Didier Daeninckx: Raconteur of History · Didier Daeninckx: Raconteur of History Donald Reid South...

Didier Daeninckx: Raconteur of HistoryDonald Reid

South Central Review, Volume 27, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring & Summer2010, pp. 39-60 (Article)

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DIDIER DAENINCKX: RACONTEUR OF HISTORY / REID 39

© South Central Review 27.1 & 2 (Spring & Summer 2010): 39–60.

Didier Daeninckx: Raconteur of HistoryDonald Reid, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Le roman noir constitutes a narrative structure of crazy moder-nity; it mixes past and present, permits the unveiling of the truth. We live in a society which doesn’t stop erasing everything and which exists in a sort of permanent present. But it is precisely the roman noir that says that the traces are of capital importance and that it is just because of this that they hide them from us.—Didier Daeninckx1

My engagement [. . .] consists in saying: ‘This is what happened [. . .] There are a lot of fault lines in history which must be looked at closely because they explain in part who we are, or what we could have been’.—Didier Daeninckx2

DIDIER DAENINCKX TELLS US OF listening to an interview with a writer. She was upset when told she was a raconteur des histoires, a story teller. Daeninckx thought to himself, “that’s the job, to tell stories,” and he chose this as the title of a collection of his stories.3 However, what of Daeninckx, raconteur d’Histoire, teller of History, an appellation he would probably reject if it were given him, and perhaps claim if denied him? Daeninckx says he is not an historian: “What I do is to take from all the social sci-ences a part of their methods and put one together [bricoler] for myself . . . It is not historical reconstitution, not an historical novel [roman en costume], but a will to give back the truth to fictional entities.”

4 To use the words of one of Daeninckx’s detectives, he seeks to “put gangways [passerelles] of fiction between two blocks of reality.”

5 These blocks often take the form of a present and an historical past. That past is invariably more powerful and alluring in its good (the soldiers’ opposition to the war in 1917 or the Communist neighborhood fraternity of the 1950s) or its bad (the Vichy regime or the French army during the Algerian War of Independence) than the tame world in which we read today, where drama comes from combats to recapture or rectify these more vivid pasts, too absent in the first case and ubiquitous in the second.

6

Born in 1948, Daeninckx is of the generation that came of age in what Henry Rousso has termed the “obsessive phase” of the Vichy Syndrome and Daeninckx has himself played an important role in creating a gang-way from this relation to the memory of the Occupation to a similar rela-

40 SOUTH CENTRAL REVIEW

tionship to memory of the Algerian War. These obsessions are premised on the idea that there is a past hidden by those in power—and they seek to keep it hidden. Daeninckx began by devoting attention to the traditional left evil, the capitalist exercise of power in the workplace, but shifted his attention to the power which control over the past could give political figures, and secondarily, businessmen, as well as their need to hide the

vices of pedophilia and Holocaust denial. One sees this change in the two versions of Mort au premier tour, which Daeninckx wrote in 1977 and 1997. While a long tradition of writers and critics have seen in fiction

a way of revealing the otherwise hidden powers exercised by capital in individuals’ lives—and how recognition of this is the first step toward

diminishing the legitimacy of this power and raising the consciousness of those it oppresses—Daeninckx is primarily concerned with revealing the power exercised through the policing of collective memory narratives, predicated on what is excluded, as well as on what is said. “A people without the memory” of what those in power want them to forget “is a defenseless people.”7 It is over this issue that Daeninckx has fought with certain ultra-leftists, who see the same memory he presents as a defense of the people, as defensive at best and as an impediment to revolution. These ultra-leftists are open to Holocaust denial because they see the omnipresence of the Holocaust in Western culture as insidiously trump-ing the evils of capitalism and therefore impeding the struggle against capitalism in the name of a much-vaunted but hollow and antiquated

anti-fascism.8

MEDIA DIVERSIONS AND FAITS DIVERS

While Daeninckx is concerned with events, groups, and interpretations marginalized or excluded in dominant collective memory narratives, he is interested as well in the efforts of the state and consumer capitalism to create a false reality which, if successful, risks becoming the only trace of the past which can be remembered. On the one hand, there is secret state funding of publications, whether La Révolution sociale of Communard Louise Michel, which Daeninckx presents as a way the police used to get information on anarchists,9 or Le Nouveau Candide, which offered a Gaullist counter to L’Express in the early Fifth Republic. Daeninckx’s bête noir Gilles Perrault not only wrote articles for Le Nouveau Candide, pre-senting the Gaullist version of events in an ostensibly independent voice, but, Daeninckx suggests, Perrault’s earlier Algerian War novels about the successes of a mysterious organization, La Main rouge, in destroy-ing networks supplying the FLN with arms, were intended to intimidate


suppliers of the FLN, and were the product of contacts between Perrault and the French secret service.10 In Le Mort au premier tour (1997), the state investigative service, Renseignements généraux, tries to infiltrate

and write for both countercultural and neo-Nazi publications in order to turn them to their own purposes. A one-time anarchist radio station in On acheve bien les disc-jockeys has been taken over by the state to show that it is can promote freedom of speech (and to provide a place for the son of a minister in François Mitterrand’s government who has a radi-cal past).11 Itinéraire d’un salaud ordinaire traces the career of a police officer who participates in a number of state attempts to manipulate an

ostensibly free media from the Occupation to the Fifth Republic. Television today, Daeninckx writes, has no place for social move-

ments and strikes.12 And in a wealth of stories and novels, all of which, Daeninckx explains, are “variations on the end of industrial civiliza-tion,”13 he explores the fake realities of consumer capitalism.14 Drawn from the entertainment business, where the exploitation they require is

hidden from view, these never seem as sinister as those involving the state. Play-back concerns the discovery by a ghostwriter of the hidden “ghostsinger” of a media star in the Lorraine, where deindustrialization, “the physical erasure of history,” has been so thorough as if to say “the industrial crime never took place.”15

Within contemporary periodicals, there is one element Daeninckx trusts: the faits divers, short news items. His detective Cadin collects faits divers16 and René Griffon, the detective in Le der des ders, affirms

that “the last page of popular newspapers was favorably replacing a host [une barbée] of distinguished researchers.”17 Daeninckx characterizes a newspaper in Mort au premier tour (1997) as a place where the main stories stay the same and only the faits divers change.18 For Roland Barthes, “everything is given with the fait-divers; its circumstances, its causes, its past, its outcome; without duration and without context, it constitutes an immediate, total being which refers, formally at least, to nothing implicit [. . .] It is its immanence which defines the fait-divers.”19 Daeninckx values this quality because the enclosed nature of the faits divers makes it difficult to incorporate into dominant media narratives.

By the same token, he sees the faits divers as an entryway to the world as it really is and not how those in power wish to present it.

GANGWAY OF FICTION

This takes Daeninckx to “the wedding parties ever black [noces perpé-tuellement noires] of the novel and History.”20 “Back Street” tells the


story of a Frenchman in London who is researching a book on the French anarchist Jules Bonnet, presented as the driver for Sherlock Holmes who has an affair with Agatha Christie, and one suspects this is a genealogy Daeninckx the writer would like to claim.21 However, in the world in which he lives, Daeninckx turns to the polar, the detective novel, and the roman noir, the hard-boiled thriller, as his preferred modes of historical revelation. For Daeninckx, “the detective novel is always a novel that leans on the past, one always finds in them traces of the past. A detec-tive is like an historian [. . .] it’s that which interests me in the detective novel [. . . ]”22

However, unlike the detective story writer, the historian generally begins the narrative (if not always the research) with the past and carries a story forward. The investigator begins in the present—the appearance of a corpse—and only examines the past to answer questions raised in

the present. Nor does the historian take the reader on dead-end paths. Yet, it is through exploration of impediments to the investigators’ work that efforts to hide the past and the nefarious reasons why are revealed; discovery of the perpetrator of the particular crime that launched the quest becomes secondary. If the investigation is a prequel to the writing

of a history, what the investigation reveals—efforts to hide the past or falsify it—are sequels to the historians’ telling of the past. The history

of historians is the absent presence of the roman noir. If historians had done their job, the past would be revealed and there would be no chance for perpetrators to hide it with a strategic murder or two. While those in power seek to hide the past, Daeninckx the writer responds by obscur-ing the project of revealing this concealment done by others. When he launched his career, Daeninckx saw the polar as allowing him to smuggle a truth past the guardians: “Meurtres pour mémoire, if I had written it in the traditional novel form, would have been blackballed by all the publishers in Paris without a doubt; there is also [. . . ] a way [. . .] to get what you want without asking [de lui faire un enfant dans le dos], in putting in a little something hidden.”23

Daeninckx says of his texts that, “under the appearance of detec-tive fictions, they question the opaqueness of the present and express

hypotheses to explain it.”24 He creates situations in which “the novel becomes a sort of hypothesis about reality”25—not “novels with a thesis, but novels with a hypothesis”26—in which Daeninckx builds hypotheses that serve as the readers’ gangway from a present to a past and back: “In a world so incomprehensible, I conceive of writing fiction as an at-tempt at elucidation of the real, each novel functioning as a hypothesis formulated, by means of invented characters, about a situation whose


meaning escapes us.”27 Daeninckx begins with the idea that it is “often the anonymous and apparently safe [anodins] bit players” who make history and that historians ignore them, presenting history as the work of a select group of prominent individuals. Daeninckx explained that his idea of the roman noir was “to try to make history and certain events in contemporary France go back to the level of the feelings and paths taken by a simple individual, of a personage [. . .] the meeting of the individual without importance and the tempestuous river of history.”28

If the genre of microhistory reveals that for which canonical historical accounts and theories have no place, Daeninckx can be seen pioneering a genre bringing our attention to elements of the past for which collec-tive memory narratives have no place and offering explanations as to why.29 Because these collective memory narratives are the tales we tell ourselves to affirm who we are, telling stories proves to be an effective

technique to challenge them.

MY PEOPLE AND THEIRS

But what makes Daeninckx think that he can escape what he calls the “French schizophrenia toward History,”30

to question what others take for

granted, to see that examining the marginality of the marginal takes us to the center? He explains this in terms of his relationship to the history of his family. Though his ancestors suffered for their beliefs and acts, they bequeathed to him a coveted left genealogy, a valuable héritage which he has fruitfully capitalized: “Each of the novels, each of the stories, curiously intersects an episode of the family romance.”31 In Daeninckx’s case, his reference to the origin of his work in the “family romance” is not a claim to loftier lineage, but the effort through his writing to prove he really is the child of the parents who bore and raised him: “The century took hold of my family. Their dreams and their hopes were sacked and it is due to their energy alone that they remained standing. They are not of the rare material from which one makes statues, and nothing would remain of their past in books. To be totally clear, I did not choose to write against the grain; I was born that way [. . .]”32

Daeninckx lays claim to a hybrid ancestry: anarchist (in practice, not politics) on his father’s side, and Communist on his mother’s side.33 Nor did he sully his blood line, marrying the daughter of an Italian anti-fascist exile who had fought in the Garibaldi International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War and been deported from France by the Nazis.34 When asked about the book that means the most to him, Daeninckx invariably cites Jack London’s Martin Eden, an account of a writer of working-class


origins who falls in love with a bourgeois woman and who pursues an ascension “doggedly individualist [. . .] in conformity with the American dream,” and ends up committing suicide.35 A forewarned Daeninckx af-firms and celebrates his origins.

Daeninckx’s paternal great grandfather drew a high number in the draft lottery in Belgium, but then sold his deferment, deserted the army and came to France in 1884.36 His paternal grandfather lost a brother in combat in 1915 and served for three years in the French army before deserting in 1917. He hid for the next two years, thus avoiding the firing

squads established by General Philippe Pétain, but was arrested in 1919

and sentenced to three years of hard labor. Released as part of a general amnesty, he led “the rest of his existence, the life of a marked man,” the deserter.37 Daeninckx’s father went to work in the Hotchkiss car factory in 1936 at age 14. During the Occupation, he went underground to es-cape STO service in Germany,38 but joined the French army at the end of the war, returning with tuberculosis, which led to the loss of a lung. He pursued a lawsuit for twelve years, eventually resulting in the award of a small pension. After the war he went back to the car factory, but was fired for union activity.

39 During the French war in Indochina, he worked for a firm which made field beds for the army and he sabotaged them and

put anti-war tracts in the packaging.40 Daeninckx remembers standing alone in the school playground to defend the honor of his grandfather and deserters during the Algerian War.41 Opposition to the war in 1917 is a recurring theme in this writing, whether by the Euro-French, colonized populations, Tahitians forced into military service, or the Russian troops who set up soviets in France in 1917, and were crushed by French and Russian troops.42 Daeninckx himself was designated P4 (in his words, “for mental deficiency”) and therefore did not serve.

43

Daeninckx’s maternal grandfather was a Communist railwayman who was elected mayor of the Parisian suburb of Stains in 1935. He repudi-ated the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact of 1939. Captured in 1940, he spent the war in a P.O.W. camp.44 When he returned, he was ostracized within the party for his stance on the pact (although the reason given at the time was that he had not tried to escape from the camp). The Com-munist minister Charles Tillon took him under his wing, but this did not last long: both he and Tillon were expelled from the party in 1952–1953. Daeninckx’s mother worked in dressmaking shops, before becoming a cook in the municipal kitchens of Aubervilliers. She was an active Com-munist militant and her son grew up in the Communist counter-culture of the Paris suburbs; he went to summer camps in East Germany and shook the hand of the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on his visit to France.


Daeninckx’s mother was one of the anonymous activists at the heart of the party’s success. Playing the role of a tourist, she secretly brought suitcases of documents to Communists in Franco’s Spain. During the negotiations between the Americans and the Vietnamese to end the war, she sheltered two emissaries sent from Hanoi who were being hounded by the press. When the secretary general of the French Communist Party, Waldeck Rochet, suffered a nervous breakdown following the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, which he opposed, Daeninckx’s mother took care of him.

Daeninckx has a complicated relationship with the Communist party. The traces of “Free Henri Martin” Cadin sees on a wall in Meurtres pour mémoire, miraculously preserved for thirty years, are an invocation of a now forgotten figure of the now forgotten history of French Communist

anticolonialism. Important elements of Daeninckx’s writing involve the transposition of memories and interactions with the party. Meurtres pour mémoire addresses the effacement in France of the brutal repres-sion of Algerians in the 17 October 1961 demonstration in Paris against a curfew placed on Algerians living in France. The novel had its origins in Daeninckx’s memory of the death of a friend of his mother in the 8 February 1962 demonstration at the Charonne metro station against anti-Algerian independence OAS terrorism. This protest had been organized by the Communist party and memory of the nine EuroFrench who died is central to the collective memory of the party. Daeninckx wrote his first novel, La mort au premier tour, to address issues like ecology on which the Communist party had placed “a real wall of silence,” but he remained a member of the party until 1982.45 Then he wistfully said good-bye to “the Robespierre housing project” of his childhood, “a little popular democracy.” Daeninckx later lamented, “I was raised in a communism of devotion, generous, without cynicism [. . .] Until 1980 you could believe that we would exercise our influence on things in a

collective way. Today [2001] we walk on the ashes.”46 In response to Communist municipalities’ mistreatment of immigrants at the time he left the party, he recalled the party of his youth: “There is a prodigious distance between the hopes that still existed in the 1950s, between that kind of aspiration to be together, to leave no one by the side of the road, and this loss, loss of the utopian memory, loss of generosity to arrive at ‘we can’t welcome all the misery of the world.’”47

Daeninckx dates his attention to alliances of the extreme left and ex-treme right to discovery fifty years later of a copy of his maternal grandfa-ther’s 1939 letter to the party denouncing the Nazi-Soviet pact. The family never spoke of this act; the expulsion of Daeninckx’s grandfather was


lived as an incomprehensible shame.48 States are not alone in repressing memory of an uncomfortable past. In the early 1990s, Daeninckx saw Communists, shattered by the events of 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, desperately reaching out to extreme left elements tainted with Holocaust denial.49 He raised the issue with party authorities and in 1993 received an affirmation of the party’s anti-fascism and rejection of

Holocaust denial from the general secretary Georges Marchais. Because Marchais could speak for the institution, individual Communists did not need to say their mea culpas. This satisfied Daeninckx in a way that

individual extreme leftists’ distancing themselves from Holocaust denial never have. Daeninckx was touched when the party general secretary Marie-George Buffet later recognized the injustice done to Communists like his grandfather and Tillon.50 Daeninckx’s Missak is a celebration of anti-Stalinist Communists, persecuted by the party for their communism; the apparent oxymoron for some of anti-Stalinist Communists is not one, Daeninckx wants to say.51 He has remained a fellow traveler, close to reformist currents in the party. Those whom Daeninckx criticizes for their indulgence toward suspect beliefs return the favor, finding any number

of ways to tie him to Stalinist practices52—“the Béria of Aubervilliers,” the Paris suburb where Daeninckx lives.53

In “Ceinture rouge,” Daeninckx draws on elements of his mother’s life to tell the tale of a man who, after the death of his grandmother, dis-covers that she had aided immigrants, sheltered Vietnamese negotiators, worked in the anti-Franco resistance, helped Algerians after the bloody repression of the 17 October 1961 demonstration, and sheltered a Soviet dissident. She is the ancestor that all leftie bobos, bourgeois bohemians, would like to have, and the narrator has apparently inherited good genes from her.54 He is comfortable with ethnic diversity and has a girlfriend of Algerian origin; the tale ends with the couple’s decision to shelter two sans-papiers.55 The narrator in sum resembles Daeninckx’s view of him-self, with roots in a Communist past, but purged of the racism the party has on occasion practiced, whose own writing has valorized marginal-ized ethnic groups in France—French who are of Algerian, Kanak and Roma origin—rather than class struggle in factories in France, memory of which he sees disappearing with the factories.

A very few of Daeninckx’s personages have the to-die-for life histories of his forebears. The writer Sloga in Nazis dans le metro, who is brutally beaten to turn him away from investigating extreme left interactions with far right anti-semites, is of proletarian origin and went to fight

with his father in the International Brigades in Spain. Sloga’s father was executed by the fascists in Spain, and Sloga returned to France to fight


in the Resistance; he sees his exploration of Red/Brown alliances as a continuation of this work. When Sloga wrote of the French army’s use of torture in 1955, Gallimard dropped him. He protested French nuclear tests in Polynesia by living there clandestinely with natives. One source of drama in Missak concerns the seemingly irreproachable family of the L’Humanité correspondent Louis Dragère, whose father had died aiding the Spanish Republicans, and who had been raised in party institutions. His mother was an immigrant Polish Jew who was a Communist labor organizer and resister. Her parents had died in the Holocaust, and she returned to Poland to build socialism after the war. Dragère had married the daughter of a Communist who had worked for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. But was his mother, the reader frets for a while, the resister who had informed on the revered resistance group of Missak Manouchian?

In turn, those who do the unacceptable are rarely first-time offenders.

It is comforting to find that the writer who steals an identity in Je tue, il . . . had been a member of Jacques Doriot’s fascist party, tortured resist-ers and been condemned to death after the war. Far more common is the inheritance of evil proclivities. In “La Gueteuse,” a woman dies, leaving pornographic photos of herself and a lifetime of letters of denunciation of Jews and those who helped them during the Occupation, of Moroc-can independence fighters and of sans-papiers. Her son moves into her apartment and begins writing the same kinds of letters.56 A pedophile in 12, rue Meckert has a pétainiste father who had turned over several dozen resisters to the Germans.57 In Itinéraire du salaud ordinaire, the police agent Clément Duprest, who began his career tracking down resisters and Jews during the war, recruits his son to be an informer on left activists after May 1968.58

INVESTIGATING THE PAST

Investigating the past is dangerous business. When the roma Antonio goes to check out his great uncle’s story about being confined in the basement

of a parochial school and castrated there during the Occupation, he is shot by a school guard. An investigator is murdered in “La Complainte oubliée” when he finds out that a Breton nationalist who worked for the

Nazis used the funds they gave him to build up a large tourist business after the war.59 In Meurtres pour mémoire a father and decades later his son are murdered to stop their investigations of a prominent Vichy (and Fifth Republic) official’s role in the deportation of Jews during the

war. Of course, seeking to hide one’s past has its hazards as well. The


official turned assassin in Meurtres pour mémoire is in turn assassinated by the man who had previously done his killing for him. In Un Château en Bohème, a French writer who wants to keep his past dealings with Soviet authorities during the Cold War hidden, is assassinated by those who do not want their own earlier secret police activities revealed after the demise of Communist regimes.60

In literature, if not in life, to deal with the past, it is best not to have one.61 Daeninckx’s most well-known investigators are the police agent Arcadius Cadin and the private investigator le Poulpe, a character used by a number of polar writers and presented by each in their own fashion. Cadin is given no genealogy and in place of a wife from a politically correct family, prefers prostitutes and a cat. He served 28 months in Al-geria,62 a revealing experience for others in Daeninckx’s works, but one which left no visible traces (unless this is the unexplained cause of his asocial nature). Cadin had been headed for a career teaching history,63 but ended up in the police. He scorns the system and is shunted from place to place, the opposite of Clément Duprest, le salaud ordinaire, who thrives on figuring out what is expected of him. Living through 1968 left

Cadin mourning the absence of a better world without finding the pres-ent one acceptable.64 He had hoped to change the system from within, but despairs and commits suicide, seeing only the system change others who enter it.65 Though Cadin’s successor Le Poulpe lacks a genealogy as well, he does have friends and a girlfriend, and an honorable six month prison term while in the army. He explains that he is not a police agent: “No . . . I am nothing at all . . . I read the newspaper, and when there are things that appear bizarre to me, I come to take a look.”66 Le Poulpe has a degree in history and is able to catch a woman claiming to work on the history of modern historiography when she doesn’t correct his reference to Lucien Lefebvre.67 Yet he is no more an historian than Cadin.

Daeninckx’s investigators are French males of European origin (though Novacek, a successor to Le Poulpe, is the child of a Czech immigrant68). They often depend on researchers, who are invariably drawn from popu-lations which deviate from this norm. Some are women like Irène in Le der des ders. Internet whiz Dan in 12, rue Meckert is the son of a secret emissary from Ho Chi Minh who negotiated the end of the war with the United States, but then fell out of favor. The net master Alain Cordier, who works for Novacek, is in a wheelchair. Their marginalization from a dominant Euromale norm in French society is associated with their ability to reveal (though not directly confront) its repressed elements.69


BEHIND THE CURTAIN

What is the past Daeninckx and his stand-ins find? He is, of course,

concerned with the landmarks of the modern French left, the Paris Com-mune and the Resistance, but he brings out elements in them previously marginalized. He discusses the role of foreigners—Poles, Italians, and Algierans—in the Commune.70 And he opens up the legacy of the Com-mune, giving the name of the Communard Maxime Lisbonne to the reporter in 12, rue Meckert and reminding us that the original Lisbonne produced fellow Communard Louise Michel’s play “Nadine,” and in-vented the strip-tease. As for the Resistance, there is recognition that it made demands on individuals that the postwar world could not recognize or recompense. “Dead Day in Deauville” tells the story of an American general who comes to Europe for wartime commemoration ceremonies and is murdered by a French resister who had been led to think the Allies would land in the Pas-de-Calais and whose capture was arranged so that when tortured he would misinform the Germans. And there is the figure

of the resister driven to alcoholism when he participates in combating the anti-colonial struggles of those seeking independence, what he had sought for France during the war.71

If a central theme of Daeninckx’s work has been to reveal efforts to hide Nazi and collaborationist past, whether in his efforts to root out Holocaust deniers on the French extreme left or to reveal the persecu-tion Roma experienced during the Occupation, he also wants to reveal a history of ethnic diversity which speaks to contemporary France. Ratonnades directed against North African immigrants to the Hexagon had been preceded by bretonnades for an earlier generation of Breton immigrants to factories in the Parisian suburbs.72 Daeninckx tells a story of Roma whom a Belgian peasant throws off his land in 1940. They then meet this peasant and his pregnant wife, who had been forced to flee the

Nazi invasion, becoming themselves gens de voyage. The Roma help the peasant, who says he will not forbid Roma to stay on his land in the future and names his child after one of them.73 Daeninckx retells the story Jean Moulin recounted in his Premier combat of Moulin’s refusal of the German demand that he blame Senegalese soldiers in 1940 for atrocities the Germans had committed. Daeninckx follows this up by having Moulin ask in 1943 about the role of Senegalese soldiers in Lyon. Hearing of their brave fighting, Moulin is forced to get rid of this information when he

is arrested; the story of the Senegalese soldiers must await Daeninckx’s telling of it now.74 Daeninckx has us visit the tomb of a resister in France of North African origin in “La Mort en dédicace”75; a resister in La Mort


n’oublie personne refuses to seek a recognition not given to a resister of Moroccan origin who died protecting him.

Daeninckx devotes particular attention to Alsace, which he sees as the victim of a national memory of the past put in the service of a local forgetting. In “Le fantôme de l’arc-en-ciel,” a reporter goes to Strasbourg to cover the discovery of work of an interwar experimental art movement whose disappearance had always been blamed on the Nazi campaign against degenerate art. It turns out that the art had been covered over before the war by a restaurant owner, who feared it would alienate his bourgeois clientele. The reporter is struck by the street name, Rue du 22 novembre, in Strasbourg, which inhabitants tell him must refer to the date of the liberation of the city in 1944, but in fact was named to mark the day the soviets established in 1918 were crushed. And finally

the “phantom” of the title was a malgré-nous Alsatian forced into the SS who had participated in the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane. He had been hidden by his wife for forty years, but reappeared with her death. The reporter does not understand the situation and in his effort to help the man burns him to death.76 In keeping with Daeninckx’s view of repression of the past, the good past repressed (soviets, experimental art) has a legacy only if we imagine the better world which could have resulted from its realization. The bad past, involving fascists, has tragic consequences when it reemerges without being fully acknowledged, in

this case for the man who had been forced to do Nazi evil.77 France has a troubled relationship to the memory of World War I and

to colonialism, but the events whose past haunt France in Daeninckx’s accounts are most often participation in and cooperation with Occupa-tion authorities and service in the French army during the Algerian War. Both marked individuals and their descendants. However, Daeninckx treats them differently. The career of the police officer Clément Duprest

in Itinéraire du salaud ordinaire spans the period from the Vel d’Hiv round-up in 1942 to the sight of René Bousquet, general secretary of the

police in occupied France, at a party for François Mitterrand in 1981. By tracing the career of an individual who pursues a successful career from the Occupation through the Fifth Republic, Daeninckx wants to show the continuity of philosophies and practices in the state during a period of apparently significant change.

Actions during the Algerian War reveal individuals for who they are, without leaving a clear institutional legacy like the Vichy regime. The effects of the war did not end in 1962: “It is something that contaminates today.”78 Le Bourreau et son double pits two veterans who knew one another in Algeria. Molier was a torturer, who settled comfortably into


his job as a brutal head of security in a factory. Werbel spent his life after the war attempting to redeem himself by organizing immigrant workers (and committed suicide when Molier sought to compromise him).79 “La mort en dédicace” had its origins in Daeninckx’s effort to reveal what he saw as the true nature of the mythic gangster Jacques Mesrine: a

racist killer who honed his talents practicing torture in Algeria.80 In 12, rue Meckert, a child killer appears who had learned his trade as a para in Algeria, where he had been in the same sector as Mesrine.81 “Corvée de bois” interweaves torture and control of the media. A paratrooper in Algeria murders an American reporter who had photographed him kill-ing a child. He is then sent off to do propaganda among Algerians, and from there to work in a unit where soldiers torture and rape Algerians, and make objects from their bones and skins. He is injured and returns to France in a wheelchair, where he receives a job censuring films on

the war.82 Daeninckx’s denunciation of Gilles Perrault for associations with ultra-leftists who flirted with Holocaust denial draws on his read-ing of Perrault’s works on other subjects, and most importantly, his Les Parachutistes, about his experience as a para in Algeria. In what Perrault intended as a critique, Daeninckx sees an exultation. Because Perrault

cannot deal with his own para past, Daeninckx believes, he is willing to forgive and forget ultra-left Holocaust deniers.83

ARCHIVISTS AND HISTORIANS

But why must it be Daeninckx and his fictional personae who reveal this

past? What of those trained and paid to collect, organize, and analyze documentation from the past? Daeninckx is proud of his discovery and use of materials which historians had not used or not used adequately in

the past, including testimonies solicited by the FLN after the demonstra-tion of 17 October 1961 for Meurtres pour mémoire84 and unpublished letters for Missak. What of archives and archivists? There are helpful low-level archivists like Dalbois in the police archives, but the state often possesses compromising information on those who have access to sensitive documents and uses the threat to expose these individuals if they release such materials to the public (or these individuals hold them back from the state materials which would compromise them when the state wants to pursue an investigation), i.e. the archivist Gerbet, the pho-tographer Rosner and police union officials in Meurtres pour mémoire. The most compromised group is the upper echelon of state archivists like Lécusson in Meurtres pour mémoire. He is the director of departmental


archives in the Haute-Garonne who tries to kill Cadin, but is shot to death by him. The departmental archivist in La Route du Rom downplays the importance of the internment of the Roma during the war.85 And in turn it is precisely the access to closed state archives given Gilles Perrault that makes Daeninckx so mistrust his findings in apparently unimpeachable

left histories like L’Orchestre rouge: why would the state grant access to these documents unless the goal was actually something nefarious, like revealing what remained of the Soviet antifascist network or to give Perrault the apparent credentials of a genuine leftist? 86

This takes us to historians and here again the division is clear between those at the lower reaches of the professional hierarchy and those at the top. In Meurtres pour mémoire, Roger Viollet was a lycée history teacher who decided to write a local history of Drancy; his only sin was a taste for films like “The Body Snatchers” (when film of the real body

snatchers—Paris police on 17 October 1961—was taken by the Belgians and kept from the French state). Viollet’s son is also a lycée history teacher with a history graduate student girlfriend, Claudine. Father and son are murdered to keep them quiet; Claudine is a good researcher, but

powerless. Historians are less admirably portrayed in La Route du Rom. Their absence of work on the taking of land from Roma during the war made it appear to le Poulpe that “the blast from the bombardments had emptied the heads of historians in the area.”87 However, a history stu-dent working as an intern (stagiaire) in the departmental archives gives le Poulpe the assistance denied him by the departmental archivist. And she in turn tips off le Poulpe to a local historian doing revealing research on gitans during the war. In Éthique en toc, Pierre, who uncovers the presence of a Holocaust denier at a research center of the university in Lyon, is another researcher there. And it is not an historian who studies resisters of Armenian origin in Missak, but a literary scholar who does this on the side.

However, do not count on the mandarins in the university to reveal the hidden past.88 In his earliest work, Daeninckx suggested that the problem was the impediments created by academic historians’ convoluted ways. A dossier with information on Arcadius Cadin is discovered in the course of urban excavations. The Centre de Recherches Historiques du

Collège Central spent five years putting the material together and then

realized that “the lack of theoretical elements rendered practical use of the dossier almost impossible.” However discovery of a buried public library provided the materials necessary to clarify even the most obscure passages of the dossier.89 In later works, the problem is that university professors are privileged state employees with no interest in speaking


truth to power. Sometimes they themselves are compromised, like the university professor in “Zigzag Men,” in this case a sociologist. He is the expert in a television documentary who denounces the behavior of the paras in Algeria as akin to that of the Waffen SS—but turns out to have been a torturer in Algeria who is murdered by the son of a man he tortured.90 While “venal historians” make an occasional appearance,91 Daeninckx is more concerned with those who know their job is to not question the legitimacy of those in power. Meurtres pour mémoire, he believed, “shed a light on the way that French historians are, for all sorts of reasons, too tied to the state apparatus; and there are a whole pile of things that they have trouble taking on [. . . ] Many historians were interested in the subject of 17 October 1961 and had to renounce it. There is real work to be done by historians and it is not done. As it is necessary that this work be done, that which does it is sometimes the novel and very often journalism.”92

Daeninckx’s most developed critique of academic historians is Éthique en toc, a novel inspired by the award of degrees at the Université de Lyon III for theses predicated on Holocaust denial and the employ-ment in a research center there of a one-time Holocaust denier (and the troubles confronted by his denouncer)93: “the compromises by certain Lyon mandarins with the assassins of memory”94; “the French university which was truly taken hostage by the Holocaust deniers.”95 In the novel Hubert Hynkel, director of the Centre d’Histoire de la Résistance et de la Déportation in Lyon, protects the Holocaust denier son of a Gestapo collaborator because the father had run a pornography theatre and had kept records on Hynket which he did not want revealed. The son uses his power to constitute committees which approve Holocaust denier theses. Ultimately Hynkel shoots the negationist son; faculty throughout France who got their degrees through the son’s interventions, resign. Such public exposure and results are relatively rare in Daeninckx’s fictional world,

an instance of wish fulfillment in his debates with academic historians

in the world outside literary texts. Daeninckx criticizes an historian at the Université de Caen for gloss-

ing over internment of Roma during the war,96 as well as the academics associated with the review Politica Hermetica which he saw publishing suspect articles.97 He accused the American historian Robert Paxton of an “attempt at aesphxiation” when he expressed doubts that the Zyklon B used in the extermination camps had been made in France.98 Daen-inckx favored removing the name of the eugenicist Alexis Carrel from a street in Paris (in opposition to Henry Rousso, director of the Institut d’histoire du temps présent ) and supported maintenance of the loi Gayssot


criminalizing Holocaust denial in the December 2005 war of petitions with academic historians, including Rousso.99 He condemned the report prepared by a commission chaired by Rousso on the situation at the Université de Lyon without having read it on the grounds that academics would look out for themselves.100

CONCLUSION

Daeninckx is what we can call a practitioner of “historical realism,” a genre akin to social (not socialist) realism, which reveals the oppression inherent in hidden histories of those in power and which, like social real-ists’ rejection of elite aesthetic norms, refuses obeisance to the higher reaches of archivists and historians. If the working class is a good moral force in Daeninckx’s works—one thinks of the EuroFrench worker in Cannibale, a book about French racism toward Kanaks, who saved the Kanak Gocéné’s life and incurred a prison term for his actions—revelation of this is not the central aim of Daeninckx’s works.101 His goal is to create fiction which allows others to entertain the hypotheses

he has made about the fate of the past in the present. Historical realism therefore is the creation of works of imagination intended to make the viewer see what collective memory traditions obscure in the interest of institutions and individuals. Historical realism therefore has the relation to academic history that social realism has to academic sociology. It is a publicly accessible, politically charged genre that affirms that academics

do not (and perhaps cannot) put their efforts to work for those who would need them most. If social realism relies on social environmental explana-tions of character and behavior traits, historical realism, as practiced by Daeninckx, supports explanations in terms of political genealogies and characters’ early formative experiences, evident in the lasting effects of service in the Vichy police or in the army during Algerian War, or time spent immersed in marginal anti-Communist extreme left groups. How-ever, the coveted political genealogy that gives Daeninckx his perspective and authority is not shared by his investigators. This allows them to better serve as stand-ins for the reader, who can see that without a privileged family history, one can still read the faits divers and look beyond the efforts of those in power to control history and use the contemporary media to fabricate reality.

Historical realism as practiced by Daeninckx is a genre rooted in the cultures of the Vichy Syndrome and the Algerian War Syndrome, which require that public attention be constantly directed to new manifestations

of the events in the past whose deleterious effects can never be rooted


out. Meurtres pour mémoire served as an important gangway between the two syndromes in France, by focusing public attention on the case of Maurice Papon, implicated in the deportation of the Jews and the murderous repression of the demonstration of 17 October 1961. Claims that these pasts are “history,” in the colloquial American sense of the

term, and therefore the domain of historians and of commemorations of those who suffered and died, are met with suspicion. This is crucial to “never again” cultures. In Daeninckx’s work, it is therefore important that even when the original perpetrators die, the legacy appear in their children. The French can never passively affirm “never again”; they

must be able to reenact it in their world. This is why the exposés at the heart of Daeninckx’s plots often do not reach the public in his works. In Meurtres pour mémoire, the assassin of Roger Viollet murders the state official who gave him the order to carry out murders, thus preventing the

story from reaching the public sphere. The detective and his girlfriend in Le der des ders die before they can reveal what they have discovered. La mort n’oublie personne ends with a journalist, who has uncovered the tragic history of injustice done to a resister, planning to publish a study of it, but it is unclear if he will (unless we count this novel as his testament)—and the resister assassinating the state attorney who had done him wrong. The cinema enthusiast who uncovers the story behind the torture of resisters in a film in Les Figurants burns the film.

Even in its revelation, the past can remain hidden.

But not to Daeninckx’s readers. In addition to students assigned his works in school, Daeninckx has a leftie bobo reading public, surviving the shame of a life as the new bourgeoisie that would not speak its name. What ultra-leftists like Guy Dardel, with whom Daeninckx has crossed swords, say about Daeninckx’s community of polar writers, is appli-cable to the contradictions of the bobo world. Dardel labels the work of Daeninckx and those like him as a “regenerating fiction” of the system

they ostensibly claim to oppose: “For them, support of the theses of Daeninckx is the label ‘good conscience’ tattooed on their forehead.”102 This bobo reading public sees the historical narrative leading to a revolu-tion disappearing,103 even as this means less and less to them in political, cultural and social terms; they replace it with battles always to be fought, no longer in the future, but in the past, the stuff of the historical realism Daeninckx does so well.

NOTES

1. “Entretien avec Didier Daeninckx: une modernité contre la modernité de paco-tilles,” Mouvements 15–16 (2001): 8–15. 15.


2. Marianne Genzling, “Arrêt sur lecture 4” in Didier Daeninckx, Meurtres pour mémoire, ed. Marianne Genzling (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 24–25.

3. Jean-Baptiste Harang, “Oeil Daeninckx,” Libération, 12 June 2003, II. 4. Quoted in “Entretien avec Didier Daeninckx,” Mouvements, 12. “Entretien avec

Françoise Kerleroux: ‘Je la connais, mon histoire des massacres, jeune homme’,” 15 August 2001 <www.editions-verdier.fr/v3/auteur-daeninckx-7.html>.

5. Daeninckx, Les corps râlent (Paris: Eden, 2003), 9. 6. Emblematic of the depressingly vacant world in which we live today is “Le

Psyshowpath” in Daeninckx, Zapping (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 93–100, which features a building in which a resister killed by the Germans and a Jewish tailor in hiding during the Occupation (who was turned in) had once lived. Now it is the place where reality consists of a man who makes passionate love to an inflatable doll.

7. This is taken from an article by Didier Daeninckx and Valère Staraselski which appeared in Cahiers du communism 74.10 (1998): 49–53. Valère Staraselski, Il faut savoir désobéir (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), 174.

8. Didier Daeninckx, “Rencontre avec Didier Daeninckx,” February 2004. <http.www.bibliosurf.com/Rencontre-avec-Didier-Daeninckx>. For an ultra-right version of the critique of Daeninckx as mired in “the privileged forms of docility, if not of pathetic

connivance,” like antifascism and anticommunism, see Pierre Béard, “Didier dénonce sur . . . http://www. Amnesia.net,” Éléments, May 2001, n.p.

9. Daeninckx, La Mémoire longue (Paris: Cherche Midi, 2008), 297–99. In his novel, 12, rue Merkert (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 242, Daeninckx has the review J’enquête play a similar role in today’s world: it is a journal secretly funded by the state with con-tributions made for cancer research that attracts left polar writers and journalists whose goal “consisted in determining the axis of the underground work of journalists of faits divers.”

10. Daeninckx, Le Goût de la vérité. Réponse à Gilles Perrault (Paris: Verdier, 1997).

11. This situation was inspired by the case of a radical radio announcer whose ties to the Renseignements généraux were revealed after his death. Daeninckx, La Mémoire longue, 295.

12. Ibid., 119–121. “Traverse No. 28” in En marge (Paris: Denoël, 1994), 83–120, is a tribute to the violence of the anti-deindustrialization demonstrations, which went un-reported in the press, in conjunction with an account of male violence against women.

13. “Didier Daeninckx, qui refuse de ‘zapper’ la vie,” Le Monde, 2 June 1995, VIII.

14. Daeninckx, Leurre de vérité et autres nouvelles (Paris: Denoël, 1992) is a col-lection of stories about the power exercised by televised reality in characters’ lives.

15. Daeninckx, Écrire en contre (Vénissieux: Paroles d’Aube, 1997), 57–58. In Play-back, the ghostsinger Prima Piovani got her start with the Lorraine Coeur d’Acier, the rebel radio station which fought factory closings, before becoming the tool of a media giant herself.

16. Daeninckx, Le Géant inachevé (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 120.17. Daeninckx, Le der des ders (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 109.18. Daeninckx, Mort au premier tour (Paris: Denoël, 1997), 115.19. Roland Barthes, “Structure of the Fait-Divers” in Critical Essays, trans. Richard

Howard (Evanston, Il.: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 185–95. 186–87.20. Daeninckx, La Mémoire longue, 329.


21. Daeninckx, “Back Street” in Hors limites (Paris: Juilliard, 1992), 138–41. On Daeninckx’s appreciation of Arthur Conan Doyle, see his “Les Dits des maudits d’Auber” in Léon Bonneff, Aubervillers (Paris: L’Esprit des Péninsules, 2000), 9–10.

22. Didier Daeninckx, “Didier Daeninckx ou: Le bruit des silences . . .,” interview by E. Borgers, January 2004, <http://geocities.com/polarnoir/daeninckx_interv2.html>.

23. Didier Daeninckx, “Entretien avec Didier Daeninckx,” interview by Yves Reuter, Pratiques 65 (March 1990): 112–24. 122.

24. “Rencontre avec Didier Daeninckx.” 25. “Entretien avec Françoise Kerleroux.” 26. Daeninckx, “Mon journal de la semaine,” Libération, 18–19 (2001): 5.27. Daeninckx, “La Marque de l’histoire. 1931–1961” in Pascal Blanchard and

Sandrine Lemaire, eds., Culture impériale (Paris: Autrement, 2004), 33–41. 36.28. Didier Daeninckx, “A la rencontre de Didier Daeninckx,” in Daeninckx, Meurtres

pour mémoire, 5–12. 10–11.29. For the application of microhistory to right a contemporary injustice rooted in

a telling of the recent past, see Donald Reid, “The Historian and the Judges,” Radical History Review 80 (2001): 135–48.

30. Interview with Didier Daeninckx by Bernard, October 2008, <http://www.bibliosurf.com/Interview-de-Didier-Daeninckx>.

31. Daeninckx, La Mémoire longue, 264–65. 32. “Didier Daeninckx: un homme contre” <http://www.bibliosurf.com/Didier-

Daeninckx-un-homme-contre>.33. Daeninckx, Écrire en contre, 108.34. Ibid., 10.35. Ibid., 44 (quoted). Didier Daeninckx. “L’épave de Port –Vila,” Les enquêtes

interdites [amnistia.net], supplement to 69 (31 March 2006), 4–5. <http://www.amnistia.net/biblio/recits/portvila_501.htm>

36. Sometimes Daeninckx tells the story without the selling of the deferment. Les Baraques du Globe (Dinan: Terre de Brume, 2008), 11.

37. “Didier Daeninckx: un homme contre.” 38. Daeninckx, Les Baraques du Globe, 24.39. Daeninckx, Écrire en contre, 32.40. Daeninckx, “La Mort en chantier,” Les Temps modernes 595 (1997): 137–45.

139.41. Daeninckx, Écrire en contre, 94.42. Daeninckx, Le der des ders; Daeninckx, “Le monument” in Le dernier guérillero

(Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 11–33; Daeninckx, “Faire de nous des héros” in Raconteur d’histoires (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 203–10; Daeninckx, “Tu ne doubleras pas” in Cités perdues (Paris: Verdier, 2005), 95–105; Daeninckx, “Un petit air mutin” in Histoire et faux-semblants (Paris: Magnard, 2009), 99–118.

43. Luc Le Vaillant, “Le rouge-noir,” Libération, 14 March 1997, last page. 44. Daeninckx, Écrire en contre, 108.45. “Entretien avec Didier Daeninckx,” Mouvements, 11.46. Harang, “Oeil Daeninckx,” III.47. Daeninckx, Écrire en contre, 75–77. Daeninckx, “Ce sont nos ennemis qui march-

ent à notre . . . ” in Main courante et autres lieux (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 289–304.48. “Entretien avec Didier Daeninckx,” Mouvements, 14.49. Daeninckx, “L’obscène alliance des contraires” in Alain Bihr et. al., Négation-

nistes: les chiffonniers de l’histoire (Paris: Golias et Syllepse, 1997), 145–62. 148–49.


50. Judith Perrignon, “‘Coluche l’a rêvé, Robert Hue l’a fait’,” Libération, 14 May 1999, 15.

51. A man of the Vichy Syndrome and the Algerian War Syndrome, Daeninckx has no place for a Communist Syndrome. See Donald Reid, “Pursuing the Communist Syn-drome: Opening the Black Book of the New Anti-Communism in France,” International History Review 27 (2005): 295–318.

52. Patrick Besson, Souvenir d’une galaxie dite nationale-bolchévique (Monaco: Editions du Rocher 1994), 17; Dominique Simonnot, “Le conflit vire à la bagarre entre les

auteurs de polars,” Libération, 3 July 2001, 18; Fabrice Nicolino, “L’affaire Daeninckx,” Politis, 23 July 2001, 22–25. 24–25.

53. Serge Quadruppani to Jean-Michel Piochon, 17 December 2002. <http://qua-druppani.samizdat.net/article.php3?id_article=40>.

54. On bourgeois bohemians, see David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001).

55. Daeninckx, “Ceinture rouge” in Raconteur d’histoires, 253–90.56. Daeninckx, “La Gueteuse” in Main courante, 275–87.57. Daeninckx, 12, rue Meckert, 209–11.58. Clément Duprest is apparently based on the career of the police official Guy

Dauvé, whose son was an ultra-left negationist who used a pseudonym to hide his parentage (but which, in Daeninckx’s conception of the world, is necessarily born out). Daeninckx, Le Goût de la vérité, 25–26. Finding one’s ancestors always has consequences

in Daeninckx’s world. A noble who is a mayor and member of the Front national does genealogical research and realizes his family has thirteenth-century Muslim roots. He switches from the Front national electoral ticket in his town to that of the Front islamique du salut. “Kinsankimpur, air connu” in En Marge, 39–41. Patrick Besson’s Didier Dénonce (Paris: Éditions Gérard de Villiers, 1997) is a caustic portrayal of guilt by genealogy and association in Daeninckx’s universe.

59. Daeninckx, “La Complainte oubliée” in La Mort en dédicace (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 11–92.

60. This novel draws on Daeninckx’s personal experience—“Rencontre avec Didier Daeninckx”; Daeninckx, La Mémoire longue, 132–41—and not surprisingly (but incor-rectly) has been taken by Daeninckx’s critics as his effort to rewrite his own past. Gérald Delteil, “Daeninckx en un combat douteux,” Libération, 11 November 1997, 5.

61. Or, more accurately, not to reveal a relevant past until one needs to do so. In La mort n’oublie personne, the investigative journalist who saw the suicide message of the resister’s son, and is presumably driven to undertake his investigation by this memory, does not reveal this information to the resister until his investigation is complete.

62. Daeninckx, Le Facteur fatal (Paris: Denoël, 1990), 127. 63. Daeninckx, Mort au premier tour, 7664. Ibid., 78–79. Daeninckx, La repentie (Paris: Gallimard, 1999) shows little at-

traction for the terrorism of post-1968 groupuscules.65. Daeninckx, a worker at an unorganized Raid insecticide plant outside Paris in

May 1968, treats the student movement with some bitterness, even if he does date his turn to writing in 1977 to a several-month “total depression” with the realization that the dreams of 1968 were over. The CGT demands in May, treated as “reformist” by student radicals, would have made a world of difference to a worker like him. Écrire en contre, 49, 79, 112–13. A beggar in “L’homme-tronc” (Main courante et autres lieux, 129–36) learns in May that collecting for “injured students,” is profitable, but is killed by an


army veteran when he shows up collecting in the name of the same cause at the Gaullist demonstration on 29 May 1968. Daeninckx scornfully presents soixante-huitard veterans who have made their peace with the world (and mark the thirtieth anniversary with a food fight)

. “Passage d’enfer” in Passages d’enfer (Paris: Denoël, 1998), 223–49. 66. Daeninckx, “Suivez la fleche” in Passages d’enfer, 139–142. 141–42. 67. Daeninckx, Ethique en toc (Paris: Baleine, 2000), 15, 26.68. And in Le Château en Bohème, Novacek discovers in the course of the novel,

the good political antecedents of his father. This sets him apart from Daeninckx’s earlier detectives.

69. There are variants to this pattern. The octogenarian Kanak Gocéné, the major personage in Le retour d’Ataï, is a good researcher, able to reveal errors in attribution in art catalogues. The lead character in Camarades de classe is a woman (though she had been male during the period of her life under examination in the text).

While pedophilia is a crime of abusive power, often tied to Holocaust denial in Daen-inckx’s work, his treatment of heterosexual relations involving his primary characters generally partakes of the model of a compliant female whose natural desire for her male lovers’ attentions is set against the unnatural political worlds in which the couple lives.

70. Daeninckx, “Une barricade à Saint-Denis,” 14 November 2003, <http://www.amnistia.net/siteabon/biblio/forum/barricad.htm>.

71. Daeninckx, Écrire en contre, 96–97.72. Daeninckx, Nazis dans le métro (Paris: Editions Baleine, 1997), 17. 73. Daeninckx, “Nous sommes tous des Gitans belges!,” 16 May 2003, <http://www.

amnistia.net/siteabon/biblio/nouvell/gitan.htm>.74. Daeninckx, “Les Chiens et les lions” in Cités perdues, 59–76. In Éthique en toc,

21, the historian hero Pierre commits suicide in the house where Moulin was arrested in Lyon, with a copy of Premier combat in his pocket.

75. Daeninckx, “La Mort en dédicace” in La mort en dédicace, 114.76. Daeninckx, “La fantôme de l’arc-en-ciel,” in Main courante et autres lieux,

107–24. 77. More common is the theme of figures from the past avenging what they see

as current incarnations of past injustices. A deportee dons his camp uniform in 1996 in “Le Penochet,” to shoot the leader of a Front National-like party. Zapping, 220–28. In “Ils reviennent,” Cémargo’s father and relatives were Africans who had fought against conscription in the First World War and died in the conflict; he had been conscripted as

laborer during the Second World War. He has remained bitter and unearths a rifle he had

buried when his nation achieved independence and kills the leader of the Paris-Dakar motorcycle race. Cémargo then takes off the rider’s helmet and sees he had killed the first African to lead the race. Daeninckx, Main courante et autres lieux, 71–76.

78. “Entretien avec Françoise Kerleroux.” 79. A man who runs a place for down-and-out youth in Le Géant inachevé had left

the priesthood after a massacre in Algeria.80. “Entretien avec Françoise Kerleroux.” 81. Daeninckx, 12, rue Merkert, 44–46, 60.82. Daeninckx, “Corvée de bois” in Raconteur d’histoires, 163–202.

83. Daeninckx is particularly concerned with the many prefaces Perrault has written for a wide range of works. He interprets these as the means by which Perrault vouches for those who should be ostracized. “Le goût de la preface,” 25 February 2000, <www.amnistia.net/news/enquetes/prefaces/prefaces.htm>. This raises the important issue of


the place of the preface in the relations within French intellectual communities and with reading publics.

84. “A la rencontre de Didier Daeninckx,” 20–21.85. Daeninckx, La Route du Rom (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 127.86. Daeninckx, La Mémoire longue, 217–220.87. Daeninckx, La Route du Rom, 160.88. The ethnologists at the Musée de l’Homme in Le retour d’Ataï can help Gocéné

pursue his research because they are on strike and therefore temporarily free of the im-pediments state authority creates.

89. Jean-Pierre Coureuil and Didier Daeninckx, “Avertissement” in Arcadius Cadin (Amiens: Encrage, 1991), n.p.

90. Daeninckx, “Zigzag Man” in Passages d’enfer, 197–222.91. Daeninckx, “Loto stoppeur” in Petit éloge des faits divers (Paris: Gallimard,

2008), 42.92. “A la rencontre de Didier Daeninckx,” 10–11. In Éthique en toc, 83, Zill ex-

pounds on this, citing the 17 October 1961 massacres as only one instance of academic historians’ silence: “You think they let them work peacefully? They are attached by the leash to the institution, and they do there what they are told to do.”

93. See Gilles Smadja, “Philippe Videlier, un interdit professional depuis trois ans,” L’Humanité, 11 September 1996. <http://www.humanite.fr/popup_imprimer.html?id_ar-ticle=760452>

94. Daeninckx, “Travailler parmi les morts,” Les enquêtes interdites 44 (2004): 12. <www.amnistia.net/news/articles/negdoss/travmort/travmort.htm>

95. “Didier Daeninckx ou: Le bruit des silences . . .” 96. Daeninckx, La Mémoire longue, 321.97. Daeninckx, “Travailler parmi les morts,” 12. 98. Daeninckx, La Mémoire longue, 189–94.99. Ibid., 393–94. Daeninckx, “L’obscène alliance des contraires,” 148–49.100. Daeninckx “Travailler Parmi les Morts,” 12. The report is available at <http://

lesrapports.ladocumentationfrancaise.fr/BRP/044000492/0000.pdf >. When it did appear, amnestia.net, with which Daeninckx is closely associated, condemned it, arguing that precisely its self-investigation of the arcane practices of academia, i.e., how the award of “très bien” to a master’s thesis predicated on Holocaust denial was, in fact, a way of blocking the author’s career, was unacceptable. “Négationnisme: Rousso-Lyon III, un rapport qui ne passe pas,” Les enquêtes interdites 52 (2004): 12–13.

101. The point is that the man is EuroFrench and Gocéné tells his story to young Kanak militants to convince them that solidarity with whites is possible.

102. Guy Dardel, Le Martyr Imaginaire (Paris: Editions No Pasaran, 2005), 26–27.103. See Donald Reid, “François Furet and the Future of a Disillusionment,” The

European Legacy 10.2 (2005): 193–216.

Didier Daeninckx: Raconteur of History · Didier Daeninckx: Raconteur of History Donald Reid South...

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