Jean Lacouture

Jean Lacouture is a Journaliste, Historien and writer French born the June 9th 1921 with Bordeaux (the Gironde).

Studies

Jean Lacouture made his secondary studies among Jesuits of the Lycée Saint-Joseph de Tivoli of Bordeaux and of the higher learning in Paris. He is graduate in letters, right and political sciences.

Press attaché of the general Leclerc at the end of the Second world war, it discovers the Indo-China and made there his beginnings in the Journalisme where it meets the chiefs of the revolutionary Vietminh, of which Ho Chi Minh.

Committed journalism

After a two years stay to the general residence of France with Reduction in Morocco (1947-1949), it begins its career from journalist and to defer to Combat in 1950 which it continues with the newspaper Le Monde in 1951 then with France Soir as a correspondent with the Cairo between 1953 and 1956. It returns to the Monde in 1957 where he is chief of the service overseas then international reporter until 1975, he also collaborates in the Nouvel Observateur .

Its engagement on the left, against the General de Gaulle, the V {{E}} Republic but especially for the Vietcong and the Khmer Rouge, will be the object of burning debates and justifications a posteriori of its share.

Its engagements

Anticolonialist

It is its meeting with Ho Chi Minh - a “charismatic personality” according to him - which will determine the engagement of Jean Lacouture in the cause of the Décolonisation.

Thus in the Years 1950, it is one of the first partisans of the decolonization of the Algérie and all the other still French colonies.

Anti-Americanism of the Years 1970 and its consequences

In 1970, in Nouvel Observateur , it speaks in praise of the new government anti-American of PEN Nouth, set up at the Kampuchea and of the political program of FUNK written on the indications of the “interior Resistance” of Khieu Samphan and Ieng Sary inter alia.

He is not then the only intellectual to take party for the hostile modes with “the American imperialism”. It cotoie Jacques Decornoy, Jacques Julliard, Jean-Paul Sartre, etc

In 1975, after having greeted the fall of Saigon, Jean Lacouture greets the imminent arrival of “better Kampuchea” with the Khmer Rouge whereas the edition of the April 17th 1975 of the Monde title: the collapse of the illusions (of Long Boret, successor of Lon Nol) and that the Khmer Rouges enter Phnom Penh. At that time, for Jean Lacouture, the Khmer Rouges are “a resistance movement against a government manufactured by the Americans”.

It will be necessary more than three years many intellectuals to apprehend the reality of the ideology of the Khmer Rouges and North Vietnameses and still to admit the Khmer Génocide more.

In November 1978, Jean Lacouture recognizes his errors on its presentations of the Vietnam and the Khmer Rouges. In a maintenance with Current values , he declares:

to have practiced selective information by dissimulating the Stalinist character of the North-Vietnamese mode. I thought that the conflict against the American imperialism was deeply right, and that it would be always time, after the war, to wonder about the true nature of the mode. In Kampuchea, I sinned by ignorance and naivety. I did not have any means of controlling my information. I had known a little certain current leaders of the Khmer Rouges, but nothing made it possible to throw a shade on their future and their program. They claimed Marxisme, without I being able to detect in them the roots of the Totalitarisme. I acknowledge that I missed political penetration.

De Gaulle

In the Years 1950 and 1960, it was one of the most vigorous detractors of the general de Gaulle and a fervent supporter of François Mitterrand.

At the end of the Years 1980, its biography of De Gaulle ( De Gaulle or the eternal challenge ) sliced with her opinions of youth. He then admitted having evolved/moved and to be become one of his larger admirors.

The Boudarel business

In 1991, it takes the defense of university Georges Boudarel, aimed by a complaint for “Crimes against humanity” deposited by French former prisoners of a camp vietminh where it was political Commissaire with the beginning of the year 1950.

The biographer

Biographer of many personalities, Jean Lacouture asserts, at the time of a debate in 2001 with Philippe Bertrand on France Inter (literary Coffee), his subjectivity and his emphase for the characters of which he writes the biography (for example “tasty” personality of Ho Chi Minh). Thus, he says, if it cannot make biography of character whom it does not appreciate, it admits writing biographies of admiration and for which it does not hesitate to deviate from the rule of objectivity. Thus leaving the report which the biographer is dominated by his character, he does not believe in this rule (defended by Pierre Milza) and admits covering the subject in a committed and personal way.

For Jean Lacouture, the art of the biographer consists in leaving remote regions to make it possible to the reader to have an idea.

However, writer or historian of the immediate or contemporary history, Jean Lacouture regretted not having put the accent on “the caging” of the men to Vietnam, and on the police mode of Nasser, in a biography written in reaction against the assimilation of Nasser with Hitler.

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