelle and Jacques Broyelle, Le bonheur des pierres: carnets rétrospectifs (Paris: Seuil, 1978), p. 70. 58 François Furet, ‘Faut-il brûler Marx?’ Le Nouvel Observateur 559 (28 July–3 August 1975), 53. 59 See, for example, the very positive reviews in Jacques Decornoy, ‘Un ouvrage corrosif: le tiers-monde masqué par ses mythes’, Le Monde, 11 February 1976, 1, 3; and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, ‘Révolution: du maquis au bureau’, Le Nouvel Observateur 594 (29 March–4 April 1976), 58. 60 Gérard Chaliand, Mythes révolutionnaires du tiers monde: guérillas et socialismes (Paris: Seuil, 1976), p. 15. 61 Ibid., pp. 15, 19, 234. 62 Maxime Szczepanski-Huillery, ‘“L’idéologie tiers-mondiste”. Constructions et usages d’une catégorie intellectuelle en “crise”’, Raisons politiques 18 (2005): 33–4. 63 Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left, p. 184. 64 See ibid., pp. 211–21; Hourmant, Le désenchantement des clercs, pp. 95–123; Sunil Khilnani, Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 125–36; Grémion, Paris/Prague, pp. 292–310. 65 Patrick Pharo, ‘Ethique et politique ou les intellectuels dans l’histoire’, L’année sociologique 3:30 (1979–80): 132. 66 Due to his thesis that French anti-totalitarianism was an insular debate focused on French domestic politics, Christofferson saw the challenges to tiers-mondisme as secondary and subsequent to anti-totalitarianism. Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left, p. 267. 67 Michel Winock, Le siècle des intellectuels (Paris: Seuil, 1997), p. 597. 68 Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left, p. 184. 69 André Glucksmann, La cuisinière et le mangeur d’hommes (Paris: Seuil, 1975), p. 205. 70 André Glucksmann, The Master Thinkers (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), p. 69. 71 Ibid., p. 37. 72 Bernard-Henri Lévy, Barbarism with a Human Face (New York: Harper Colophon, 1980), p. 155. 73 Ibid., p. 194. 74 Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics, p. 260. 75 Ibid., pp. 49–102. 76 Jean Guisnel, Libération, la biographie (Paris: La Découverte, 2003), pp. 14, 21. 77 ‘RAF-RFA: la guerre des monstres’, Libération, 18 October 1977, 1; Serge July, ‘Notes sur les années 70’, Libération, special issue (1977): 130. 78 Sommier, La violence politique et son deuil, pp. 223–4. 79 Serge July, ‘Presse: “Cette terreur que je refuse”’, Le Nouvel Observateur 677 (31 October 1977), 41–3; on the occupation see Guisnel, Libération, pp. 105– 7. The Autonomes, linked with Italian far-left groups such as Autonomia

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80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

90

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92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106

107 108

Notes to pages 126–32 Operaia, recruited some of their members from the breakdown of the GP three years before and later fed into the more extreme Action Directe. ‘Une lettre d’André Glucksmann’, Le Nouvel Observateur 602 (24–30 May 1976), 9. Judt, Past Imperfect, pp. 26–7. Leys, Ombres chinoises, p. 20. Jacques Broyelle and Claudie Broyelle in ‘La Chine dans nos têtes’, 16. Claude Roy, Nous (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 488. Italics in original. Ibid., pp. 392–3. Roy signed the two open letters to Fidel Castro of 9 April 1971 and 22 May 1971. Roy, Nous, p. 393. Ibid., p. 488. In addition to the works discussed here, see also Claudie Broyelle and Jacques Broyelle, Apocalypse Mao (Paris: Grasset, 1980); Claudie Broyelle and Jacques Broyelle, Les illusions retrouvées: Sartre a toujours raison contre Camus (Paris: Grasset, 1982). A brief commentary on this book is given by Claudie Broyelle in Claudie Broyelle, Jacques Broyelle, and Evelyne Tschirhart, Deuxième retour de Chine (Paris: Seuil, 1977), pp. 16–17. ‘Dix témoins en quête d’une Chine’, Les Temps Modernes 380 (March 1978): 1339. See also Evelyne Tschirhart, ‘L’asexualité en Chine’, Les Temps Modernes 380 (March 1978): 1480–96. Broyelle, Broyelle, and Tschirhart, Deuxième retour de Chine, p. 18. Ibid., pp. 29, 132, 255–6. ‘La Chine dans nos têtes’, 23. Broyelle and Broyelle, Le bonheur des pierres, pp. 47–8. Ibid., pp. 76, 118. In ‘La Chine dans nos têtes’, 20. Claudie Broyelle and Jacques Broyelle, ‘Nous sommes tous des Chinois’, Le Monde, 20 January 1978, 2. Le Dantec, Les dangers du soleil, p. 262. Ibid., pp. 108, 195, 265. Jean-Claude Guillebaud, Les années orphelines, 1968–1978 (Paris: Seuil, 1978), p. 27. Ibid., p. 44. Jean Daniel, L’ère des ruptures (Paris: Grasset, 1979), p. 82. Ibid., p. 285. Jean Daniel, ‘Le retour des belles âmes’, Le Nouvel Observateur 641 (21–27 February 1977), 17. In Broyelle, Broyelle, and Tschirhart, Deuxième retour de Chine, p. 17. The garden allusion – meaning to mind one’s own business and focus on the task at hand – referred to the end of Voltaire’s Candide. Daniel, L’ère des ruptures, p. 282. Jacques Julliard, ‘Le tiers monde et la gauche’, in Jean Daniel and André Burguière (eds.), Le tiers monde et la gauche (Paris: Le Seuil, 1979), p. 37. Originally published in Le Nouvel Observateur 708 (5 June 1978).

Notes to pages 132–7

293

109 Ibid., p. 39. 110 Ibid., p. 40. 111 Kristin Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 160. 112 Julliard, ‘Le tiers monde et la gauche’, p. 38. 113 Ahmed Baba Miské, ‘Les nouveaux civilisateurs’, in Daniel and Burguière, Le tiers monde et la gauche, p. 68. Originally published in Le Nouvel Observateur 710 (19 June 1978). 114 Ahmed Baba Miské, Front polisario, l’âme d’un peuple (Paris: Editions Rupture, 1978); Miské, Lettre ouverte aux élites du tiers monde (Paris: Editions les Sycomore, 1981). Lacouture’s contribution to the former offered further evidence of his rethinking of international politics and ideology at this time. 115 Claude Bourdet, ‘La gauche mélancolique’, in Daniel and Burguière, Le tiers monde et la gauche, p. 129. 116 Jean Lacouture, ‘Pour répondre à quelques trouble-fête’, in Daniel and Burguière, Le tiers monde et la gauche, p. 104. Originally published in Le Nouvel Observateur 711 (26 June 1978). 117 Jean Roux, ‘La zone des tempêtes’, in Daniel and Burguière, Le tiers monde et la gauche, p. 117. 118 Paige Arthur, Unfinished Projects: Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (London; New York: Verso, 2010), p. 203. 119 Guy Sitbon, ‘Le temps des méprises’, in Daniel and Burguière, Le tiers monde et la gauche, p. 74. Originally published in Le Nouvel Observateur 713 (10 July 1978). 120 Ibid., p. 76. 121 Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 122 Bernard Kouchner, ‘Les bons et les mauvais morts’, in Daniel and Burguière, Le tiers monde et la gauche, p. 46. Originally published in Le Nouvel Observateur 712 (3 July 1978). Italics in original. 123 Jean-Pierre Le Dantec, ‘Une barbarie peut en cacher une autre’, in Daniel and Burguière, Le tiers monde et la gauche, pp. 42, 44. Originally published in Le Nouvel Observateur 715 (22 July 1978). 124 Lacouture, ‘Pour répondre à quelques trouble-fête’, p. 104. 125 Maxime Rodinson, ‘La fin des “compagnons de route”’, in Daniel and Burguière, Le tiers monde et la gauche, p. 54. Originally published in Le Nouvel Observateur 716 (29 July 1978). 126 Galen Hull, ‘The French Connection in Africa: Zaire and South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies 5:2 (April 1979): 224. 127 Peter Mangold, ‘Shaba I and Shaba II’, Survival XXI: 3 (May–June 1979): 107. 128 Jean Daniel, ‘Les grilles perdues’, Le Nouvel Observateur 650 (25 April–1 May 1977): 40. 129 Jean Daniel, ‘Afrique – où nous entraîne Giscard?’ Le Nouvel Observateur 649 (18–24 April 1977): 38. 130 Daniel, ‘Les grilles perdues’, 40. 131 Jean Daniel, ‘La nouvelle résistance’, Le Nouvel Observateur 587 (9–15 February 1976): 14.

294

Notes to pages 137–44

132 Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left; Arthur, Unfinished Projects, pp. 205–6. 133 René Gallissot, ‘Les empires se portent bien’, in Daniel and Burguière, Le tiers monde et la gauche, p. 58. Originally published in Pluriel 15 (October 1978). 134 Miské, ‘Les nouveaux civilisateurs’, p. 73. 135 Ibid., p. 72. 136 Lacouture, ‘Pour répondre à quelques trouble-fête’, p. 105. 137 Jean Ziegler, ‘Les héritiers de “Che” Guevara’, in Daniel and Burguière, Le tiers monde et la gauche, pp. 79–80. Originally published in Le Nouvel Observateur 719 (19 August 1978). 138 Jean Ziegler, Main basse sur l’Afrique (Paris: Seuil, 1978), p. 21. 139 Ibid., p. 11. 140 Ibid., pp. 19, 23–4. 141 Ibid., p. 281. 142 Régis Debray, ‘Il faut des esclaves aux hommes libres’, in Daniel and Burguière, Le tiers monde et la gauche, pp. 94, 95. 143 Ibid., p. 90. 144 Arthur, Unfinished Projects, pp. 207–9. For Arthur, following Christofferson, this incoherence was explained by the Union of the Left thesis. 145 Chaliand, ‘D’un mythe à l’autre’, p. 116. 146 Miské, ‘Les nouveaux civilisateurs’, p. 69. 147 Bourdet, ‘La gauche mélancolique’, pp. 128, 129. 148 Jacques Julliard, ‘Pour ne pas conclure . . . ’ in Daniel and Burguière, Le tiers monde et la gauche, p. 139. 149 André Burguière, introduction to Daniel and Burguière, Le tiers monde et la gauche, p. 14. 150 Chaliand, Mythes révolutionnaires du tiers monde, p. 243; Roy, Nous, pp. 563–4; Jacques Julliard, Contre la politique professionnelle (Paris: Seuil, 1977). 151 Brière-Blanchet, Le voyage au bout de la révolution, p. 273. 152 Olivier Rolin, Tigre en papier (Paris: Seuil, 2002), p. 245. 153 Le Dantec, Etourdissements, pp. 126, 128. 154 See, for example, Brière-Blanchet, Voyage au bout de la révolution, p. 277. 155 Lévy, Barbarism with a Human Face, p. 195.

5 A rhetoric of responsibility: Vichy, the Holocaust, and suffering in the third world 1 Jean-Pierre Le Dantec, Les dangers du soleil (Paris: Presses d’aujourd’hui, 1978), p. 53. 2 Joelle Tanguy, ‘The Médecins Sans Frontières Experience’, in Kevin M. Cahill (ed.), A Framework for Survival: Health, Human Rights and Humanitarian Assistance in Conflicts and Disasters (New York; London: Routledge, 1999), p. 229.

Notes to pages 144–7

295

3 Hervé Chabalier, ‘La longue course des médecins sans frontières: IV. Chez les “barjos-paranos” du Liban’, Le Matin de Paris, 30 January 1980, 18. Bortolotti puts the number of volunteers at fifty-six, in Dan Bortolotti, Hope in Hell: Inside the World of Doctors Without Borders (Ontario; New York: Firefly Books, 2004), p. 50. 4 Nicole Lauroy, ‘Pour les Médecins sans frontières . . . soignez c’est servir’, Femmes d’aujourd’hui 1563 (16 April 1975): 24–7. 5 Philippe Ryfman and Jean-Christophe Rufin, ‘L’humanitaire’, in Laurent Gervereau (ed.), Dictionnaire mondial des images (Paris: Editions Nouveau Monde, 2006), p. 497; Xavier Emmanuelli, Les prédateurs de l’action humanitaire (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991), p. 205. 6 C. B., ‘Sans abandonner les missions d’urgence, les Médecins sans frontières souhaitent aussi prendre en charge les besoins de santé de populations démunis’, Le Monde, 6 May 1977, 44. 7 Tanguy, ‘The Médecins Sans Frontières Experience’, p. 230. 8 Christophe Bourseiller, Les maoïstes: la folle histoire des gardes rouges français (Paris: Plon, 1996), p. 105. 9 Julian Bourg, ‘Principally Contradiction: The Flourishing of French Maoism’, in Alexander C. Cook (ed.), Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 227. 10 See Isabelle Sommier, La violence politique et son deuil: l’après 68 en France et en Italie (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 1998), p. 81; Michel Wieviorka, ‘Les maoïstes français et l’hypothèse terroriste’, Esprit 94–5 (October– November 1984): 142. 11 Alain Geismar, L’engrenage terroriste (Paris: Fayard, 1981), p. 53. 12 Antoine Liniers, ‘Objections contre une prise d’armes’, in François Furet, Antoine Liniers and Philippe Raynaud, Terrorisme et démocratie (Paris: Fayard, 1985), pp. 201–2. Rolin wrote using Liniers as a pseudonym, but the text indicated his identity and the understanding that Rolin authored this article does not appear to be controversial. 13 Le Dantec, Les dangers du soleil, p. 180. 14 Philippe Buton, ‘Inventing a Memory on the Extreme Left: The Example of the Maoists after 1968’, in Julian Jackson, Anna-Louise Milne and James Williams (eds.), May 1968: Rethinking France’s Last Revolution (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), pp. 58–75. 15 ‘Le député U.D.R. de Belfort était membre de la milice!’ La Cause du Peuple– J’accuse 41 (23 February 1973), 3. 16 ‘Touvier nie tout!’, La Cause du Peuple–J’accuse 37 (5 January 1973), 16; ‘Un nouveau témoignage contre le nazi Touvier’, La Cause du Peuple–J’accuse 40 (9 February 1973), 2. 17 Sommier, La violence politique et son deuil, p. 168. 18 Pierre Girard, ‘De 1968 au terrorisme: les Brigades rouges et l’Italie des “années de plomb”’, in Philippe Artières and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel (eds.), 68: Une histoire collective 1962–1981 (Paris: La Découverte, 2008), p. 465; Claire Brière-Blanchet, Voyage au bout de la révolution: de Pékin à Sochaux (Paris: Fayard, 2009), p. 157.

296

Notes to pages 148–9

19 ‘Interview de la Nouvelle Résistance Populaire: contre le nouveau fascisme, armer la justice populaire’, La Cause du Peuple–J’accuse 8 (1 August 1971), 4–5; Sommier, La violence politique et son deuil, p. 84. 20 Liniers, ‘Objections contre une prise d’armes’, p. 202. 21 Robert Gildea, France since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 75. Marcel Ophüls (dir.), Le chagrin et la pitié (1971). 22 François Azouvi, Le mythe du grand silence: Auschwitz, les Français, la mémoire (Paris: Fayard, 2012), pp. 282–3. 23 Daniel Lindenberg, Choses vues: une éducation politique autour de 68 (Paris: Editions Bartillat, 2008), p. 181. 24 ‘Débat sur le film le Chagrin et le pitié’, La Cause du Peuple–J’accuse 2 (31 May 1971): 18–19. 25 Stanley Hoffmann, Foreword to Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. ix. 26 Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York: Knopf, 1972); French version published 1973. Some of his conclusions were anticipated by works produced by the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine and the Comité d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale in the 1950s but did not attract significant attention at that time. Johannes Heuman, ‘Entangled Memories: A Reassessment of 1950s French Holocaust Historiography’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 28:3 (2014): 417. 27 Renée Poznanski, ‘Vichy et les Juifs. Des marges de l’histoire au cœur de son écriture’, in Jean-Pierre Azéma and François Bédarida (eds.), Le régime de Vichy et les Français (Paris: Fayard, 1992), p. 63. 28 See Colin Nettelbeck, ‘Getting the Story Right: Narratives of World War II in Post-1968 France’, Journal of European Studies 15:2 (June 1985): 77– 116. 29 Keith Botsford, ‘A “New European Man” Runs France’, New York Times Magazine (29 August 1971), 42. See Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome, p. 115. 30 Ibid., p. 117. 31 Azouvi, Le mythe du grand silence, pp. 288–94. 32 Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome, p. 123. Interview of 21 September 1972, originally published in Le Monde, 23 September 1972, and reproduced in Georges Pompidou, Entretiens et discours, 1968–1974 (Paris: Flammarion, 1984), pp. 157–8. 33 Azouvi, Le mythe du grand silence, p. 296. 34 See Le Dantec, Les dangers du soleil, pp. 222–4. In his account of this ceremony, Le Dantec referred to their anger at Pompidou’s comments about the period of resistance being finished; however, the press conference to which he seems to be referring seems to have been held later. If anything, however, this discrepancy points to a more inherent, less reactive commitment to the resistance memory on the part of the GP. 35 ‘La guillotine mais pour Touvier! Nazi français, gracié par Pompidou, assassin de centaines d’hommes’, La Cause du Peuple–J’accuse 33 (1 December 1972): 1.

Notes to pages 150–3

297

36 Ibid., 3. See also ‘A propos de la peine de mort: Lettre de la Nouvelle Résistance Populaire à la Cause du peuple’, La Cause du Peuple–J’accuse 36 (22 December 1972): 16. 37 Olivier Rolin, Tigre en papier (Paris: Seuil, 2002), pp. 229–30. 38 Le Dantec, Les dangers du soleil, p. 248; Liniers, ‘Objections contre une prise d’armes’, p. 203. 39 Rolin, Tigre en papier, p. 132. 40 Ibid., p. 29. 41 Ibid., p. 172. 42 Philip Mendes, Jews and the Left: The Rise and Fall of a Political Alliance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 43 Ibid., pp. 237–9. 44 Azouvi, Le mythe du grand silence, p. 255; Joan B. Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust: The Politics of Memory in France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 51. They disagree on how prevalent Holocaust references were before 1967. 45 Azouvi, Le mythe du grand silence, p. 274. See also Philippe Mesnard, La victime écran: la représentation humanitaire en question (Paris: Textuel, 2002), pp. 128–9. 46 Yaïr Auron, Les Juifs d’extrême gauche en mai 68: Cohn-Bendit, Krivine, Geismar . . . une génération révolutionnaire marquée par la Shoah (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998). 47 Simon Reeve, One Day in September: The Story of the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre, a Government Cover-up and a Covert Revenge Mission (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), p. xii. 48 My use of the term refers to violence by politically motivated groups, directed against either state or civilian targets, with an intended audience beyond those directly affected as victims. For an overview of the term ‘terrorism’ and the historical origins of its modern form, see Walter Laqueur, The Age of Terrorism (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), pp. 11–23. 49 A. Razak Abdel-Kader, Le conflit judéo-arabe (Paris: Maspero, 1961). 50 Gérard Chaliand, ‘La Palestine n’est pas le Vietnam’, Partisans 52 (March– April 1970): 171; Chaliand, La résistance palestinienne (Paris: Seuil, 1970), p. 8. 51 Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman, Génération, vol. 2: Les années de poudre (Paris: Seuil, 1988), pp. 90, 92. 52 Liniers, ‘Objections contre une prise d’armes’, pp. 209–10. 53 Abdellali Hajjat, ‘Des comités palestine au movement des travailleurs arabes (1970–1976)’, in Ahmed Boubeker and Abdellali Hajjat (eds.), Histoire politique des immigrations (post)coloniales: France, 1920–2008 (Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2008), p. 146; Hamon and Rotman, Génération, vol. 2, pp. 90, 92. 54 For examples of GP actions in different registers, see Sommier, La violence politique et son deuil, pp. 93–4. For a discussion of the Minute bombing, see ‘Interview de la Nouvelle Résistance Populaire’, 5. 55 On the death of Overney and kidnapping of Nogrette, see Hamon and Rotman, Génération, vol. 2, pp. 383–421. After serving a sentence for murder, in

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56 57 58 59 60 61 62

63

64

65

66 67

68 69

70

71 72

Notes to pages 153–5

1977 Tramoni was killed by members of Noyaux Armés Pour l’Autonomie Populaire (NAPAP), which included former GP members. Nouvelle Résistance Populaire, Communiqué of 8 March 1972, in La Cause du Peuple–J’accuse 20 (11 March 1972): 3. Brière-Blanchet, Voyage au bout de la révolution, p. 77. Le Dantec, Les dangers du soleil, p. 176. See, for example, ‘Et Maintenant ils massacrent nos enfants!’ La Cause du Peuple–J’accuse 23 (1 May 1972): 14–15. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Lynchage ou justice populaire’, La Cause du Peuple– J’accuse 24 (17 May 1972): 12. Geismar, L’engrenage terroriste, p. 64. Interview with Leila Khaled, BBC, ‘Transcripts: The Guerrilla’s Story’, 1 January 2001. Available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in depth/uk/2000/uk confidential/1090986.stm, last accessed 27 December 2014. It has been argued that the inclusion of protection activities in UNRWA’s mandate since the 1980s expanded its humanitarian and social work to include assistance for the development of durable solutions. Lance Bartholomeusz, ‘The Mandate of UNRWA at Sixty’, Refugee Survey Quarterly 28:2–3 (2010): 452–74. Mark Ensalaco, Middle Eastern Terrorism: From Black September to September 11 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), p. 9; Samir Frangié, ‘Tournant dans l’activité de la résistance palestinienne?’ Le Monde Diplomatique 223 (October 1972), 6–7. Guy Sitbon, ‘Pierre Victor: “Pourquoi la Gauche Prolétarienne n’est pas devenue la ‘bande à Baader’”’, Le Nouvel Observateur 671 (19–25 September 1977): 47. See also Geismar, L’engrenage terroriste, p. 127. Ibid., p. 59. Jamie Trnka, ‘The West German Red Army Faction and its Appropriation of Latin American Urban Guerilla Struggles’, in Steve Giles and Maike Oergel (eds.), Counter-Cultures in Germany and Central Europe: from Sturm und Drang to Baader-Meinhof (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004), pp. 315–32; Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Duke University Press, 2012). Hans Kundnani, Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust (London: Hurst and Company, 2009). Ibid., pp. 88–92. See also George Michael, ‘The Ideological Evolution of Horst Mahler: The Far Left-Extreme Right Synthesis’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 32:4 (2009): 349–50. ‘Shalom + Napalm’, Agit 883:40 (13 November 1969): 9, cited in English translation by Jeffrey Herf, ‘An Age of Murder: Ideology and Terror in Germany’, Telos 144 (2008): 22. This text was reproduced, with a different translation and the apparent omission of several key phrases, in Bommi Baumann, Terror or Love? Bommi Baumann’s Own Story of His Life as a West German Urban Guerrilla (New York: Grove Press, 1977), pp. 67–8. Brière-Blanchet, Le voyage au bout de la révolution, p. 228. My account draws upon Ensalaco, Middle Eastern Terrorism, pp. 37–43; Reeve, One Day in September, pp. 1–132.

Notes to pages 156–8

299

73 Kay Schiller and Christopher Young, The 1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany (London: University of California Press, 2010), pp. 219–20. 74 ‘Drame à Munich: un commando palestinien s’empare de délégués israéliens’, Le Monde, 6 September 1972, 1. 75 Thierry Maulnier, ‘Septembre noir’, Le Figaro, 6 September 1972, 1. 76 Jacques Coubard, ‘A qui profite le crime?’ L’Humanité, 6 September 1972, 1. 77 Jean-François Brisson, ‘Les jeux en deuil’, Le Figaro, 6 September 1972, 1; also Jean Lacouture, ‘Une fantastique caisse de résonance’, Le Monde, 6 September 1972, 1. 78 See, for example, Jean Lacouture, ‘Le coup de grâce?’ Le Monde, 7 September 1972, 1–2. 79 Jean Daniel, ‘L’héritage de Munich’, Le Nouvel Observateur 409 (11–17 September 1972): 18. 80 And also among historians. See, for example, Wieviorka, ‘Les maoïstes français et l’hypothèse terroriste’, 145; Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 220; Sommier, La violence politique et son deuil, p. 212; Rémy Rieffel, Le tribu des clercs: intellectuels sous le Ve République (Paris: Calman-Lévy, 1993), p. 145; Auron, Les Juifs d’extrême gauche en mai 68, p. 216; Paul Berman, Power and the Idealists, or, The Passion of Joschka Fischer and its Aftermath (Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2005), p. 57. 81 Liniers, ‘Objections contre une prise d’armes’, p. 211. 82 Jean-Pierre Le Dantec, ‘Le refus de donner la mort’, Le Monde, 11 May 1978, 2. 83 Geismar, L’engrenage terroriste, p. 63; interview with Glucksmann cited in James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (London: Harper Collins, 1993), p. 233. 84 Hamon and Rotman, Génération, vol. 2, pp. 458–9. 85 ‘Après l’action de Septembre noir, déclaration à La Cause du Peuple de la Nouvelle Résistance Populaire’, La Cause du Peuple–J’accuse 27 (14 September 1972): 6. 86 Wolin, The Wind from the East, p. 221; Philippe Raynaud, L’extrême gauche plurielle: entre démocratie radicale et révolution (Paris: Editions Autrement, 2006), p. 88. 87 Liniers, ‘Objections contre une prise d’armes’, p. 212. 88 Hamon and Rotman, Génération, vol. 2, p. 458. 89 Brière-Blanchet, Voyage au bout de la révolution, pp. 227–8. 90 Ibid., pp. 193–4. This threat also hints at the relationship, problematic to say the least, between male and female militants in the organisation. 91 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘A propos de Munich’, La Cause du Peuple–J’accuse 29 (15 October 1972): 2. Arthur emphasises that this text was markedly less ambiguous about terrorist acts even than Sartre’s preface to The Wretched of the Earth, and discusses his treatment of terrorism in his Rome Lecture of 1956. Paige Arthur, Unfinished Projects: Decolonization and the Philosophy of JeanPaul Sartre (London; New York: Verso, 2010), pp. 151–2.

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Notes to pages 158–62

92 For other examples of support for the Palestinian terrorists, see Frangié, ‘Tournant dans l’activité de la résistance palestinienne?’; Joseph Krasny, ‘La sainte alliance’, Rouge 171 (16 September 1972), cited alongside further examples in Raynaud, L’extrême gauche plurielle, p. 90. 93 ‘Déclaration à La Cause du Peuple de la Nouvelle Résistance Populaire’, 7. 94 Ibid. Italics in original. 95 In ‘De la république de Platon au Talmud’, La Règle du Jeu 33 (2007), 181–2. 96 Liniers, ‘Objections contre une prise d’armes’, p. 211. 97 Geismar, L’engrenage terroriste, p. 76. 98 ‘A propos de l’action de Septembre noir à Khartoum’, La Cause du Peuple– J’accuse 42 (16 March 1973): 13. 99 Geismar, L’engrenage terroriste, p. 73; Liniers, ‘Objections contre une prise d’armes’, p. 204; Berman, Power and the Idealists, pp. 58–9. 100 William Klein in Libération, 4 October 1978, cited in Auron, Les Juifs d’extrême gauche en mai 68, p. 210. 101 July, ‘Notes sur les années 70’, 128. 102 Brière-Blanchet, Voyage au bout de la révolution, pp. 271–2. 103 Sommier, La violence politique et son deuil, p. 212. Technically, the GP had already been dissolved by an official decree banning it in 1970, though in reality it continued until its self-dissolution of 1973; between the two dissolutions it was sometimes referred as the ‘ex-GP’. 104 France’s seeming reprieve from the worst of far-left violence ended with the arrival of Action Directe, which began its urban guerrilla terrorist attacks in 1979, causing scores of deaths until the arrest of its leadership put a stop to its activities in 1987. In 1985, Action Directe announced a formal alliance with the RAF. See Michael Dartnell, Action Directe: UltraLeft Terrorism in France 1979–1987 (London: Frank Cass, 1995); Alain Hamon and Jean Charles Marchand, Action Directe, du terrorisme française à l’euroterrorisme (Paris: Seuil/L’Epreuve des Faits, 1986); Roland Jacquard, La longue traque d’Action Directe (Paris: Albin Michel, 1986). 105 Michael Sriven, Sartre and the Media (London: St Martin’s Press, 1993), p. 63. 106 Le Dantec, ‘Le refus de donner la mort’, 2. 107 Philippe Mesnard, La victime écran: la représentation humanitaire en question (Paris: Textuel, 2002), p. 125. 108 Berman, Power and the Idealists, p. 231. 109 ‘Le Croix-Rouge dans le monde’, Vie et Bonté 203 (October 1970), 15–16. The doctors were Kouchner, Récamier, Bernard Lhuillier, and Paul Sargos. Anne Vallaeys, Médecins sans frontières: la biographie (Paris: Fayard, 2004), pp. 102–3. 110 Alain Guillemoles, Bernard Kouchner: la biographie (Paris: Bayard, 2002), p. 120; Daniel Pierrejean, Bernard Kouchner: du Biafra au Kosovo, biographie (Paris: Editions Editeur Indépendant, 2007), p. 95. 111 Seventeen doctors and four nurses are reported as departing for Jordan on 23 September, joined shortly afterwards by a further fourteen volunteers, along with medical supplies and other support. La Commission Médicale [du Secours Rouge], ‘Soutien à la résistance palestinienne’ Secours Rouge 1

Notes to pages 162–5

112

113

114 115

116 117 118

119 120

121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129

130 131

132

301

(January 1970): 15. The same issue of the journal carried a letter of thanks from the Palestinian Red Crescent. See also Olivier Weber, French Doctors: Les 25 ans d’épopée des hommes et des femmes qui ont inventé la médecine humanitaire (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995), pp. 87–8. Axelle Brodiez, Le Secours populaire français, 1945–2000: du communisme à l’humanitaire (Paris: Presse de la Fondation National des Sciences Politiques, 2006), p. 162. Hervé Chabalier, ‘La longue course des médecins sans frontières: III. De Saigon à Hô Chi Minh-Ville’, Le Matin de Paris, 29 January 1980, 17. See also the account in Pierrejean, Bernard Kouchner: du Biafra au Kosovo, pp. 112–23. Bernard Kouchner, Ce que je crois (Paris: Grasset, 1997), pp. 63, 64. Telegram to MSF Paris from Saigon, 28 April 1975; Xavier Emmanuelli, telegram sent to French embassy in Saigon, 29 April 1975, MSF archive, Paris. Bernard Kouchner, Le malheur des autres (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1991), p. 184. Bernard Kouchner, L’Ile de Lumière (Paris: Editions Ramsay, 1980), p. 25. Guillemoles, Bernard Kouchner, pp. 125–6; Pierrejean, Bernard Kouchner, pp. 121–3. There are conflicting versions of who the other doctors were, though it seems clear that Xavier Emmanuelli had left before the fall of Saigon and Jacques Bérès remained throughout; other names mentioned are Max Récamier, Claude Sénéchal, and Paul Sargos. Bortolotti, Hope in Hell, p. 52. Rony Brauman, Penser dans l’urgence: parcours critique d’un humanitaire. Entretiens avec Catherine Portevin (Paris: Seuil, 2006), p. 11; on the matraquages, see Kristin Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 27. Rony Brauman, ‘Portraits d’anciens maoïstes qui ont depuis fait carrière’, L’Histoire 182 (November 1994): 51. Brauman, Penser dans l’urgence, p. 55. Ibid. Weber, French Doctors, pp. 96–7. Emmanuelli, Les prédateurs de l’action humanitaire, pp. 214–15. Claude Malhuret, Les vices de la vertu, ou La fin de la gauche morale (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2003), p. 8. Ibid., p. 10. Vallaeys, Médecins sans frontières, p. 327. Marc Payet, Logs. Les hommes-orchestres de l’humanitaire (Paris: Editions Alternatives, 1996), pp. 14–15. MSF Logistique, which also sells kits to other NGOs with fewer logistical resources, was established in 1986. Ibid. Fabrice Weissman, ‘Silence Heals . . . From the Cold War to the War on Terror, MSF Speaks Out: A History’, in Claire Magone, Michaël Neuman and Fabrice Weissman (eds.), Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experience (London: Hurst and Company, 2011), p. 178. In Gérard Marin, ‘Le S.O.S. de “Médecins sans frontières”: la course contre la mort’, Le Figaro, 20 July 1979, 3.

302

Notes to pages 165–8

133 Claude Malhuret, ‘Agonies . . . ’ Bulletin MSF 3 (August–September 1979): 8. See also René Backmann, ‘Cambodge: un médecin témoigne: entretien avec Xavier Emmanuelli’, Le Nouvel Observateur 788 (17–23 December 1979): 58–61. 134 Emmanuelli, Les prédateurs de l’action humanitaire, p. 218. 135 Yvon Samuel, ‘Les Vietnamiens détournent l’aide internationale destinée aux Cambodgiens’, France Soir, 28 November 1979, 9. 136 Bernard-Henri Lévy, ‘Une brigade internationale pour le Cambodge?’ Le Matin de Paris, 14 January 1980, 12. 137 Vallaeys, Médecins sans frontières, pp. 316–24 passim. 138 Rieffel, Le tribu des clercs, p. 551. 139 Jean Daniel, L’ère des ruptures (Paris: Grasset, 1979), p. 90. 140 Jean-Claude Guillebaud, Les années orphelines, 1968–1978 (Paris: Seuil, 1978), p. 30. 141 Kouchner, Ce que je crois, p. 66. 142 François Ponchaud, Cambodge année zéro (Paris: Julliard, 1977), p. 156. 143 François Ponchaud, ‘Cambodge: deux ans après la liberation’, Revue d’Etudes Comparatives Est-Ouest 8:4 (December 1977), 156. 144 Jean Lacouture, ‘François Ponchaud – Cambodge Année Zéro’, Revue d’Etudes Comparatives Est-Ouest 8:4 (December 1977): 220; Jacques Decornoy, ‘Trois ouvrages sur la révolution cambodgienne: est-ce ainsi que les hommes doivent vivre?’ Le Monde, 12 February 1976, 2. 145 Jean Lacouture, ‘La démence cambodgienne’, Le Nouvel Observateur 642 (28 February–6 March 1977): 37. 146 Jean Lacouture, Survive le peuple cambodgien! (Paris: Seuil, 1978), p. 13. 147 Ibid., pp. 5, 133. 148 See, for example, E.C., ‘Deux mille réfugiés sur un bateau: L’exodus vietnamien’, Libération, 14 November 1978, 9; Patrick Ruel, ‘Les parias de la mer de Chine’, Libération, 16 November 1978, 12–13; Roland-Pierre Paringaux, ‘Entassés sur un petit cargo dans le Détroit de Malacca: Plus de deux mille cinq cents fugitifs du Vietnam sont dans une situation dramatique’, Le Monde, 14 November 1978, 5; Roland-Pierre Paringaux, ‘La Malasie a accueilli plus du quart des deux cent mille Vietnamiens qui ont fui leur pays depuis 1975’, Le Monde, 22 November 1978, 4. 149 Patrice Franceschi, L’exode vietnamien: les réfugiés de Pulau Bidong (Paris: Arthaud, 1979), p. 192. 150 Jean Lacouture, ‘Le drame de l’ “Exodus” viêtnamien’, Le Nouvel Observateur 732 (20–26 November 1978): 50. 151 Louis Pinto, L’intelligence en action: Le Nouvel Observateur (Paris: A. M. Métillé, 1984), pp. 202–3. 152 ‘Le drame de l’Exodus’, Libération, 16 November 1978, 8; E.C., ‘Deux mille réfugiés sur un bateau: L’exodus viet-namien’, 9; ‘La mutinerie de l’Exodus viet-namien’, Libération, 15 November 1978, 1; Lacouture, ‘Le drame de l’“Exodus” viêtnamien’, 50–51; Lacouture, ‘Réfugiés: l’Indochine au naufrage’, Le Nouvel Observateur 766 (16–22 July 1979), 28; Daniel, L’ère des ruptures, p. 284.

Notes to pages 169–73

303

153 Jean-Pierre Allali, ‘Un regard juif sur Poulo-Bidong’, Le Monde, 27 June 1979, 2. Alongside his appeal, Le Monde published another that also compared the deaths in Asia to Auschwitz: Trinh Van Thao, ‘Une dechirure irremediable’, Le Monde, 27 June 1979, 2. 154 Marek Halter, ‘Qui a peur d’holocauste?’ Libération, 1 December 1978, 7. 155 Patrick Ruel, ‘Les 2500 réfugiés vietnamiens n’ont aucune proposition concrète d’accueil: le Haï Hong attend toujours’, Libération, 16 November 1978, 8. 156 Marek Halter, ‘A quoi sert la mémoire?’ Le Monde, 22 June 1979, 5. 157 Michel-Antoine Burnier, Les 7 vies du docteur Kouchner: biographie (Paris: XO Editions, 2008), pp. 113–14. 158 Marek Halter, ‘Lettre d’Argentine’, Le Nouvel Observateur 660 (4–10 July 1977), 3. 159 Bernard-Henri Lévy, ‘Reportage: “Ici Radio-Kaboul libre . . . ”’ Le Nouvel Observateur 879 (12–18 September 1981): 35–7; Philippe Cohen, BHL: une biographie (Paris: Fayard, 2005), p. 121. 160 ‘In Auschwitz they only gassed lice’, in Carmen Callil, Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), p. 445. Originally published as Philippe Ganier-Raymond, ‘A Auschwitz, on n’a gazé que les poux’, L’Express 1425 (28 October–4 November 1978): 164–99. 161 ‘In Auschwitz they only gassed lice’, pp. 445, 449. 162 Callil, Bad Faith, p. 431. However, a three-volume study of the CGQJ released in the late 1950s, perhaps because of its technical nature, did not provoke a comparable controversy. Heuman, ‘Entangled Memories’, 418. 163 Bernard Kouchner, ‘Peur de l’oubli ou peur de la mémoire?’ L’Express 1426 (4–11 November 1978): 115. Bicot is a derogatory term for people of Arab descent originating from the French rule of North Africa. 164 ‘Un appel de Marek Halter pour l’ “Holocauste”’, L’Express 1426 (4–11 November 1978): 114. 165 Lawyer Serge Klarsfeld, the ‘Nazi hunter’ who drove these cases, ascribed to Darquier’s interview a release effect allowing these cases to be made. Interview with Callil, November 1999, cited in Callil, Bad Faith, p. 435. The aftermath of the interview also saw a rise in profile of Holocaust deniers like Robert Faurisson. 166 See Jacques Vergès and Etienne Bloch, La face cachée du procès Barbie (Paris: Samuel Tastet, 1983); Alain Finkielkraut, La mémoire vaine: du crime contre l’humanité (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), pp. 60–68. 167 Gerry Simpson, Law, War and Crime: War Crimes Trials and the Reinvention of International Law (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), p. 100. 168 Richard J. Golsan, The Papon Affair: Memory and Justice on Trial (New York; London: Routledge, 2000). 169 Michel Brugière with Tristane Banon and Christine Goguet, Refuser le malheur des hommes: les 30 ans de Médecins du Monde (Paris: Le Cherche Midi, 2010), p. 14. 170 Bernard-Henri Lévy, Le lys et la cendre (Paris: Grasset, 1996), p. 81.

304

Notes to pages 173–81

171 Denis Maillard, L’humanitaire, tragédie de la démocratie (Paris: Michalon, 2007), p. 36. 172 Francine Derbon, ‘Castro, ou comment on devient socialiste’, Clarté 58 (1964): 10–12; Kouchner, Le malheur des autres, p. 60; Burnier, Les 7 vies du docteur Kouchner, pp. 90–7; Jean-François Duval, ‘Les livres essentiels de Bernard Kouchner, toubib baroudeur’, Le Temps Stratégique 25 (1998): 111; Guillemoles, Bernard Kouchner, p. 60. 173 Michel-Antoine Burnier and Bernard Kouchner, La France sauvage (Paris: Publications Premières, 1970), p. 8. 174 Bernard Kouchner, ‘Assez de manichéisme’, Actuel 24 (October 1972): 11. 175 According to one of the Actuel editors who later produced a biography of Kouchner, this article was shortened by a staffer in such a way as to increase the impression of support for the Palestinians. Burnier, Les 7 vies du docteur Kouchner, p. 162. 176 Bernard Kouchner in Jacques Paugam, Génération perdue: Ceux qui avaient ving ans en 1968? Ceux qui avaient vingt ans à la fin de la guerre d’Algérie? Ou ni les uns ni les autres? (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1977), pp. 155, 158. 177 Bernard Kouchner, ‘Que plus un mort ne bouge!’ Le Nouvel Observateur 665 (8–14 August 1977): 10. 178 Ibid. Kouchner also stated on Radio France-Culture that he was not particularly concerned by the ‘somewhat promotional element’ of the nouveaux philosophes. See Paugam, Génération perdue, p. 160. 179 Kouchner, ‘Que plus un mort ne bouge!’ 11. 180 André Glucksmann and Bernard Kouchner, ‘La preuve par le Cambodge’, Le Nouvel Observateur 785 (26 November 1979): 132. 181 Ibid., 132. 182 See Bernard Kouchner, ‘Les bons et les mauvais morts’, in Jean Daniel and André Burguière (eds.), Le tiers monde et la gauche (Paris: Seuil, 1979), p. 48; Kouchner, L’Ile de Lumière, p. 19; Bernard Kouchner, Charité business (Paris: Le Pré aux clercs, 1986), pp. 171, 235; Duval, ‘Les livres essentiels de Bernard Kouchner’, 111; Kouchner, Le malheur des autres, pp. 10, 112. 183 Glucksmann and Kouchner, ‘La preuve par le Cambodge’, 118. 184 Ibid., 133. 185 Mesnard, La victime écran, p. 125. 186 Glucksmann and Kouchner, ‘La preuve par le Cambodge’, 131. 187 Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge; London: Belknap, 2010), p. 220. 188 Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (London: Allen Lane, 2012), p. 328. 189 Le Dantec, Les dangers du soleil, p. 272. 190 Pharo, ‘Ethique et politique ou les intellectuels dans l’histoire’, 143.

6 Idealism beyond borders: the turn to sans-frontiériste spectacle 1 Patrice Franceschi, L’exode vietnamien: les réfugiés de Pulau Bidong (Paris: Arthaud, 1979), p. 121. 2 Rony Brauman, Penser dans l’urgence: parcours critique d’un humanitaire. Entretiens avec Catherine Portevin (Paris: Seuil, 2006), p. 94.

Notes to pages 182–5

305

3 See, for example, Michel Winock, Le siècle des intellectuels (Paris: Seuil, 1997), p. 603; François Hourmant, Au pays de l’avenir radieux: voyages des intellectuels français en URSS, à Cuba et en Chine populaire (Paris: Aubier, 2000), pp. 245–56; David Drake, Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), pp. 153–5; see Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left: The Anti-Totalitarian Moment of the 1970s (New York; Oxford: Berghahn, 2004), pp. 267–8. 4 Fiona Terry, Condemned to Repeat? The Paradox of Humanitarian Action (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 149. See Brauman, Penser dans l’urgence, pp. 93–100; Xavier Emmanuelli, Les prédateurs de l’action humanitaire (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991), pp. 201–29; Yves Laurent, Médecins Sans Frontières: là où les autres ne vont pas (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1980), pp. 306– 8; Anne Vallaeys, Médecins sans frontières: la biographie (Paris: Fayard, 2004), pp. 213–29, 307–60; Olivier Weber, French Doctors: Les 25 ans d’épopée des hommes et des femmes qui ont inventé la médecine humanitaire (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995), pp. 297–304, 325–6. See also Eleanor Davey, ‘Famine, Aid, and Ideology: The Political Activism of Médecins Sans Frontières in the 1980s’, French Historical Studies 34:3 (2011): 529– 58. 5 Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islam (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 2; David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (London: Random House, 1993), p. 422. 6 Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, p. 8. 7 Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), p. 323; p. 395 n. 32. 8 See account in Ervand Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 155–95. 9 Michel Foucault, ‘I “reportages” d’idee’, Corriere della Sera, 12 November 1978, 1. The rubric’s intended contributors are listed in Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, 1954–1988, vol. II, 1976–1988 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), p. 706. 10 Cited in Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 282. 11 For a list and English translation of the articles and other texts, as well as some of the responses they provoked, see ‘Appendix: Foucault and His Critics, an Annotated Translation’, Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, pp. 179–277. 12 James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (London: Harper Collins, 1993), p. 309. 13 Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), p. 136. 14 Ibid., p. 132. 15 Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, p. 206. 16 Foucault, Remarks on Marx, pp. 134, 135, 137, 141. 17 See Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics, pp. 49–102.

306

Notes to pages 185–8

18 Michel Foucault and Pierre Victor, ‘On Popular Justice: A Discussion with Maoists’, in Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1980), p. 2. Originally published in Les Temps Modernes 310 (1972). 19 Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 305. 20 See Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, pp. 392–6. 21 Michel Foucault, ‘Tehran: Faith against the Shah’, in Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, p. 202. Originally published in Corriere della Sera, 8 October 1978. See Michiel Leezenberg, ‘Power and Political Spirituality: Michel Foucault on the Islamic Revolution in Iran’, in James Bernauer and Jeremy Carrette (eds.), Michel Foucault and Theology: The Politics of Religious Experience (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 99–115. 22 Michel Foucault, ‘What Are the Iranians Dreaming About?’ in Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 209. Originally published in Le Nouvel Observateur 727 (16–22 October 1978). 23 Michel Foucault, ‘A Revolt with Bare Hands’, in Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, p. 213; 211. Originally published in Corriere della Sera, 5 November 1978. 24 In Michel Foucault, Claire Brière, and Pierre Blanchet, ‘Iran: The Spirit of a World without Spirit’, in Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, p. 253. Originally published in Claire Brière and Pierre Blanchet, Iran: la révolution au nom de Dieu, suivi d’un entretien avec Michel Foucault (Paris: Seuil, 1979), pp. 227–41. 25 Michel Foucault, ‘The Shah is a Hundred Years Behind the Times’, in Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, p. 198. Originally published in Corriere della Sera, 1 October 1978. 26 Michel Foucault, ‘The Mythical Leader of the Iranian Revolt’, in Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, p. 220. Originally published in Corriere della Sera, 26 November 1978. 27 Foucault, ‘Tehran: Faith against the Shah’, pp. 200, 201. 28 Foucault, ‘The Mythical Leader of the Iranian Revolt’, p. 222. 29 Ibid., p. 223. 30 Michel Foucault, ‘A Powder Keg Called Islam’, in Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 241. Originally published in Corriere della Sera, 13 February 1979. 31 Richard Wolin, ‘From the “Death of Man” to Human Rights: The Paradigm Change in French Intellectual Life’, in Mark Bevir, Jill Hargis, and Sara Rushing (eds.), Histories of Postmodernism (London; New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 172. 32 Georges Montaron, ‘La révolution de Téhéran’, Témoignage Chrétien 1806 (19–25 February 1979): 5. 33 Serge July, ‘La joie est entrée dans Téhéran’, Libération, 12 February 1979, 5. 34 Nicole Gnesotto, ‘Le Nouvel Observateur, “L’histoire déraille”’, Esprit 1 (January 1980): 64–9.

Notes to pages 188–93

307

35 Roger Garaudy, Appel aux vivants (Paris: Seuil, 1979), p. 295; Michel Crépu, ‘Garaudy et l’apocalypse de l’Occident’, Esprit 1 (January 1980): 94. See also Garaudy, Promesses de l’Islam (Paris: Seuil, 1981); Michaël Prazan and Adrien Minard, Roger Garaudy: itinéraire d’une négation (Paris: CalmannLévy, 2007). 36 ‘Tiers monde et information: table ronde avec Jacques Bureau, Gérard Chaliand, Jean-Claude Guillebaud, Jacques Julliard, Olivier Mongin and Paul Thibaud’, Esprit 1 (January 1980): 77. 37 Eribon, Michel Foucault, p. 285. 38 Brière and Blanchet, Iran: la révolution au nom de Dieu, p. 18. 39 In Foucault, Brière and Blanchet, ‘Iran: The Spirit of a World without Spirit’, pp. 253, 258, 259. 40 Ibid., p. 259. 41 Drake, Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France, p. 156. 42 Maxime Rodinson, ‘Islam Resurgent?’ in Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, p. 231. Originally published in Le Monde, 6–8 December 1978. 43 Maxime Rodinson, ‘Khomeini and the “Primacy of the Spiritual”’, in Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, p. 242. Originally published in Le Nouvel Observateur (19–25 February 1979). 44 Claudie Broyelle and Jacques Broyelle, ‘What Are the Philosophers Dreaming About? Was Michel Foucault Mistaken about the Iranian Revolution?’ in Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, p. 248. Originally published in Le Matin, 24 March 1979. 45 Broyelle and Broyelle, ‘What Are the Philosophers Dreaming About?’ p. 249. 46 ‘Michel Foucault et l’Iran’, Le Matin, 26 March 1979, 15. 47 Michel Foucault, ‘Open letter to Mehdi Bazargan’, in Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, p. 261. Originally published in Le Nouvel Observateur 753 (14–20 April 1979). 48 Michel Foucault, ‘Is it Useless to Revolt?’ in Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, p. 267. Originally published in Le Monde, 11–12 May 1979. 49 Eribon, Michel Foucault, p. 290. 50 Foucault, ‘Open Letter to Mehdi Bazargan’, p. 262. 51 Foucault, ‘Is it Useless to Revolt?’ p. 267. 52 According to Kouchner, they first met in 1971 when he interviewed Defert for the journal Actuel. Bernard Kouchner, ‘Un vrai samouraï’, in Michel Foucault: une histoire de la vérité (Paris: Syros, 1985), p. 86. 53 Eribon, Michel Foucault, p. 304. Two other MDM doctors, Jacques Lebas and Jean-Pierre Maubert, also participated in the mission. 54 Kouchner, ‘Un vrai samouraï’, p. 89. 55 Michel Foucault, ‘Confronting Governments: Human Rights’, in Foucault, Power: Essential Works of Foucault, vol. III, 1954–1984 (New York: The New Press, 1994), p. 474. 56 Denis Maillard, L’humanitaire, tragédie de la démocratie (Paris: Michalon, 2007), p. 9.

308

Notes to pages 193–7

57 Ibid., p. 475; GIP pamphlet ‘Intolérable’ cited in Eribon, Michel Foucault, p. 228. 58 Alain Guillemoles, Bernard Kouchner: la biographie (Paris: Bayard, 2002), p. 146; Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman, Génération, vol. 2: Les années de poudre (Paris: Seuil, 1988), p. 634; Max Likin, ‘Médecins sans frontières et l’apparition d’un consensus humanitaire’, Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps 95 (2009): 25; Weber, French Doctors, p. 243. 59 Claude Liauzu, Histoire de l’anticolonialisme en France, du XVIe siècle à nos jours (Paris: Armand Colin, 2007), p. 15. 60 ‘Un appel du comité “Un bateau pour le Vietnam”’, 4. 61 A longer list of names is given in ibid. 62 Jean Daniel, ‘Le Viêt-nam et eux . . . ’ Le Nouvel Observateur 734 (4–10 December 1978): 56. 63 Axelle Brodiez, Le Secours populaire français, 1945–2000: du communisme à l’humanitaire (Paris: Presse de la Fondation National des Sciences Politiques, 2006), p. 157. 64 Daniel Verdier, ‘Un bateau pour le Vietnam: chargé bénévolement par les dockers marseillais, le “Solechnogorsk” vogue vers le Vietnam’, L’Humanité, 20 February 1968, 4; Lazar, ‘Le Parti communiste français et l’action de solidarité avec le Vietnam’, pp. 250–51. 65 Brodiez, Le Secours populaire français, p. 157. 66 Robert Gildea, James Mark and Niek Pas, ‘European Radicals and the “Third World”: Imagined Solidarities and Radical Networks, 1958–73’, Cultural and Social History 8:4 (2011): 458. A conference on medical aid to Vietnam followed on 20 April 1968 and other European medical committees, including a Dutch committee still active over four decades later, were established as a result. 67 Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, p. 413. 68 Bernard Kouchner, L’Ile de Lumière (Paris: Editions Ramsay, 1980), p. 218; Weber, French Doctors, pp. 206–208; Guillemoles, Bernard Kouchner, p. 138; Vallaeys, Médecins sans frontières, pp. 283–4. 69 Kouchner, L’Ile de Lumière, p. 407. 70 Robert Hersant, ‘Le bateau pour le Vietnam: une lettre de Robert Hersant’, Le Figaro, 9 December 1978, 1. 71 Robert Linhart, ‘Un bateau pour Longwy!’ Le Monde, 24 March 1979, 34. 72 Alain Ruscio, ‘Le delta noyé’, L’Humanité, 11 November 1978, 11. 73 Le bureau politique du Parti communiste français, ‘Avec le peuple vietnamien’, L’Humanité, 24 November 1978, 1. 74 René Andrieu, ‘Les droits de l’homme’, L’Humanité, 25 November 1978, 1. See also Claude Poperen, ‘Le droit à la liberté’, L’Humanité, 28 November 1978, 1. 75 ‘Des intellectuels dénoncent “une exploitation à des fins publicitaires”’, Le Monde, 29 June 1979, 8. 76 Claudie Broyelle and Jacques Broyelle, ‘Sauver les corps . . . ’, Le Monde, 17– 18 December 1978, 2. Italics in original. 77 ‘Le “Bateau pour le Vietnam” quittera la Nouvelle-Calédonie en mars’, Le Monde, 16 February 1979, 6.

Notes to pages 197–200

309

78 For a detailed account of the mission in its planning stages, see Kouchner, L’Ile de Lumière, pp. 71–136. 79 Guillemoles, Bernard Kouchner, p. 143. 80 Bernard Kouchner and Vladan Radoman were colleagues from Biafra; JeanClaude Sénéchal had worked with Kouchner in the hospital in Saigon; nurse Guylaine Martin had worked in Lebanon; others were newer arrivals Pierre Bonniaud, Patrick Laburthe and Eric Cheysson. 81 Franceschi, L’exode vietnamien, p. 119. 82 Valérie Gorin, ‘La couverture médiatique de la guerre civile du Biafra au regard des enjeux humanitaires dans les médias français, suisses et américains (1967–1970)’, Le Temps des Medias (2013): 184. 83 Raymond Aron, Mémoires (Paris: Julliard, 1983), p. 710. 84 Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, p. 414. 85 ‘Au cours d’une conférénce de presse: la délégation du comité “Un bateau pour le Vietnam” a rendu compte de son entretien avec M. Giscard d’Estaing’, Le Monde, 28 June 1979, 3. 86 Aron, Mémoires, pp. 711, 713. 87 Simone de Beauvoir, La cérémonie des adieux (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), p. 146. 88 Jean de la Guerivière, ‘Les causes et les effets’, Le Monde, 22 June 1979, 5. 89 Jean Daniel, ‘Même combat . . . ’ Le Nouvel Observateur 763 (25 June–1 July 1979): 30. 90 Ibid. See also Jean-Francis Held, ‘Indochine: l’autre holocauste’, Le Nouvel Observateur 763 (25 June–1 July 1979): 42. 91 ‘Bernard Kouchner: médecin de l’année 1979’, Impact Médecin 34 (1 February 1980): 32. 92 Xavier Emmanuelli, ‘Un bateau pour Saint-Germain-des-Prés’, Le Quotidien du Médecin, 4 December 1978, cited in Vallaeys, Médecins sans frontières, p. 295. 93 Ibid., p. 297. 94 Vallaeys, Médecins sans frontières, pp. 297–8. 95 Brauman, Penser dans l’urgence, p. 72. 96 See Weber, French Doctors, pp. 205–43; Vallaeys, Médecins sans frontières, pp. 275–360; Bortolotti, Hope in Hell, pp. 50–55; Joelle Tanguy, ‘The Médecins Sans Frontières Experience’, in Kevin M. Cahill (ed.), A Framework for Survival: Health, Human Rights and Humanitarian Assistance in Conflicts and Disasters (New York; London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 231–3. For a contemporary account that sided with Kouchner, see Hervé Chabalier, ‘La longue course des médecins sans frontières: VI. La naissance de Médecins du monde’, Le Matin de Paris, 1 February 1980, 29. 97 Cited in Franceschi, L’exode vietnamien, p. 195. 98 Cited in Bortolotti, Hope in Hell, p. 52. See Brauman, Penser dans l’urgence, p. 72. 99 Maillard, L’humanitaire, tragédie de la démocratie, p. 30. Italics in original. 100 Cited in Weber, French Doctors, p. 239. 101 Redfield, Life in Crisis, p. 60. Within the Comité Un Bateau pour le Vietnam, Geismar had been concerned at the spending of donations on ‘propaganda’

310

102 103

104

105 106 107 108 109 110

111 112 113

114 115 116 117

Notes to pages 200–3 rather than practical actions, but he left the committee discreetly and without explanation at the time. Alain Geismar, Mon Mai 1968 (Paris: Perrin, 2008), pp. 224–5. Weber, French Doctors, p. 240. Janet E. Heininger, ‘Cambodia: Relief, Repatriation, and Rehabilitation’, in Eric A. Belgrad and Nitza Nachmias (eds.), The Politics of International Humanitarian Aid Operations (Westport; London: Praeger, 1997), p. 116. Some of the camps were run by Cambodian resistance factions, including the Khmer Rouge, and the level of international access to these camps varied significantly. On the militarisation of the camp system and its implications for the international aid effort and resident refugees, see Terry, Condemned to Repeat? pp. 114–54; Courtland Robinson, ‘Refugee Warriors at the Thai-Cambodian Border’, Refugee Survey Quarterly 19:1 (2000): 23– 37. François Schlosser, ‘Ethiopie: “Aidons-les quand même!”’, Le Nouvel Observateur 1143 (3–9 October 1986): 44. Terry, Condemned to Repeat?, pp. 143–5. Brodiez, Le Secours populaire français, p. 257. Oxfam and the Quakers were also active inside Cambodian territory. Xavier Emmanuelli, ‘“Candide” et l’assistance internationale au Cambodge et en Thaïlande’, Le Quotidien du Médecin, 28–29 December 1979, 13. Jean-Yves Follezou, ‘Questions à “Médecins Sans Frontières”’, Le Quotidien du Médecin, 28–29 December 1979, 13. Menotti Bottazzi and Marcel Henriet, ‘Ni politiques, ni politisés mais pas apolitiques’, Le Quotidien du Médecin, 15 January 1980, 16. The exchange was featured in the Communist daily, which described Emmanuelli as ‘accustomed to provocation’. ‘Réponse à Médecins sans frontières’, L’Humanité, 25 January 1980. Claude Prudhomme, ‘De l’aide aux missions à l’action pour le tiers monde: quelle continuité?’ Le Mouvement Social 177 (1996): 24–5. Ibid., 20. Vincent Cosmao, Michel Gest, and André Rousseau, De l’idéologie à l’apologetique: aspects des langages de libération du militantisme catholique en France (Paris: Centre Lebret: 1973); see also Cosmao’s work in the journal he founded, Foi et développement; René Valette, ‘L’église catholique et le développement: l’expérience du CCFD’, in Les Actes du FIG 2002 (Festival international de géographie, Saint Dié des Vosges, 2002). Available at http:// archives-fig-st-die.cndp.fr/actes/actes 2002/valette/article.htm, last accessed 29 December 2014. Denis Pelletier, ‘1985–1987: une crise d’identité du tiers-mondisme catholique?’, Le Mouvement Social 177 (1996): 90. Ibid., 101. Menotti Bottazzi, Et germe l’espoir: de la mine de Bollwiller aux rives du Mékong (Paris: Cerf, 1980), p. 67. Francis Bergeron, Itinéraire d’un chrétien progressiste: l’histoire de JeanFrançois Lambert, ancien dirigeant du CCFD et d’Amnesty (Bouère: Editions Dominique Martin Morin, 1988), pp. 24–5.

Notes to pages 203–6

311

118 Ibid., p. 65. 119 Bottazzi, Et germe l’espoir, p. 71. 120 In Emmanuelle Plas, ‘Cambodge: un présent ni rose, ni noir’, L’Unité, 4 January 1980. 121 As recognised by Brauman, in Vallaeys, Médecins sans frontières, p. 100. For Malhuret, anti-totalitarianism in this period was equivalent to anticommunism; see Malhuret, Les vices de la vertu, p. 12. 122 Rony Brauman, interview with the author, Paris, 10 December 2013. 123 Ibid. 124 Alain Dubos, ‘Après la Marche pour la Survie du Cambodge . . . ’ Bulletin MSF 5 (January–March 1980): 4. 125 This allowed them to include people who were not members of MSF, while also exerting greater control over the association than would have been possible if the campaigns had been run from inside MSF. Rony Brauman, interview with the author, Paris, 10 December 2013. 126 Cambodge: Marche pour la Survie: Statuts, p. 1, MSF archive, Paris. The statutes indicated that a constitutive assembly was held on 16 December 1979; they were signed by Brauman. 127 Médecins Sans Frontières, Cambodge: Opération Marche pour la Survie (Paris, 7 January 1980), p. 1, MSF archive, Paris. 128 Claude Malhuret, Cambodia – March for Survival (Paris: MSF, no date), pp. 1–2, MSF archive, Paris. 129 Associations participantes à Cambodge Marche pour la Survie, MSF Archive, Paris; Rony Brauman, interview with the author, Paris, 10 December 2013. 130 Published in various newspapers on 19 and 20 December; see ‘Cambodge: une accusation et un appel de “Médecins Sans Frontières”’, Le Quotidien du Médecin, 20 December 1979, 19. 131 Bernard-Henri Lévy, ‘Une brigade internationale pour le Cambodge?’ Le Matin de Paris, 14 January 1980, 12. Italics in original. 132 In Jean Bothorel, ‘“Où le ‘star system’ trouverait-il mieux à s’employer qu’à la défense des opprimés?” nous déclare Bernard-Henri Lévy’, Le Matin de Paris, 12 February 1980, 13. 133 MSF, Cambodge: Opération Marche pour la Survie, p. 2. 134 Bernard Kouchner, ‘Une enquête sur les besoins doit précéder les actes de charité’, Le Monde, 27 November 1979, 3. 135 Jacques Guillaume, ‘Cambodge: le face à face des bodoïs’, Libération, 7 February 1980, 8; Roland-Pierre Paringaux, ‘La marche pour la Survie du Cambodge: pour que nul ne dise “je ne savais pas . . . ”’ Le Monde, 8 February 1980, 3. See also Patrick Sabatier, ‘Politique et action humanitaire: une certaine malaise’, Libération, 11 February 1980, 8; René Backmann, ‘Cambodge: la marche pour la Survie’, Le Nouvel Observateur 796 (11–17 February 1980): 28. 136 Marche pour le Cambodge: ont été contactés (Paris: MSF, no date), MSF archive, Paris. 137 Jean Lacouture, letter to Rony Brauman, 1 February 1980, MSF archive, Paris.

312 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150

151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160

Notes to pages 206–9 Doris Lessing, letter to Rony Brauman, 21 January 1980, MSF archive, Paris. Jean Ziegler, letter to MSF France, 30 December 1979, MSF archive, Paris. John le Carré, telegram to Xavier Emmanuelli, undated, MSF archive, Paris. Jean-Christophe Rufin and Jean-Marc Dumas, ‘Une initiative manipulée’, Libération, 11 February 1980, 8. Weber, French Doctors, p. 303. Susan George, ‘Une action mal engagée’, Le Monde, 31 January 1980, 5. Xavier Emmanuelli, ‘Une mauvaise fois de trop’, Libération, 13 February 1980, 8. ‘Pourquoi l’A.I.C.F. (Action internationale contre la faim) participera à l’opération’, Le Monde, 5 February 1980, 4. Bothorel, ‘“Où le ‘star system’ trouverait-il mieux à s’employer qu’à la défense des opprimés?”’ 13. David C. Isby, War in a Distant Country. Afghanistan: Invasion and Resistance (London: Arms and Armour Press, 1989), p. 19. Meredith L. Runion, The History of Afghanistan (Westport; London: Greenwood Press, 2007), pp. 111, 115. Yves Moreau, ‘Pas de retour à la guerre froide’, L’Humanité, 3 January 1980, 8. Sudhir Hazareesingh, Intellectuals and the French Communist Party: Disillusion and Decline (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 17–18. See also Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left, p. 269. Maurice Najman, ‘Marchais: un show qui souffle du froid’, Libération, 12 January 1980, 1. Charles Rebois, ‘La livrée du Kremlin’, Le Figaro, 12 January 1980, 1, 3. ‘Déchaînement anticommuniste hystérique’, L’Humanité, 14 January 1980, 1. ‘Raymond Aron appelle au boycott des J.O.’, Le Figaro, 24 January 1980, 5. Gérard Chaliand, Rapport sur la résistance afghane (Paris: Bibliothèque Berger-Levrault, 1981), p. 22. Patrice Franceschi, Guerre en Afghanistan, 27 avril 1978–31 mai 1984: essai (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1984), p. 28. Philippe Augoyard, La prison pour délit d’espoir: médecin en Afghanistan (Paris: Flammarion, 1985), p. 81. Edward Girardet, Afghanistan: The Soviet War (London; Sydney: Croom Helm, 1985), p. 215. Tanguy, ‘The Médecins Sans Frontières Experience’, p. 239. AMI seems to have inspired several medical studies but few publications. See Hervé Dejours, ‘Une mission de trois mois dans le panjshir afghan avec Aide médicale internationale’, unpublished PhD thesis, Aix-Marseille 2 (1983); Jean-Pierre Roux, ‘Aide médicale internationale: évolution d’une association humanitaire à travers cinq ans de missions médicales au Kurdistan iranien’, unpublished PhD thesis, Dijon (1986); Bertrand Laversin, ‘Formation d’agents de sante afghans par Aide medicale internationale Afghanistan, de 1986 à 1992: description, perspective’, unpublished PhD thesis, Lille 2 (1993).

Notes to pages 210–12

313

161 Yves Beigbeder, The Role and Status of International Humanitarian Volunteers and Organizations: The Right and Duty to Humanitarian Assistance (Dordrecht; London: Martinus Nihoff, 1991), p. 268. 162 Le Kurdistan d’Iran et l’Aide médicale internationale (Paris: AMI, 1984), p. 16. 163 Jean-Christophe Rufin, Le piège: quand l’aide humanitaire remplace la guerre (Paris: J.C. Lattès, 1986), p. 73. 164 Helga Baitenmann, ‘NGOs and the Afghan War: The Politicisation of Humanitarian Aid’, Third World Quarterly 12:1 (1990): 70. Baitenmann highlighted that despite the relatively modest sums involved in the crossborder operations they were rife with corruption, linked with the need to pay ‘protection’ within Afghanistan as well as bribes to Pakistani police; corruption also plagued the refugee assistance programmes in Peshawar. 165 See the first-hand account of AMI doctor Philippe Augoyard and extracts from the diary of another volunteer, in Augoyard, La prison pour délit d’espoir, pp. 31–72, 161–9; also the reconstruction of MSF missions and a lengthy extract from a contemporary report by a volunteer, in Vallaeys, Médecins sans frontières, pp. 419–27, 433–9. 166 See Jonathan Benthall, ‘Le sans-frontiérisme’, Anthropology Today 7:6 (December 1991): 1; Emmanuelli, Les prédateurs de l’action humanitaire, p. 34; Weber, French Doctors, pp. 11–12; Vallaeys, Médecins sans frontières, p. 397. 167 Girardet, Afghanistan: The Soviet War, p. 220. 168 Franceschi, Guerre en Afghanistan, p. 34. 169 Augoyard, La prison pour délit d’espoir. 170 ‘Appel pour la libération du Dr Augoyard’, Bulletin MSF 16 (1983): 16. 171 Xavier Emmanuelli, ‘La nuit tombe’, Bulletin MSF 16 (January–March 1983): 3. 172 Jacques Abouchar, Dans la cage de l’ours (Paris: Editions Balland, 1985). 173 Claude Malhuret, ‘Report from Afghanistan’, Foreign Affairs 62:2 (1983– 84): 432. This is a version of Malhuret’s speech ‘The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan: The Consequences for Afghanistan and the Soviet Union’, at the Russian Research Centre of Harvard University, 17 October 1983. 174 Juliette Fournot in Fabrice Weissman, ‘Silence Heals . . . From the Cold War to the War on Terror, MSF Speaks Out: A History’, in Claire Magone, Michaël Neuman and Fabrice Weissman (eds.), Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experience (London: Hurst and Company, 2011), p. 180. 175 Claude Malhuret, ‘Le droit de secourir et de témoigner’, Le Monde, 26 September 1984, 4. 176 Interview cited in Vallaeys, Médecins sans frontières, p. 441. 177 Foucault, ‘Confronting Governments’, p. 475. 178 Stephen Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights (Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2014), p. 9. 179 Samuel Moyn, Human Rights and the Uses of History (London: Verso, 2014), p. 94.

314

Notes to pages 213–16

180 181 182 183

Xavier Emmanuelli, ‘L’âge de raison’, Bulletin MSF 2 (April 1979): 8. Bernier, Des Médecins Sans Frontières, p. 110. Rony Brauman, interview with the author, Paris, 10 December 2013. Claude Liauzu, L’enjeu tiers-mondiste: débats et combats (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1987), p. 96. 184 Jacques Broyelle claimed Kouchner prevented the Bateau pour le Vietnam adopting an explicitly anti-communist position. Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left, p. 269. 185 Claude Malhuret in Jacques Bernard, ‘La Marche pour la Survie s’arrêterat-elle au pont d’Aranyapratet?’ Le Quotidien du Médecin, 29 January 1980, 15.

7 Controversy in a humanitarian age: attacks on tiers-mondisme in the 1980s 1 Joelle Tanguy, ‘The Médecins Sans Frontières Experience’, in Kevin M. Cahill (ed.), A Framework for Survival: Health, Human Rights and Humanitarian Assistance in Conflicts and Disasters (New York; London: Routledge, 1999), p. 234. 2 See, for example, the work of the former MSF vice-president in Alain Dubos, La rizière des barbares (Paris: France Loisirs, 1980); Dubos, Et tu franchiras la frontière (Paris: Julliard, 1986). 3 Dan Bortolotti, Hope in Hell: Inside the World of Doctors Without Borders (Ontario; New York: Firefly Books, 2004), p. 15. 4 Bertrand Nezeys, L’Autopsie du tiers-mondisme (Paris: Economica, 1988), p. 1. 5 Pascal Bruckner, The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt (New York: The Free Press, 1986), p. 132. Italics in original. 6 Tim Allen and David Styan, ‘A Right to Interfere? Bernard Kouchner and the New Humanitarianism’, Journal of International Development 12 (2000): 834. 7 Philippe Laurent in Peter Caesar (ed.), The Inside Story: Personal Testimonies. The History of MSF Belgium and the Operational Centre of Brussels (Brussels: MSF, 2013), p. 55. 8 Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), p. 155; Brauman, cited in Laurence Binet, Famine and Forced Relocations in Ethiopia, 1984–1986 (Geneva: MSF, 2013), p. 28. 9 Peter Redfield, Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journal of Doctors Without Borders (London; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), p. 62; Renée C. Fox, Doctors Without Borders: Humanitarian Quests, Impossible Dreams of Médecins Sans Frontières (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), p. 56. 10 Rony Brauman and Michaël Neuman, MSF and the Aid System: Choosing Not to Choose (Paris: MSF-CRASH, 2014), p. 4.

Notes to pages 217–20

315

11 Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith (London; New York: Zed Books, 1997), p. 175; Philippe Ryfman, ‘L’humanitaire, enfant de Mai?’ in Philippe Artières and Michelle ZancariniFournel (eds.), 68: Une histoire collective 1962–1981 (Paris: La Découverte, 2008), pp. 741–2. 12 Claude Liauzu, L’enjeu tiers-mondiste: débats et combats (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1987), pp. 101, 127. 13 Rony Brauman, ‘La déconstruction des mythes’, Libération, 26 January 1985, 9; Rony Brauman, Penser dans l’urgence: parcours critique d’un humanitaire. Entretiens avec Catherine Portevin (Paris: Seuil, 2006), p. 113. 14 Gérard Chaliand, Les faubourgs de l’histoire: tiers-mondismes et tiers-mondes (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1984), pp. 9, 39, 44. 15 Bruckner, The Tears of the White Man, pp. 14, 38, 185. 16 Chaliand, Les faubourgs de l’histoire, p. 17; Yves Lacoste, Contre les antitiers-mondistes et contre certains tiers-mondistes (Paris: La Découverte, 1986), pp. 55, 59; Pierre Vidal-Naquet, ‘Une fidélité têtue: la résistance française à la guerre d’Algérie’, Vingtième Siècle, Revue d’Histoire 10 (April– June 1986): p. 18. 17 See Yves Lacoste, ‘L’escalade de la cruauté’, Le Nouvel Observateur 409 (11– 17 September 1972): 33–6; also the resulting book, Lacoste, La géographie, ça sert, d’abord, à faire la guerre (Paris: Maspero, 1976). 18 Lacoste, Contre les anti-tiers-mondistes et contre certains tiers-mondistes, pp. 31, 82, 83. 19 Fondation Liberté Sans Frontières: Statuts, p. 1, MSF archive, Paris. The statutes were dated 9 August 1984 and signed by Malhuret. 20 Anne Vallaeys, Médecins sans frontières: la biographie (Paris: Fayard, 2004), pp. 474–80. For Rony Brauman’s memory of this process, see Brauman, Penser dans l’urgence, pp. 107–12. 21 Rony Brauman, interview with the author, Paris, 10 December 2013. 22 Fondation Liberté Sans Frontières pour l’information sur les droits de l’homme et le développement, no date, pp. 2, 3, 5, 10, 14, MSF archive, Paris. 23 Ibid., pp. 14–15. 24 Alain Gresh, ‘Une fondation au-dessus de toute soupçon’, Le Monde Diplomatique 374 (May 1985), 20. MSF received funding in this period from the newly launched National Endowment for Democracy, which, although officially a non-profit organisation, was created by the Reagan administration as a means of promoting American soft power. Fabrice Weissman, ‘Silence Heals . . . From the Cold War to the War on Terror, MSF Speaks Out: A History’, in Claire Magone, Michaël Neuman, and Fabrice Weissman (eds.), Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experience (London: Hurst and Company, 2011), p. 181. 25 See Claude Malhuret in Michel de Jaeghère, ‘L’idéologie de la famine’, Valeurs Actuelles 2513 (28 January–3 February 1985): 33; and in Pierre Haski, ‘Une médecine de choc pour guérir du tiers-mondisme’, Libération, 26 January 1985, 8; see Rony Brauman in Pierre Castel, ‘Rony Brauman: “Nous avons tapé dans le mille!”’ Croissance des Jeunes Nations 270 (March 1985): 13.

316

Notes to pages 220–2

26 Patrick Forestier, ‘Les impostures du tiers-mondisme’, Paris Match 1865 (22 February 1985): 4. 27 Ibid., 8, 80. 28 Alain Chenu, ‘Des sentiers de la gloire aux boulevards de la célébrité: sociologie des couvertures de Paris Match, 1949–2005’, Revue Française de Sociologie 49:1 (2008): 16. 29 Invitation to conference of 23–24 January 1985, from Dr Claude Malhuret, dated 11 January 1985. Available at http://speakingout.msf.org/en/node/177, last accessed 13 December 2014. 30 Rony Brauman, interview with the author, Paris, 10 December 2013. 31 Olivier Weber, French Doctors: Les 25 ans d’épopée des hommes et des femmes qui ont inventé la médecine humanitaire (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995), p. 402. 32 Haski, ‘Une médecine de choc pour guérir du tiers-mondisme’, 8. 33 Rony Brauman, interview with the author, Paris, 10 December 2013. 34 Rist attributes much of the conference’s impact to this glaring omission; Rist, The History of Development, p. 175–6. 35 René Dumont, ‘C’est la nouvelle droite’, Libération, 26 January 1985, 8. 36 Rony Brauman, ‘Ni tiers-mondisme, ni cartiérisme’, in Brauman (ed.), Le tiersmondisme en question (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1986), p. 14. 37 Ilios Yannakakis, ‘Le tiers-mondisme, de Lénine à nos jours’, in ibid., p. 47. 38 Gérard Chaliand, ‘La fin des mythes révolutionnaires’, in ibid., p. 69; see also Chaliand, Les faubourgs de l’histoire, pp. 42–3. 39 Olivier Roy, ‘Commentaire’ [response to Chaliand], in Brauman, Le tiersmondisme en question, p. 78. 40 The different interventions corresponding to LSF’s aspiration to tackle both theoretical and empirical questions are available in Le tiers-mondisme en question: the first group of papers was collected as ‘Réalités et illusions: les représentations’ and the second group is classed as ‘case studies;’ a final, concluding section featured papers on the theme of development. 41 Jacques Broyelle, ‘Commentaire’, in Rony Brauman (ed.), Le tiers-mondisme en question (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1986), pp. 73, 75. 42 Françoise Monestier, ‘Au colloque de “Liberté sans frontière [sic]” les tiersmondistes n’étaient pas à la noce’, Présent (31 January 1985): 2. Brauman has described being approached during a visit to Strasbourg by Bernard Antony, the journal’s founder and at the time a member of the European Parliament for the Front National, noting that the far right was ‘obviously trying to take us over’. In Binet, Famine and Forced Relocations in Ethiopia, p. 31. 43 De Jaeghère, ‘L’idéologie de la famine’, 32. 44 In ibid. The same edition also carried an article by Broyelle on the situation in Ethiopia and Afghanistan, attributing the greatest famines of the twentieth century to socialism. Jacques Broyelle, ‘Les goulags de la faim’, Valeurs Actuelles 2513 (28 January–3 February 1985): 34. 45 Pierre Castel, ‘Le tiers-mondisme au rancart?’ Croissance des Jeunes Nations 270 (March 1985): 10; René Dumont, ‘Des droits politiques pour des cadavres?’ Croissance des Jeunes Nations 271 (April 1985): 11; Jean-Pierre

Notes to pages 223–5

46 47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54

55 56 57 58

59

60

61 62 63

317

Cot, A l’épreuve du pouvoir: le tiers-mondisme pour quoi faire? (Paris: Seuil, 1984), p. 13; Jean-Pierre Cot, ‘Une malhonnêteté intellectuelle’, Croissance des Jeunes Nations 271 (April 1985): 8–9; Charles Condamines, ‘Messieurs les ambulanciers n’écrasez pas les cantonniers!’ Croissance des Jeunes Nations 271 (April 1985): 9–11. Rémy Rieffel, Le tribu des clercs: intellectuels sous le Ve République (Paris: Calman-Lévy, 1993), p. 550. Rony Brauman, correspondence with the author, 13 December 2013. Claude Julien, ‘Une bête à abattre: le “tiers-mondisme”’, Le Monde Diplomatique 374 (May 1985), 13, 14. Gresh, ‘Une fondation au-dessus de toute soupçon’, 20. Gabriel Marc, ‘Le principal problème de notre temps: trois milliards de nouveaux pauvres’, Le Monde Diplomatique 374(May 1985), 20. Lettre ouverte adressée à la la direction collegiale et aux membres MSF, N’Djamena, 10 February 1985. Available at http://speakingout.msf.org/en/ node/186, last accessed 13 December 2014. Pierre Haski, ‘Bistouris: guerre franco-belge chez Médecins Sans Frontières’, Libération, 10 July 1985, 25. Lionel Rotcage, ‘Band Aid, ou comment ramasser le jack pot, hors taxes’, Libération, 13–14 July 1985, 7. Maxime Szczepanski-Huillery, ‘“L’idéologie tiers-mondiste”. Constructions et usages d’une catégorie intellectuelle en “crise”’, Raisons politiques 18 (2005): 29. Dumont, ‘C’est la nouvelle droite’, 8; see also Castel, ‘Le tiers-mondisme au rancart?’ 10. Gresh, ‘Une fondation au-dessus de toute soupçon’, 19. Liauzu, ‘Du tiers-mondisme à la dérive des continents’, 24. Lacoste, Contre les anti-tiers-mondistes et contre certains tiers-mondistes, p. 63; see Pierre-André Taguieff, ‘La stratégie culturelle de la “Nouvelle Droite” en France (1968–83)’, in Robert Badinter (ed.), Vous avez dit fascismes? (Paris: Montalba, 1984), pp. 13–52. This concern was also noted by MSF Belgium although it was secondary to their main point about the contravention of MSF’s apolitical identity. Georges Courade, ‘Le référent tropical dans la “melée”: la géographie, la crise alimentaire africaine et la fondation “Liberté Sans Frontières”’, in Michel Bruneau and Daniel Dory (eds.), Les enjeux de la tropicalité (Paris: Masson, 1989), p. 131. On the internal tensions see Denis Pelletier, ‘1985–1987: une crise d’identité du tiers-mondisme catholique?’, Le Mouvement Social 177 (1996): 89– 106. Gabriel Marc in Gresh, ‘Une fondation au-dessus de toute soupçon’, 19. Pelletier, ‘Une crise d’identité du tiers-mondisme catholique?’ 94–5. Guillaume Maury, L’église et la subversion: le C.C.F.D. (Paris: Centre d’études et de diffusion de l’Union nationale inter-universitaire, 1985). See also Michel Algrin, La subversion humanitaire: les bonnes œuvres du CCFD (Paris: Jean Picollec, 1988); Jean-Pierre Moreau, Le terrorisme pastorale: résurgence de la théologie de la libération (Paris: Atelier Fol’Fer, 2009).

318

Notes to pages 225–7

64 Michel de Jaeghère, ‘Les maquis de la charité’, Valeurs Actuelles 2520 (18–24 March 1985): 31–2; Y.D., ‘Le CCFD au pied du mur’, Présent 836 (16 May 1985): 2. 65 See, for example, Bernard Holzer, ‘Quand l’Evangile redevient subversif’, Le Monde Diplomatique 387 (June 1986), 6; Bernard Holzer, ‘Maintenir la porte ouverte’, La Croix l’Evénement, 29 October 1986, 11; Bernard Holzer and Frédéric Lenoir, Les risques de la solidarité: entretiens sur le C.C.F.D. (Paris: Fayard, 1989); Marc, Il faut aimer l’Eglise, nom de Dieu!; Abbé Pierre, ‘Venez vivre parmi les pauvres!’ Témoignage Chrétien 10 (April 1989). 66 Rony Brauman, ‘Controverse sur l’aide humanitaire et ses utilisations politiques, tiers-mondisme: les intentions et les résultats’, Le Monde Diplomatique 380 (November 1985), 4–5. 67 Philippe Laurent, ‘Solidarité et non-alignement idéologique’, Le Monde Diplomatique 380 (November 1985), 4. 68 See Rony Brauman, ‘Des mythes à pourchasser’, Le Monde, 6 November 1985, 2. 69 Conference papers published in François Jean (ed.), La dette, catastrophe ou mutation (Paris: Fondation Liberté sans frontières, 1987); see also Sylvie Brunel, La vache du riche mange le grain . . . du riche (Paris: Fondation Liberté sans frontières, 1985); Jean, De Lomé I à Lomé II: les infortunés de la coopération CCE-ACP (Paris: Fondation Liberté sans frontières, 1985); Brunel, Le nordeste brésilien: les véritables enjeux (Paris: Fondation Liberté sans frontières, 1986). 70 In Vallaeys, Médecins sans frontières, p. 359. 71 Rony Brauman in Patrick Forestier, ‘En Ethiopie, votre argent finance les déportations!’ Paris Match 1904 (22 November 1985): 119. 72 See Bahru Zewde, ‘The History of the Red Terror: Contexts and Consequences’, in Kjetil Tronvoll, Charles Schaefer, and Girmachew Alemu Aneme (eds.), The Ethiopian Red Terror Trials: Transitional Justice Challenged (Oxford: James Currey, 2009), pp. 17–32. 73 Suzanne Franks, Reporting Disasters: Famine, Aid, Politics and the Media (London: Hurst, 2013), p. 37. 74 See Bob Geldof and Paul Vallely, Is That It? (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1986), pp. 215–352. 75 Colette Braeckman, ‘Noël à Korem: les hottes sont vides et les enfants grelottent sur la paille’, Le Soir, 25 December 1984, cited in Binet, Famine and Forced Relocations in Ethiopia, p. 22; Jean-Christophe Rufin, Le piège: quand l’aide humanitaire remplace la guerre (Paris: J.C. Lattès, 1986), p. 225. 76 See the account of Claude Malhuret on Midi 2, 31 October 1985, available at http://www.ina.fr/video/CAB85108992/plateau-claude-malhuretdirecteur-medecin-sans-frontiere-video.html, last accessed 13 December 2014. 77 Cited in Ondine Barrow, ‘International Responses to Famine in Ethiopia, 1983–85’, in Barrow and Michael Jennings (eds.), The Charitable Impulse: NGOs and Development in East and Northeast Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 2001), p. 66.

Notes to pages 227–9

319

78 See Jason Clay, ‘Ethiopian Famine and the Relief Agencies’, in Bruce Nichols and Gil Loescher (eds.), The Moral Nation: Humanitarianism and U.S. Foreign Policy Today (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989): pp. 232–77. 79 Mortality figures from ibid., pp. 259–60, 262. 80 Alex de Waal, Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 123. According to Cutler, UNEOE ‘actually did very little’ and was ‘more concerned with the appearance of monitoring and evaluation than its substance’. Peter Cutler, ‘The development of the 1983–85 famine in northern Ethiopia’, unpublished PhD thesis, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (1988), p. 407. 81 In addition, the Oromo Relief Association (ORA) worked on behalf of the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), but essentially only in Sudanese territory; the Eritrean Red Cross and Red Crescent Society (ERCCS) was the relief wing of the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), a rival to the EPLF, but received few donations after 1981. 82 Mark Duffield and John Prendergast, Without Troops & Tanks: The Emergency Relief Desk and the Cross Border Operation into Eritrea and Tigray (Lawrenceville: Red Sea Press, 1994), p. 6. Two other key groups were the Eritrean Inter-agency Agricultural Consortium (EIAC) and the Tigray Transport and Agricultural Consortium (TTAC). 83 Jean Louis Péninou, ‘Un médecin sans frontières en Erythrée’, Libération, 29 June 1978, 14–15; Rony Brauman, Rapport moral (Paris: MSF, 1983), p. 3. 84 Ondine Barrow, ‘International Responses to Famine in Ethiopia’, p. 68. 85 See Jason Clay and Bonnie Holcombe, Politics and Famine in Ethiopia, 1984– 1985 (Cambridge: Cultural Survival, 1986); Jason Clay, Sandra Steingraber, and Peter Niggli, The Spoils of Famine: Ethiopian Famine Policy and Peasant Agriculture (Cambridge: Cultural Survival, 1988). 86 Rufin, Le piège, p. 222. 87 Francis Charhon, ‘Ethiopie: état d’urgence’, Bulletin MSF 22 (November– December 1984): 2. See also F. Poinard, ‘Erythrée: l’hôpital du front’, Bulletin MSF 20 (April–June 1984): 10; Francis Charhon, ‘Ethiopie: le cauchemar’, Bulletin MSF 21 (September–October 1984): 5; Antoine Crouan, ‘Réfugiés éthiopiens’, Bulletin MSF 22 (November–December 1984): 5. 88 Francis Charhon, ‘Ethiopie: derrière l’horreur, l’espoir’, Bulletin MSF 23 (March–April 1985): 4. 89 Brauman in Forestier, ‘En Ethiopie, votre argent finance les déportations!’ 119. 90 Jacques de Barrin, ‘Détournements, discriminations et fausse statistiques . . . ’ Le Monde, 23 May 1985, 3. 91 René Backmann, ‘Après le “concert du siècle”, Afrique: où va le fric’, Le Nouvel Observateur 1080 (19–25 July 1985): 36. 92 Pierre Haski, ‘Pendant ce temps en Ethiopie . . . ’ Libération, 15 July 1985, 25. 93 See Yves Lacoste, ‘Des famines qui ne tombent pas du ciel’, Hérodote 39 (October–December 1985): 5; Michel Foucher, ‘L’Ethiopie: à qui sert

320

94

95 96 97 98

99 100 101 102 103

104 105 106

107 108

109

110

111 112 113

Notes to pages 230–4 la famine?’ Hérodote 39 (October–December 1985), 109; Jean Gallais, ‘Sécheresse – Famine – Etat: le cas de l’Ethiopie’, Hérodote 39 (October– December 1985): 60–87. The phrase is used in Rony Brauman, Rapport moral (Paris: MSF, 1985), p. 10; and Brauman, ‘Médecins sans frontières: 12 mois: 44 missions – 22 pays’, Bulletin MSF 24 (June–July 1985): 5. See Binet, Famine and Forced Relocations in Ethiopia, pp. 37–8. David Blundy, ‘50,000 die in Ethiopia transit’, The Sunday Times, 3 November 1985, 1, 15. Rony Brauman in Pierre Haski, ‘Ethiopie: MSF reconduit à la frontière’, Libération, 4 December 1985, 21. Rony Brauman, ‘Refugee Camps, Population Transfers, and NGOs’, in Jonathan Moore (ed.), Hard Choices: Moral Dilemmas in Humanitarian Intervention (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), p. 192. In Binet, Famine and Forced Relocations in Ethiopia, pp. 15, 33; see pp. 40, 47 for the 1985 mortality rates. Ibid., p. 49. Ibid., p. 60. William Shawcross, Le poids de la pitié (Paris: Balland, 1985), p. 390. Pierre Haski, ‘Silence, on aide’, Libération, 4 December 1985, 21; André Glucksmann and Thierry Wolton, Silence, on tue (Paris: Grasset, 1986), pp. 36, 111–14; Brauman, Penser dans l’urgence, p. 99. Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza (London: Verso, 2011), pp. 28–9. Ibid., p. 36. Weizman himself argued that ‘the moderation of violence is part of the very logic of violence’, in ibid., p. 4. Brauman, Penser dans l’urgence, p. 147. See also Rony Brauman, Humanitaire: le dilemme, entretien avec Philippe Petit (Paris: Textuel, 2002), p. 192; Rony Brauman, ‘Learning from Dilemmas’, in Michel Feher (ed.), Nongovernmental Politics (New York: Zone Books, 2007), p. 139. Blundy, ‘50,000 die in Ethiopia transit’, 15. MSF, Compte rendu du Conseil d’administration, 25 November 1985, pp. 6–7. Available at http://speakingout.msf.org/en/node/226, last accessed 13 December 2014. AICF’s leaders remained faithful to the line established by Giroud throughout the remaining years of the Ethiopian famine. See Catherine Flach, ‘La nuit tombe sur Rama . . . ’ Bulletin AICF 10 (1987): 1; Manuel Pietri, ‘L’Ethiopie’, Bulletin AICF 15 (1989): 1. Françoise Giroud, ‘Ethiopie: quand le fric arrive’, Le Nouvel Observateur 1081 (26 July–1 August 1985): 32–3. This was a response to Backmann, ‘Afrique: où va le fric’. Françoise Giroud, ‘Il faut continuer à aider l’Ethiopie’, Libération, 4 December 1985, 23. Françoise Giroud, ‘S’en aller, c’est déserter’, Bulletin AICF 6 (1986): 4. Also published in Libération, 3 October 1986, 18. Francis Charhon, ‘Médecins sans Frontières expulsé d’Ethiopie’, Bulletin MSF 26 (December 1985–January 1986): 5.

Notes to pages 234–7

321

114 Christiane Chombeau, ‘Le retour de Médecins sans frontières: des témoignages accablants sur les transferts forcés de populations’, Le Monde, 11 December 1985, 6. 115 Jean-Noël Villers, ‘Claude Malhuret: “Parler, au risque de partir”’, La Croix l’Evénement, 29 October 1986, 11. 116 On CRASH and its role within MSF, see Elsa Rambaud, ‘L’organisation sociale de la critique à Médecins Sans Frontières’, Revue française de science politique 29: 4 (2009): 734–46. 117 Rony Brauman, ‘Le tiers-mondisme contre le tiers-monde’, Géopolitique Africaine (June 1986): 9. See also Brauman, Humanitaire: le dilemme, p. 104. 118 Joël Le Corre, ‘De l’aide d’urgence au développement’, Convergence 47 (January 1986): 12; Jacques Fauconnier, ‘Ethiopie: la renaissance des villages’, Convergence 50 (April 1986): 13. 119 Daniel Assalit, ‘Le temps de la récolte’, Convergence 54 (September 1986): 13. 120 Rufin, Le piège, p. 235. 121 François Schlosser, ‘Ethiopie: “Aidons-les quand même!”’ Le Nouvel Observateur 1143 (3–9 October 1986): 44. 122 In René Backmann, ‘Famine: faut-il aider les dictatures?’ Le Nouvel Observateur 1144 (10–16 October 1986): 100. 123 Pierre Haski, ‘Une rentrée éthiopienne bien parisienne’, Libération, 3 October 1986, 18. 124 Philippe Ryfman, ‘Crises of Maturity and Transformation in French NGOs’, in Karl Blanchet and Boris Martin (eds.), Many Reasons to Intervene: French and British Approaches to Humanitarian Action (London: Hurst, 2011), p. 12. 125 Mark Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), p. 47. See Blanchet and Martin, Many Reasons to Intervene; Eleanor Davey, Beyond the ‘French Doctors’: The Evolution and Interpretation of Humanitarian Action in France (London: ODI, 2012). 126 See Barbara J. Brown, ‘The United Nations and Disaster Relief in the Sahel 1973–75’, Disasters 1:2 (1977): 145–50; Randolph C. Kent, Anatomy of Disaster Relief: The International Network in Action (London: Pinter Publishers, 1987). UNDRO was the forerunner of the Department of Humanitarian Affairs (DHA) and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). 127 See, for example, Joanna Macrae and Anthony Zwi (eds.), War and Hunger: Rethinking International Responses to Complex Emergencies (London: Zed Books, 1994); for some of the analysis of these issues in MSF, see François Jean, From Ethiopia to Chechnya: Reflections on Humanitarian Action, 1988–1999 (MSF, 2008). 128 Jean-Christophe Rufin, ‘Urgence dans l’urgence’, Tribune Médicale 149 (22– 29 June 1985): 5. 129 Jean-Christophe Rufin, ‘Plaidoyer pour la faim’, Tribune Médicale 149 (22– 29 June 1985): 18. See for a similar argument, see Charles Condamines in

322

130 131

132

133 134 135 136 137 138

139

140 141 142 143 144 145 146

147 148

Notes to pages 237–41 François Schlosser, ‘Le coup de coeur? Non, le coup de main!’ Le Nouvel Observateur 1076 (21–27 June 1985): 48. Brauman, Rapport moral [1985], pp. 9, 11. See also Vasset in Binet, Famine and Forced Relocations in Ethiopia, p. 15. Haski, ‘Silence, on aide’; Christophe Naigeon, ‘Addis Abeba accuse Médecins sans frontières de faire de la politique’, Libération, 4 December 1985, 21. MSF prefers the term ‘movement’ to describe its international network. At the time of writing, the MSF international movement had twenty-three associations, grouped into five operational centres. After MSF France, the first offices to be established were Belgium (1980), Switzerland (1981), Holland (1984), and Spain (1986); these now form the movement’s operational centres. Greece also shared operational status with Switzerland but was expelled from the movement after unilaterally undertaking missions in Kosovo in 1999; it returned to the movement in 2007, joining the Spanish operational centre. The movement’s unifying body is MSF International, based in Geneva. See http://www.msf.org/msf-movement, last accessed 27 May 2014; on Greece, see Fox, Doctors Without Borders. Caesar, The Inside Story, p. 13. Colette Braeckman, ‘“Médecins sans frontières”: en un an, 80 Belges envoyés aux quatres coins du monde’, Le soir [Brussels], 17 November 1981. Ibid. Cited in Binet, Famine and Forced Relocations in Ethiopia, p. 29. Cited in Caesar, The Inside Story, p. 48. Jean-Benoît Falisse, ‘Entrepreneurs humanitaires: Médecins sans frontières Belgique, genèse d’une ONG atypique, 1980–1987’, Cahiers d’histoire du temps présent 21 (2009): 41–4. Ibid., 23. In addition to having different visions of their role, MSF Belgium, principally supported by Francophone Belgians, also had a far smaller potential donor base amongst the public than MSF France. MSF Belgium, Médecins Sans Frontières et Libertés Sans Frontières: l’incompatibilité (no date), p. 1, MSF archive, Paris. Ibid., pp. 3, 9, 12. In Caesar, The Inside Story, p. 57. In Binet, Famine and Forced Relocations in Ethiopia, p. 49. Cited in Haski, ‘Guerre franco-belge chez Médecins Sans Frontières’. Brussels Trial Court, Public Hearing of 15 July 1985, Decision of the Court, p. 8, MSF archive, Paris. Rony Brauman, Rapport moral 1985–1986 (Paris: MSF, 1986), p. 18. In effect, because of the impossibility of extending Law 1901 (which enabled the creation of MSF France) to other European countries, MSF Belgium was created out of an entirely independent legal structure. Falisse, ‘Entrepreneurs humanitaires’, 19. Kevin P.Q. Phelan, ‘Introduction’, in Jean, From Ethiopia to Chechnya, pp. v– viii. François Jean, Ethiopie: du bon usage de la famine (Paris: MSF, 1986), pp. 99, 100.

Notes to pages 241–6

323

149 François Jean, ‘Famine and Ideology’, in Jean, From Ethiopia to Chechnya, p. 4. Originally published in Commentaire 42 (Summer 1988). 150 François Jean, ‘Ethiopia: A Political Famine’, in Jean, From Ethiopia to Chechnya, pp. 13, 19. Originally published in Politique Internationale 39 (Spring 1988). 151 Rufin, Le piège, p. 17. 152 Ibid., pp. 96, 236, 237, 238. 153 Tony Vaux, The Selfish Altruist: Relief Work in Famine and War (London: Earthscan, 2001), pp. 45–68. 154 Allen and Styan, ‘Bernard Kouchner and the New Humanitarianism’, 834. 155 Rufin, Le piège, p. 333; Glucksmann and Wolton, Silence, on tue, p. 10. 156 Ibid., pp. 11, 116. 157 Bernard Kouchner, Charité business (Paris: Le Pré aux clercs, 1986), pp. 25, 26, 46. Brauman later described his resentment at Kouchner and MDM’s failure to support MSF after the expulsion. Brauman, ‘Ennemis publics’, pp. 126–7. 158 Liauzu, L’enjeu tiers-mondiste, pp. 16, 107, 127, 130. 159 Valérie Lagrange in Charles Vial, ‘Les artistes et les causes humanitaires: le salut par les planches’, Le Monde, 13 December 1985, 10; Geldof and Vallely, Is That It?, pp. 10, 248. 160 Glucksmann and Wolton, Silence, on tue, pp. 65–6. They cited coverage of the famine in Libération and articles by Jean Ziegler. 161 Kouchner, Charité Business, p. 25. 162 Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils, p. 29. He was speaking primarily of Brauman and Arendt. 163 Pascal Bruckner, ‘Tiers-monde, culpabilité, haine de soi’, in Brauman, Le tiers-mondisme en question, p. 85. Nonetheless, he reprised his critique of tiers-mondisme, arguing that it had experienced a resurgence, in Pascal Bruckner, La tyrannie de la pénitence: essai sur le masochisme occidental (Paris: Grasset and Fasquelle, 2006). 164 Christian Helm, ‘Booming Solidarity: Sandinista Nicaragua and the West German Solidarity Movement in the 1980s’, European Review of History 21:4 (2014): 605. 165 Holzer and Lenoir, Les risques de la solidarité, p. 166. 166 Rony Brauman, interview with the author, Paris, 10 December 2013. 167 Rony Brauman, Letter to membership of Fondation Liberté Sans Frontières, Paris, 15 March 1989, MSF archive, Paris. 168 Ilios Yannakakis, Letter to Rony Brauman, Paris, 29 March 1989, MSF archive, Paris. 169 Gilbert Etienne, Letter to Rony Brauman, Geneva, 29 March 1989, MSF archive, Paris. 170 Minutes, Fondation Liberté Sans Frontières Extraordinary General Meeting, 30 March 1989, MSF archive, Paris. 171 Emmanuelli, ‘Une mauvaise fois de trop’, 8. 172 Jean, Ethiopie: Du bon usage de la famine, p. 98. 173 Tanguy, ‘The Médecins sans frontières experience’, p. 240.

324

Notes to pages 246–50

174 Laurence Binet, ‘Ethiopia: A Fool’s Game in Ogaden’, in Magone, Neuman and Weissman, Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed, p. 38. 175 See Franks, Reporting Disasters; Tanja R. Müller, ‘“The Ethiopian famine” Revisited: Band Aid and the Antipolitics of Celebrity Humanitarian Action’, Disasters 37: 1 (2013): 61–79. 176 ‘Colombie: la tragédie d’Armero’, Paris Match 1905 (29 November 1985): 24–45; Jean-Paul Mari, ‘Chronique d’un désastre annoncé’, Le Nouvel Observateur 1098 (22–28 November 1985): 40–41. 177 Jean, ‘Famine and Ideology’, p. 2.

Conclusion 1 Pierre Verluise, Armenia in Crisis: The 1988 Earthquake (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995). 2 Bernard Coq and Michel Floquet, Les tribulations de Bernard K en Yougoslavie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1993), p. 20. 3 UN General Assembly Resolution 43/131, 8 December 1988; UN General Assembly Resolution 46/182, 19 December 1991. 4 Thomas G. Weiss and Peter J. Hoffman, ‘The Fog of Humanitarianism: Collective Action Problems and Learning-Challenged Organizations’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 1:1 (2007): 53. 5 André Glucksmann and Bernard Kouchner, ‘La preuve par le Cambodge’, Le Nouvel Observateur 785 (26 November–2 December 1979): 132. 6 Mario Bettati and Bernard Kouchner, Le devoir d’ingérence (Paris: Denoël, 1987). 7 Bernard Kouchner, ‘L’humanitaire a changé le monde’, Les Temps Modernes 627 (2004): 10–21. 8 MSF, ‘Le devoir d’ingérence humanitaire’, Bulletin MSF 18 (October– December 1983): 10; Claude Malhuret, ‘Le droit de secourir et de témoigner’, Le Monde, 26 September 1984, 4. 9 ‘Campagne de Médécins du Monde en faveur d’une intervention militaire en Bosnie’, Agence France Presse, 11 December 1992. 10 Monique Chemillier-Gendreau, ‘Introuvable droit d’ingérence’, Le Monde Diplomatique 474 (September 1993), 29; Coq and Floquet, Les tribulations de Bernard K en Yougoslavie, pp. 20–22. 11 ‘Action humanitaire: les héros ont des états d’âme’, Le Point, 22 April 1995. 12 Fabrice Weissman (ed.), A l’ombre des guerres justes: l’ordre internationale cannibale et l’action humanitaire (Paris: Flammarion, 2003); Natalie Herlemont-Zoritchak, ‘“Droit d’ingérence” et droit humanitaire: les faux amis’, Humanitaire 23 (2009). 13 Bruno Franceschi, ‘Le président de MSF souligne “l’ambiguïté” de l’action humanitaire en Bosnie et dénonce le “crime contre l’humanité” serbe’, Agence France Presse, 8 December 1992. See also Rony Brauman, ‘Bosnie: un général au balcon’, Le Monde, 3 April 1993. 14 Jacques Julliard, ‘Nous ne pourrons pas dire que nous ne savions pas’, Esprit 188 (1993): 138.

Notes to pages 250–4

325

15 Bernard-Henri Lévy, ‘L’intégrisme ou l’épuration sans fin’, Le Nouvel Observateur (22 September 1994). 16 Bernard-Henri Lévy, Le lys et la cendre (Paris: Grasset, 1996); Bernard-Henri Lévy (dir.), Bosna! (1994); Bernard-Henri Lévy, La pureté dangereuse (Paris: Grasset, 1994). 17 Rony Brauman, Devant le mal: Rwanda, un génocide en direct (Paris: Arléa, 1994), p. 7. 18 Ibid., p. 7. 19 Alain Finkielkraut, Dispatches from the Balkan War and Other Writings (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), p. 97. Originally published in Le Monde, 9 August 1992. 20 Jean-Marie Colombani, ‘Vigilance’, Le Monde, 17 March 1994. See also Jacques Julliard, Pour la Bosnie (Paris: Seuil, 1996), p. 175. 21 Jacques Chirac, ‘Allocution prononcée lors des cérémonies commémorant la grande rafle des 16 et 17 juillet 1942’, 16 July 1995, translation in Eric Conan and Henry Rousso, Vichy: An Ever-Present Past (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1998), pp. 39–42. 22 Richard Wolin, ‘From the “Death of Man” to Human Rights: The Paradigm Change in French Intellectual Life’, in Mark Bevir, Jill Hargis and Sara Rushing (eds.), Histories of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 186; Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza (London: Verso, 2011), p. 39; Philippe Mesnard, La victime écran: la représentation humanitaire en question (Paris: Textuel, 2002); Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, Human Rights and Memory (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010). 23 Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, ‘The Institutionalization of Cosmopolitan Morality: The Holocaust and Human Rights’, Journal of Human Rights 3:2 (2004): 152. 24 Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999), pp. 252–7; David Rieff, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), p. 27. 25 Linda Polman, War Games: The Story of Aid and War in Modern Times (London: Viking, 2011); Stephen Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013). 26 Mesnard, La victime écran, p. 131. 27 Kristin Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 12, 157. See also Paige Arthur, Unfinished Projects: Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (London; New York: Verso, 2010), pp. 212–14. 28 See, for example, Alex De Waal, Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa (Oxford; Bloomington: Currey; Indiana University Press, 1997); Mark Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007); Elena FiddianQasmiyeh, South-South Educational Migration, Humanitarianism and Development: Views from the Caribbean, North Africa and the Middle East (London: Routledge, 2015).

326

Notes to pages 254–6

29 Robert Gildea, James Mark, and Niek Pas, ‘European Radicals and the “Third World”: Imagined Solidarities and Radical Networks, 1958–73’, Cultural and Social History 8:4 (2011): 467. 30 Gérard Chaliand, Les faubourgs de l’histoire: tiers-mondismes et tiers-mondes (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1984), pp. 42–3. 31 Rony Brauman, Penser dans l’urgence: parcours critique d’un humanitaire. Entretiens avec Catherine Portevin (Paris: Seuil, 2006), p. 57. 32 David Rieff, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (London: Vintage, 2002), p. 91. 33 Michel Foucault, ‘Confronting Governments: Human Rights’, in Foucault, Power: Essential Works of Foucault, vol. III, 1954–1984 (New York: The New Press, 1994), p. 475. 34 Brauman, Penser dans l’urgence, p. 99. 35 François Maspero, ‘Amérique latine – Solidarité – Guérillas’, Partisans 38 (1967): 3. 36 Jean Daniel, ‘Détruire, disent-ils . . . ’ Le Nouvel Observateur 676 (24–30 October 1977): 54.

Index

Abbé Pierre, 26, 225 Abouchar, Jacques, 211 Académie Tarnier, 192 Action Directe, 255, 292, 300 Action Française, 222 Action Internationale Contre la Faim (AICF), 13, 204 Cambodia and, 207 Ethiopia and, 233 Aeberhard, Patrick, 44 Afghanistan, 209 humanitarian action in, 209–12 MSF and, 209–12, 238 Soviet invasion of, 170, 207–8 Aide Médicale Internationale (AMI), 14, 209–11 Algeria, 58, 172 Algerian War, 10, 50–1, 52–4, 185, 202 17 October 1961, 61, 75 campaign against, 51, 59–64, 65, 74–5, 76, 139 CRF and, 56–8 French use of torture in, 2, 60–1, 63, 64, 74–5, 172, 187 Holocaust memories and, 41, 63 humanitarian action during, 55–8 ICRC and, 55–6, 58 SPF and, 61 torture in, 53–4 Ali, Tariq, 85, 98 Allali, Jean-Pierre, 176 Alleg, Gilberte, 60 Alleg, Henri, 60–1

Allende, Salvador, 97, 101, 103 Althusser, Louis, 70, 117 Amnesty International, 27, 193, 213, 238 French chapter of, 14, 110 Anders, Gunther, 87 Andrieu, René, 196 anti-colonialism, 63, 66, 158, 217 anti-fascism, 5, 10, 74, 76, 147 anti-Semitism, 75, 157, 159, 170–1, 188 anti-totalitarianism, 9, 114, 123–5, 126, 138, 151, 203, 217 Arcocha, Juan, 107 Arendt, Hannah, 231, 244 Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN), 95 Armenia, 248 Arnaud, Georges, 63 Aron, Raymond, 97, 124, 208, 219 Bateau pour le Vietnam and, 193, 194, 197–8 Association Médicale Franco-Vietnamienne (AMFV), 195 Augoyard, Philippe, 209, 210–11 Aussaresses, Paul, 53, 62 Autonomes, 126 Backmann, René, 229 Badinter, Robert, 285 Baez, Joan, 205 Bangladesh. See East Pakistan Crisis Barbie, Klaus, 103, 149, 172 Barrientos Ortuño, René, 97 Barthes, Roland, 115

327

328

Index

Bateau pour le Vietnam, 12, 181, 192, 193, 197–8, 204, 205, 214 appeal for, 169, 194 MSF and, 198–200 relationship with tiers-mondisme, 195 responses to, 194, 196, 198 Bazargan, Mehdi, 190, 191 Benabdallah, Abdessamad, 63 Bercail, J.-C. See Guillebaud, Jean-Claude Bérès, Jacques, 34, 46, 240, 301 Bergès, Yves-Guy, 32, 35–6, 40 Bernier, Philippe, 46, 213 Bertolino, Jean, 87 Besançon, Alain, 194, 219 Bethune, Norman, 72 Bettati, Mario, 194, 249 Biafra–Nigeria War, 10, 28, 38 CRF and, 30, 31, 40, 44 genocide discourse and, 32, 38, 39–40, 43–4, 175, 244, 251 humanitarian action during, 29–31, 33, 36 humanitarianism and, 21 ICRC and, 29, 31, 32, 39, 41, 44 idea of genocide during, 20 significance for MSF, 3, 7, 20 See also Kouchner, Bernard Black Panther Party, 110 Blackburn, Robin, 98 Blanchet, Pierre, 188–9 Bonnot, Michel, 209 Bosnia and Herzegovina, 250, 252 Bottazzi, Menotti, 203 Boupacha, Djamila, 60 Bourdet, Claude, 74, 133, 139–40 Bourguiba, Habib, 184 Bousquet, René, 172 Brauman, Rony, 27, 72, 250 anti-communism of, 213, 220, 234 Bateau pour le Vietnam and, 199 Biafra–Nigeria War and, 43–4 Cambodia and, 163, 206 Ethiopia and, 230, 231–2 LSF and, 4, 220, 221, 225 MSF and, 163, 164 on decline of tiers-mondisme, 245, 254 political engagement of, 163, 164 témoignage and, 181 Bravo, Douglas, 95 Bresson, Robert, 209

Brière-Blanchet, Claire, 77, 118, 141, 153, 158, 188–9, 192 Broyelle, Claudie, 132, 169, 190 Bateau pour le Vietnam and, 190, 194, 196 China and, 118, 122, 128–30 Broyelle, Jacques, 169, 190 Bateau pour le Vietnam and, 190, 194, 196 China and, 122, 128–30 LSF and, 221–2 Bruckner, Pascal, 215, 217–18, 220, 225, 231 Buerk, Michael, 244 Bukovsky, Vladimir, 169, 194 Burguière, André, 140 Burnier, Michel-Antoine, 173 Bustos, Ciro Roberto, 96, 99 Cambodia, 11, 140, 201, 231 AICF and, 207 CCFD and, 201, 203 genocide discourse and, 165, 166–7, 175, 204–5, 251 genocide in, 42, 146, 163, 165–6, 175, 201 MSF and, 164–5, 203 SPF and, 201 Vietnamese invasion of, 200, 203 See also Marche pour la Survie du Cambodge CARE, 23 Carter, Jimmy, 134 Casanova, Jean-Claude, 219 Cassin, René, 97 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 124 Castro, Fidel, 67, 82, 104, 108, 173, 221 tiers-mondistes’ admiration of, 95, 105, 107 Catholic activism, 14, 124, 187, 201, 202–3, 222, 224–5 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 164 Centre de Réflexion sur l’Action et les Savoirs Humanitaires (CRASH), 234 Césaire, Aimé, 251 Chad, 237 Chaliand, Gérard, 87, 140, 152, 220, 272 Afghanistan and, 209 on decline of tiers-mondisme, 123, 139, 217, 221, 254 Chappel, Patrick, 37

Index Charhon, Francis, 229 Chesneaux, Jean, 87 China. See People’s Republic of China (PRC) Chirac, Jacques, 74, 251 Christianisme Sociale, 195 Cimade, 61, 195, 201, 235 Clair, René, 97 Clavel, Maurice, 149, 194 Clay, Jason, 228 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 76 Colombani, Jean-Marie, 251 Colombia, 247 colonialism, 63, 67, 74, 77, 137, 172, 186 sans-frontiérisme and, 26–7 Comité Catholique Contre la Faim et pour le Développement (CCFD), 14, 202–3 Cambodia and, 201, 203 Ethiopia and, 235 LSF and, 223, 224–5 Comité des Intellectuels pour l’Europe des Libertés (CIEL), 220 Comité Français d’Aide Médicale et Sanitaire à la Population Cambodgienne, 201, 203 Comité Vietnam National (CVN), 84 Comités Vietnam de Base (CVB), 84 Commentaire, 124, 241 Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives (CGQJ), 170, 303 Concern Worldwide, 21, 23, 233 Condamines, Charles, 222 Cortázar, Julio, 107 Cosmao, Vincent, 202 Cot, Jean-Pierre, 222 Coubard, Jacques, 156 Courade, Georges, 224 Courrégé, Maurice, 63 Croissance des Jeunes Nations, 222 Croissant Rouge Algérien (CRA), 56, 61 Croissant, Klaus, 185 Croix-Rouge Française (CRF) Algerian War and, 30, 56–8 Biafra–Nigeria War and, 31, 44 East-Pakistan Crisis and, 34 Crouzet, Michel, 59 Cuba, 95 internationalism of, 56, 58 repression in, 105–6, 108, 109

329

revolution and, 67, 71, 104–5 Cuza Malé, Belkis, 106 Czechoslovakia, 109, 113 d’Astier de la Vigerie, Emmanuel, 98 d’Ormesson, Jean, 194 Daly, Lawrence, 87 Daniel, Jean, 107, 131–2, 136–7, 140, 156, 194, 198 Darquier de Pellepoix, Louis, 170–2 de Barrin, Jacques, 229 de Beauvoir, Simone, 40, 51, 86, 208 Bateau pour le Vietnam and, 194, 198 China and, 116 Cuba and, 104, 106, 107 de Benoist, Alain, 224 de Bretagne, Capucine, 210 de Gaudemar, Antoine, 125 de Gaulle, Charles, 73, 76, 97, 112 Algerian War and, 50, 64 Biafra–Nigeria War and, 30 Israel and, 93 Vietnam War and, 85 de Rothschild, Elie, 152 Debray, Régis, 15, 72 campaign for release of, 97–8 end of revolutionary engagement, 101–2 human rights and, 102, 138 imprisonment in Bolivia, 11, 81, 94, 96–101, 109 tiers-mondisme and, 96 Debré, François, 37 decolonisation, 23, 57, 58, 62, 64, 65, 74, 90, 149, 202 Dedijer, Vladimir, 86, 92 Defert, Daniel, 184 Dellinger, Dave, 86, 91 Demeyer, Willy, 238 Democratic Republic of Kampuchea. See Cambodia dependency theory, 219 Deutscher, Isaac, 86, 151 development, 23, 221, 222, 236, 237, 242 dissidence, 10, 110, 124, 136, 138, 175 Dumas, Jean-Marc, 206–7 Dumont, René, 221, 222, 224, 225 Dunant, Henri, 26, 36 Duncan, Donald, 87 Dupuis, François, 37

330

Index

East Pakistan Crisis, 33–4 genocide discourse and, 33 UN and, 34, 35 Economie et Humanisme, 202 Egypt, 37, 58 Eichmann, Adolf, 39 Elément Médical Militaire d’Intervention Rapide (EMMIR), 34 Emergency Relief Desk (ERD), 228 Emmanuelli, Xavier, 26, 34, 72, 211, 213 Bateau pour le Vietnam and, 199, 200 Cambodia and, 163, 164, 165, 201, 207, 246 political engagement of, 163 Emmaüs, 201, 225 Eritrea, 206, 210, 227–8, 232, 237 Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), 227 Esprit, 124, 188 Ethiopia AICF and, 233 CCFD and, 235 famine in, 12, 220, 226–7, 229, 231, 236, 241, 244–5 manipulation of aid, 227–8, 229–31, 235, 240–4, 246 MSF aid work in, 228, 229, 230–1, 232, 237 MSF témoignage in, 229–34, 240–4, 246 secessionist conflict in, 227–8 SPF and, 235 ethnic cleansing, 250 Etienne, Gilbert, 245 Etudiants Socialistes Unifiés, 195 European Commission (EC), 238 Falk, Richard, 85, 93 Fanon, Frantz, 46, 65–7, 68, 165, 218 far right, 148, 222, 225 Faveaux, Vincent, 164 Finkielkraut, Alain, 251 Firk, Michèle, 95 Fiszbin, Michel, 230 Follezou, Jean-Yves, 202 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 202 foquismo, 95–6, 102, 103 Force Ouvrière, 204 Foucault, Michel, 12, 15, 184–5, 209 Bateau pour le Vietnam and, 190, 194

Iranian Revolution and, 182, 184, 185–7, 188, 189–92 sans-frontiérisme and, 192–3, 212 Franceschi, Patrice, 181, 197, 209 François-Poncet, André, 56, 57, 58 Franqui, Carlos, 107 French Revolution, 69, 144, 185 Fretilin, 225 Freymond, Jacques, 45 Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), 1, 46, 50, 58, 59, 62, 74, 158 Fédération de France du FLN, 53 members of, 53, 58 strategy of during Algerian War, 54–5, 56, 65 Front Homosexual d’Action Révolutionnaire (FHAR), 112 Front Solidarité Indochine (FSI), 84 Fuentes, Carlos, 107, 108 fundraising, 26, 34, 145, 215, 226, 229, 238, 248 Furet, François, 122 Gallissot, René, 137 Ganier-Raymond, Philippe, 171 Garaudy, Roger, 188 García Márquez, Gabriel, 107 Gauche Prolétarienne (GP), 69, 119, 125, 141–2, 145, 163, 188 armed wing of (Nouvelle Résistance Populaire (NRP)), 147–8, 150, 152, 153, 154, 157, 159 dissolution of, 156–8, 160–1 historical references of, 146–8, 149–50, 158–9 Munich attack and, 152, 156–8 terrorism and, 153, 154 gauchisme, 70, 93, 95, 117, 119, 134, 139, 150, 154, 173, 178 Geismar, Alain, 15, 112, 122, 153, 169 Bateau pour le Vietnam and, 194, 195, 309 GP and, 147, 151, 152, 154, 157, 159, 160 Geldof, Bob, 226, 242 Genet, Jean, 110 genocide, 87, 89–90, 92, 165, 167, 172, 244 concept of, 38 Holocaust within understandings of, 39, 168, 175

Index See also Biafra–Nigeria War, Cambodia, East Pakistan Crisis George, Susan, 207 Gide, André, 113 Ginzburg, Alexander, 205 Giroud, Françoise, 170, 233 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry, 112, 136, 137, 197 Glucksmann, André, 124, 126, 130, 192, 209, 235 Bateau pour le Vietnam and, 194 sans-frontiérisme and, 175–6, 242–3 Godard, Jean-Luc, 94, 117 Göring, Hermann, 89 Goldman, Pierre, 15, 72, 75–6, 95 Golendorf, Pierre, 109 Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Algérienne (GPRA), 50, 55 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, 69, 109, 114, 117–18, 120–1, 130, 146 Greene, Graham, 94 Grellety Bosviel, Pascal, 30 Gresh, Alain, 223, 224 Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (GIP), 110, 185, 193 Groupe d’Intervention Médico-Chirurgical d’Urgence (GIMCU), 34, 36, 48 Grumbach, Tiennot, 59 guerrilla fighters, 67, 81–2, 103, 104, 154, 186 guerrilla warfare, 100–1, 110, 157, 159, 174, 211 Guevara, Ernesto ‘Che’, 81, 82, 96, 104, 138, 173, 195 death of, 99–100, 103, 109 Guillaume, Jacques, 206 Guillebaud, Jean-Claude, 32, 34, 131, 166 Halter, Marek, 169–70, 171, 194 Hammarskjöld, Dag, 30 Handicap International, 236 Haski, Pierre, 220, 229 Hemingway, Ernest, 71 Hernandez, Melba, 86 Hersant, Robert, 195, 196 Hertzog, Gilles, 225 Hess, Rudolf, 89 Hitler, Adolf, 74, 91 Holocaust, 151

331

memories of, 8, 39, 40–3, 49, 51, 73, 75, 92–3, 147, 151, 158–60, 165, 166–7, 168, 176, 178, 205, 244–5, 250–3 Holzer, Bernard, 225 human rights, 126, 132, 134, 139, 143, 174, 176, 177–8, 182, 196, 208, 219, 221, 235 as ideology, 9, 114, 212 MSF and, 219 sans-frontiérisme and, 212–14 humanitarian sanctuary, 242 humanitarianism, 162, 198 ahistoricism of, 7, 8, 247 as victim narrative, 38, 40, 161, 198, 253–4 celebrities and, 34, 192, 205–6, 226, 246 history of, 19, 22–8 human rights and, 212–14 media and, 145, 167, 181, 200, 205–6, 207, 226, 229, 246–7, 249, 253 security of aid workers, 210–11 Hungary, 65, 113 Hurst, Jean-Louis, 61 Indochina, 74, 88 ingérence, 3, 205, 249 Institut International de Recherche et de Formation en Vue du Développement Harmonisé (IRFED), 202 International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), 23, 25, 28, 36, 44–5, 210, 233 Algerian War and, 55–6, 58 Biafra–Nigeria War and, 29, 31, 32, 39, 41, 44 founding of MSF and, 3, 21 Holocaust and, 41–2, 175, 235 international humanitarian law, 54, 88 International Military Tribunal (IMT). See Nuremberg trials International Red Aid, 25, 61 International Rescue Committee (IRC), 204 International War Crimes Tribunal. See Russell Tribunal Internationale de la Résistance, 220 Iranian Revolution, 12, 183–4 French responses to, 187–90 See also Foucault, Michel Iraq, 58 Israel, 93, 151, 156, 157, 159

332

Index

Jacob, François, 97 Jagger, Mick, 110 Jaggi, Karl Heinrich, 39 Jambet, Christian, 194 Jamot, Eugène, 27 Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 194 Japan, 87, 280 Jean, François, 240–1, 246, 247 Jeanson, Colette, 272 Jeanson, Francis, 272 Jewish identity, 76, 150–1, 168, 174 Johnson, Lyndon, 89 Jordan, 34, 57, 92, 152, 155, 162, 163 Julien, Claude, 105, 223 Julliard, Jacques, 208, 250 on African socialism, 114, 132–3, 134, 135, 140 July, Serge, 126, 160, 187 Jurquet, Jacques, 116 Karol, K.S., 71 Kastler, Alfred, 170 Khaled, Leila, 154 Khmer Rouge, 165–6, 167, 201, 203, 206, 221, 222, 231 Khomeini, Ruhollah, 182, 188, 189 Klarsfeld, Beate, 149, 171 Klarsfeld, Serge, 102, 171 Koestler, Arthur, 71, 97 Kosovo, 248 Kouchner, Bernard, 15, 72, 163, 170, 192, 209, 214 Bateau pour le Vietnam and, 12, 181, 194, 195, 198, 199, 205 Biafra–Nigeria War and, 28, 30, 31, 32, 37, 40, 43–4, 175 Ethiopia and, 243, 244 government role of, 215, 248 invocation of Holocaust memory by, 40, 42, 43, 112, 174, 175–6, 244 Kurdish cause and, 40, 46–7, 175 LSF and, 225, 240, 243 on decline of tiers-mondisme, 134–5, 174 on nouvelle philosophie, 174, 175 sans-frontiérisme and, 175–6 témoignage and, 3, 175, 176, 243, 323 Vichy memory and, 171 Kravchenko, Victor, 113 Kristeva, Julia, 115

Krivine, Alain, 84 Krivine, Jean-Michel, 59, 87, 195 Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), 46 La Cause du Peuple, 126, 130, 147, 149, 153, 157, 158, 159, 160 La Cause du Peuple–J’accuse. See La Cause du Peuple Lacoste, Yves, 218, 224, 225 Lacouture, Jean, 133, 135, 137, 166–7, 194, 206 Lambert, Jean-François, 203 Lanzmann, Claude, 73 Laos, 210 Laurent, Philippe, 225, 238, 239, 240 le Carré, John, 206 Le Dantec, Jean-Pierre, 69, 130–1, 135, 147, 153, 157, 178, 194 China and, 118, 130 Le Monde Diplomatique, 5, 37, 105, 138, 152 LSF and, 222–3, 224, 225 Le Nouvel Observateur, 121, 131, 132–41, 168, 186, 188 Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, 209 Lebanon, 58 Lebret, Louis-Joseph, 202 Lefort, Claude, 124, 130 Leguay, Jean, 172 Lemkin, Raphael, 38 Les Temps Modernes, 75, 108 Lessing, Doris, 206 Lévy, Benny, 119, 152, 154, 157, 159, 160, 185 Lévy, Bernard-Henri, 15, 124–5, 143, 169, 173, 194, 250 Afghanistan and, 170 Cambodia and, 165, 205, 207 Lévy, Tony, 152, 281 Leys, Simon, 120–1, 127 Liauzu, Claude, 5, 193, 213, 224, 243–4 Libération, 125–6, 160, 167, 168, 187, 188, 206, 229 liberation theology, 187, 202 Liberté Sans Frontières (LSF), 12, 204, 242 closure of, 245 creation of, 218–19 first conference of, 4, 220–2, 225 MSF Belgium and, 223–4 outputs of, 225 political orientation of, 217, 219–20

Index responses to, 216, 222–6, 239–40, 243 significance of, 216, 245–6 Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR), 151 Ligue Internationale Contre le Racisme et l’Anti-Sémitisme (LICRA), 204 Lin Biao, 130 Lindenberg, Daniel, 75, 148 Linhart, Robert, 13, 117, 118, 195–6 Liniers, Antoine. See Rolin, Olivier Live Aid, 227, 242, 246 Lumumba, Patrice, 63, 103 Lwoff, André, 209 Madaule, Jacques, 38 Madelin, Alain, 165 Madiran, Jean, 222 Malhuret, Claude, 165, 239, 249 Afghanistan and, 211 anti-communism of, 214, 220 Bateau pour le Vietnam and, 199, 200 Cambodia and, 164 Ethiopia and, 234 government role of, 215, 235, 248 LSF and, 4, 220, 222 political engagement of, 164 Malraux, André, 35, 71, 72, 94, 97 Mao Zedong, 118, 127, 130, 188 tiers-mondistes’ admiration of, 146 Maoism as movement in France, 2, 59, 69, 84, 115–21, 126–31, 141–3, 185 établissement, 115, 117, 127, 141, 142 See also Gauche Prolétarienne (GP), Parti Communiste Marxiste-Léniniste de France (PCMLF), Union des Jeunesses Communistes (marxiste-léniniste) (UJC(ml)) Marc, Gabriel, 223, 225 Marchais, Georges, 71, 208 Marche pour la Survie du Cambodge, 12, 181, 203–7, 214, 246 Marker, Chris, 83, 104 Martinsen, Peter, 87 Marxism, 9, 65, 68, 70, 117, 124, 126, 130, 135, 144, 184, 202, 242 Maschino, Maurice, 61 Mascolo, Dionys, 107 Maspero, François, 1, 15, 67, 77, 255 publishing house of (Editions Maspero), 1, 59, 67, 135, 152, 218

333

Matos, Huber, 105 Maulnier, Thierry, 85, 156 Mauriac, François, 94, 97 Maurienne. See Hurst, Jean-Louis Maury, Guillaume. See Moreau, Jean-Pierre May 1968, 14–15, 69, 76, 84, 96, 109, 119, 130, 164, 185 legacy of, 4, 119, 125, 173 McNamara, Robert S., 89 Médecins du Monde (MDM), 192, 193, 250 Afghanistan and, 209 founding of, 12, 199 Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Afghanistan and, 209 aid worker security and, 211 anti-communist campaigning in, 4, 181, 203–7, 211, 213–14, 217, 218–21, 225–6, 234–5 Cambodia and, 164–5 charter of, 45, 48, 223, 239, 240 founding of, 20, 36, 45–6 human rights and, 164, 213, 238 influence of, 13 logistics and, 47, 164, 199–200 schism in 1979, 199–200 Vietnam and, 144–5, 162 See also MSF international movement, MSF Belgium, MSF Holland Meinhof, Ulrike, 155 Mendès France, Pierre, 55 Mengistu Haile Mariam, 226, 234, 246 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 68 Milosovic, Slobodan, 250 Miské, Ahmed Baba, 133, 135, 137, 139 Mitterrand, François, 54, 103 Monestier, Françoise, 222 Monod, Jacques, 97 Montand, Yves, 194 Montaron, Georges, 187 Moreau, Jean-Pierre, 225 Morocco, 58 Moscow Olympics, 208 Mouvement Contre le Racisme, l’Antisémitisme et pour la Paix (MRAP), 75 Mouvement de la Libération des Femmes (MLF), 113 MSF Belgium, 223–4, 225, 237–8, 239, 322 LSF and, 239–40

334

Index

MSF France. See Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) MSF Holland, 223 MSF international movement, 223, 234, 238, 240, 322 mujahideen, 208, 209, 210, 211 Munich Olympics, 152 Holocaust memories and, 156–7, 158–60 terrorist attack during, 11, 152, 155–7, 173 National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (FNL), 38, 83, 121 Nazism, 129, 159, 231 memories of, 74–5, 85, 91, 92, 166–7, 251 New International Economic Order (NIEO), 113 Nicaragua, 21, 245 Nigeria. See Biafra–Nigeria War Nixon, Richard, 92 Nogrette, Robert, 125, 153, 157 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 252 Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA), 25 nouvelle philosophie, 9, 123–5, 126, 129, 131, 142, 143, 167, 170, 174, 217 Nouvelle Résistance Populaire (NRP). See Gauche Prolétarienne (GP) Nuremberg trials, 63, 88, 89, 91 Occupation, 42, 73, 150, 251 memories of, 8, 68, 76, 147, 148, 149 Ojukwu, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu, 29, 38, 39, 266, 267 Ophüls, Marcel, 148 Ordre Nouveau, 148 Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS), 50, 64 Organisation of African Unity (OAU), 30 Organisation of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL), 100 Orwell, George, 71 Oussedik, Mourad, 63 Overney, Pierre, 153 Oxfam, 27, 236, 242 Padilla, Heberto, 81, 105 arrest of, 11, 103, 106–8, 109 campaign for, 106–9, 128 Pakistan, 210

Palestine, 162 as cause in France, 93, 152, 156, 157, 158, 160 Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), 152 Papon, Maurice, 172 Papua New Guinea, 210 Paringaux, Roland Pierre, 206 Paris Commune, 69, 144, 147 Parti Communiste Français (PCF), 14, 65, 70–1, 84, 112, 137, 141, 195, 201 Bateau pour le Vietnam and, 195, 196 individuals’ membership of, 70, 117, 128, 188, 189, 209 Maoism and, 116–17, 146 relationship with tiers-mondistes, 70 Soviet Union and, 70, 208 Parti Communiste Marxiste-Léniniste de France (PCMLF), 116 Parti de la Jeune République, 195 Parti Socialiste (PS), 112, 137, 208 Parti Socialiste Unifié (PSU), 139, 164, 195 Partisans, 14, 37, 47, 64, 69, 70, 74, 84, 152 Pasqualini, Jean, 122–3, 194 Paxton, Robert, 148 Paz, Octavio, 107 PEN International, 97 People’s Republic of China (PRC), 37, 64, 115, 128, 188, 241 repression in, 122, 129 revolution and, 115 See also Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution Perec, Georges, 98 Peru, 21, 34, 35 Pétain, Philippe, 73 Peyrefitte, Alain, 288 Philippe, Anne, 107 Picasso, Pablo, 94 pieds-rouges, 58–9 Pinel, Jacques, 164 Pinochet, Augusto, 130 Pivot, Bernard, 217 Plyushch, Leonid, 169, 194 Polisario Front, 133, 225 political prisoners, 110 Pompidou, Georges, 112, 149–50 Ponchardier, Dominique, 96, 98, 101 Ponchaud, François, 120, 166, 203 Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), 152, 154

Index popular justice, 153, 185, 190, 191 Portugal, 37 Présent, 222, 224, 225 racism, 52, 75, 82, 85, 134, 171 Rayman, Marcel, 76 Récamier, Max, 31–2, 37, 41, 46, 240, 301 Red Army Faction (RAF), 96, 110, 126, 154–5, 160, 185, 255 Red Brigades, 147, 255 refugee movements, 11, 145, 166, 183, 201, 228 Relief and Rehabilitation Commission (RRC), 227, 228, 232 Relief Society of Tigray (REST), 228 Resistance, 139 memories of, 8, 74, 76, 82, 102, 112, 146, 147, 149, 159 Responsibility to Protect, 250 Revel, Jean-François, 123, 194, 219 Rhodesia, 37 Rocard, Michel, 248 Rodinson, Maxime, 135, 189–90 Rolin, Olivier, 8, 71, 142, 147, 148, 150, 152, 157, 159 Roth, George, 96 Rousset, David, 113 Roux, Jean, 133 Roy, Claude, 64, 107, 127, 194 China and, 70, 115, 118, 128 Roy, Olivier, 221 Rufin, Jean-Christophe, 206–7, 236–7, 241–2 Russell Tribunal, 81, 83, 85–8, 91, 93–4, 194, 195 hearings, 86–8 Holocaust memories and, 91–2 law and, 88–9 Russell, Bertrand, 83, 85, 86, 90, 91, 98 Russian Revolution, 70 Rwanda, 23, 244, 248, 251 MSF appeal for action, 250 Ryckmans, Pierre. See Leys, Simon Sagan, Françoise, 98, 106 Sakharov, Andrei, 208 Sánchez, Omayra, 247 sans-frontiérisme concept of, 5, 21, 42, 47, 48, 235–6 cross-border operations and, 183, 200, 209–10, 211–12, 228, 232

335

emergence of, 3, 20, 33, 44, 47–8, 161, 235–6 historical references of, 26–7, 178 human rights and, 178 importance of, 7 media and, 197 relationship with tiers-mondisme, 48–9, 72, 77, 143, 161, 176–7, 193, 254–6 Sargos, Paul, 301 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 15, 39, 68, 208 Algerian War and, 60, 74, 90–1 Bateau pour le Vietnam and, 193, 194, 198 Biafra–Nigeria War and, 38, 40 campaign for Régis Debray, 97, 98 China and, 116, 122 Cuba and, 107, 108 GP and, 126, 153, 158 Russell Tribunal and, 86, 88, 89–91, 92 tiers-mondisme and, 2, 67, 81, 82, 193, 218 Sauvy, Alfred, 64 Save the Children Fund (SCF), 23, 27, 233, 236, 237 Schoenmann, Ralph, 86 Schwartz, Laurent, 86, 92 Schweitzer, Albert, 26, 72 Second World War, 70, 73–4, 126, 177 memories of, 73, 91, 146, 147, 154, 176, 178, 252 Secours Populaire Français (SPF), 14, 98, 162 Algerian War and, 61 Cambodia and, 201 East Pakistan Crisis and, 35 Ethiopia and, 235 Secours Rouge, 162 Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO), 61 Semprun, Jorge, 194 Sen, Amartya, 236 Sénéchal, Claude, 301 Services d’Aide Médicale Urgente (SAMU), 34 Sétif massacres, 43, 61, 89 Shawcross, William, 231 Signoret, Simone, 192 Silve, Jean-Paul, 211 Sitbon, Guy, 134 Six-Day War, 92–3, 151, 154, 162, 170

336

Index

Solidarités International, 201, 236 Solidarity (Solidarnosc), 192 Sollers, Philippe, 98, 115, 194 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 9, 110, 113, 122, 124, 136, 142, 221 Somalia, 23, 248 Sorel, Georges, 68 South Africa, 37 Soviet Union, 30, 33, 37, 65, 68, 70, 89, 93, 129, 167 camps and, 113, 122, 124–5, 136, 175 Spanish Civil War, 25, 71–2 memories of, 10, 35, 71, 72, 84, 102, 176, 205 Stasi, Bernard, 194 Syria, 92 Taylor, Telford, 88 Teitgen, Paul, 63 témoignage, 187, 192, 193, 214, 226, 255 as MSF practice, 3, 43, 46, 164–5, 200, 211–12, 229–34, 240 Témoignage Chrétien, 187, 195 Terre des Hommes, 193, 201, 204 terrorism, 45, 126, 153–4, 155, 158, 160, 255 See also Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS), Munich Olympics Thailand, 163, 164, 201 third world, 77, 123, 134, 139, 165, 167, 177, 182, 224, 245, 253–4 concept of, 2, 5, 64–5, 135, 140, 219, 254 tiers-mondisme attacks on, 4, 5, 213, 215–16, 217–18, 221–2, 224, 234, 243, 245–6 concept of, 2, 65, 82, 119, 140, 224 decline of, 34, 82, 101–2, 109–11, 123, 127–43, 161, 163–4, 165–6, 167, 186, 193, 217–18, 221–2, 254 historical references of, 69–72, 76, 102 influence of, 77 military engagement and, 95–6, 98, 100–1 Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), 227, 246 Timor Leste, 225 Tintin, 26 Todd, Olivier, 37, 121, 194 Tonus, 14, 36, 46 Torres, Camilo, 187 Torres, Juan José, 101

Touvier, Paul, 149–50, 172, 251 Tramoni, Jean-Pierre, 153 Trotskyism, 14, 59, 71, 84, 151 Tschirhart, Evelyne, 128 Tunisia, 58, 184–5 Tupamaros West Berlin (TW), 155 Ukraine, 241 Union des Étudiants Communistes (UEC), 70, 116, 163 Union des Jeunesses Communistes (marxiste-léniniste) (UJC(ml)), 13, 69, 117, 118–19, 195 Union of the Left, 137, 208 United Kingdom, 37 United Nations, 35, 54, 58, 88, 113, 236, 248 United Nations Disaster Relief Office (UNDRO), 236, 265 United Nations Emergency Office for Ethiopia (UNEOE), 227, 228, 233 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 164, 197, 210 United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), 154 United States, 37, 82, 83, 87, 89 Valeurs Actuelles, 222, 225 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 107 Vasset, Brigitte, 230, 232 Vaux, Tony, 242 Vercors, 74 Vergès, Jacques, 63, 115, 172 Viansson-Ponté, Pierre, 55 Vichy regime, 170 memories of, 8, 72, 76, 147, 148–9, 169, 170–2, 250, 251–2 Victor, Pierre. See Lévy, Benny Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, 37, 40, 65 Vietnam, 58, 65, 82, 121, 140 refugees from, 11, 146, 167–70, 193 See also Bateau pour le Vietnam Vietnam War, 81, 83–4, 89–91, 218, 278 campaign against, 83–5, 110, 151, 164, 221 genocide discourse and, 89–92, 251 public opinion and, 91, 93 violence changing attitudes to, 145, 156–8, 160–1, 167, 174, 177, 194–5, 255, 256

Index tiers-mondisme and, 67–8, 90, 101, 105–6, 150, 153, 158, 173–4, 185 Vive la Révolution (VLR), 119 Vive le Communisme, 119 Vyshinskii, Andrei, 89

Wiesel, Elie, 205 Wolton, Thierry, 242–3 World Vision, 23

Weather Underground, 96, 255 Weil, Simone, 71 Weiss, Peter, 87

Zaïre, 136 Zavrian, Michel, 63 Ziegler, Jean, 137–8, 206

Yannakakis, Ilios, 194, 221, 225, 245 Yugoslavia, 23, 41, 248

337