Guy Debord (Critical Lives)

by Andy Merrifield

  Perhaps the 1970s came to end in an unlikely spot: le parking of avenue Foch, under the cobblestones of bourgeois Paris? Perhaps 1984 was the real knell of the 1960s, the notorious year that that other Champ Libre author, George Orwell, had long ago underscored? As the .22 calibre rifle had taken potshots at Lebovici’s head, Mitterrand’s much-hailed socialist victory of 1980 looked glib and the conservative rot steadily set in everywhere. At the forefront were Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who had perversely promised to fill the post-Keynesian emptiness; politics and economics would never be the same again.

  Somewhere and somehow the Left had lost its way and welfare-state capitalism was all but moribund. Suddenly, Lebovici was as dead as French party-political socialism. In the 1970s Debord had made a loyal ally and now he’d lost one, the only comrade he’d never actually fallen out with. Their friendship had flourished throughout the Baader Meinhof and the Red Brigade years, amid the violence and the bombs. In the process, Debord had strayed from Paris’s streets and almost made another movie. He’d hid behind Renaissance Italian ramparts and jousted windmills in Spain. He’d stayed gallant and translated poetry, dreamt of Gypsies and wisecracked in slang. He’d sensed death nearing and drank away his fears. And now Lebovici was gone, assassinated by culprits to this day still at large, another friend inexplicably killed by bullets. As the sirens flared and the fingers began to point, Debord stood accused, yet again.

  5

  I Am Not Somebody Who Corrects Himself

  There are times when one should only use contempt with economy because of the large number of people who necessitate it

  Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre-tombe

  It had been a gruesome death, a bizarre murder, a ruthless hit. Was it an execution or an assassination, a botched robbery or a crime of passion? Maybe it was a deal gone sour or a settling of accounts? Paris’s finest sallied forth, fumbling in the darkness, powerless against the imponderable, almost as clueless as their counterparts in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’: ‘confounded by the seeming absence of a motive… puzzled, too, by the seeming impossibility of reconciling the voices heard in contention’.1 In fact, the cops only had one real lead: the name ‘François’, retrieved from a crumpled scrap of paper in Lebovici’s pocket, scribbled alongside the words ‘rue Vernet, 18h 45’. Earlier that day (Monday, 5 March), Lebovici had met another cinema producer, Jean-Louis Livi, to discuss a future project. They’d lunched together and were later in mid-conversation at Lebovici’s office when, at around 5.30 p.m., the phone rang: a mysterious interlocutor compelled Lebovici suddenly to quit the office and cancel all remaining appointments. Nobody knows who was on the other end; all that surfaced nine hours later, in a subterranean parking lot, were those few words, Lebovici’s last.

  Many were interviewed and not a few aspersions cast; theories and conjectures abounded, yet little solid stuck. Paris’s press, meanwhile, appeared to mimic that of Poe’s day: ‘Many individuals have been examined’, Poe’s fictional newspaper noted, ‘in relation to this most extraordinary and frightful affair… but nothing whatever has transpired to throw light upon it.’ Thus, L’Humanité, three days after the Lebovici bombshell: ‘The hypotheses on the motive of death are even more numerous and diverse than the complex personality the victim presented himself.’ And on 12 March, Le Parisien libéré reported:

  As the days unfold, [the police] discover a complex character – secret, many-sided, whose life entails enormous and strange twilight zones, where money, success after success, wealth and society soirées coexist in a bizarre cocktail with a pronounced taste for clandestine action and dangerous company.

  In this latter regard, Debord entered the fracas; the authorities would interview him at the quai des Orfèvres almost while the corpse was still warm. He must have felt like Diego Rivera after Trotsky had an axe buried in his brain: devastated at the loss of a friend and comrade, appalled by the accusations of his culpability. Needless to say, the police found nothing on Champot’s most notorious habitué, no incriminating evidence, rien to suggest he’d connived in the assassination of his ally and benefactor. At first, Debord ignored their slander and innuendo. For a while he followed Chateaubriand’s maxim: he branded contempt with economy, mobilizing classic Joycean principles of dissent: ‘silence, cunning and exile’. Then, in defence of his character and in memory of his late friend, he penned Considérations sur l’assassinat de Gérard Lebovici, putting the record straight, telling every hack critic to go to hell. (He would later sue Le Journal du dimanche for libel after implying his ‘evil influence’ was responsible for the producer’s assassination. He would subsequently win the case for an undisclosed amount.)

  Twenty years on, the case remains unsolved and largely forgotten. Lebovici’s life read like a novel. He could have easily figured in any Raymond Chandler noir tale. Dressed in his louche raincoat, pacing the boulevards, he even looked like Humphrey Bogart. But he could also slip into a tux just as nonchalantly, hobnob with the elite in the Coupole, sip champagne and exert the Midas Touch wherever he went. He was rich and couldn’t fail at anything; he was hated by the Left for his bourgeois pretensions, and loathed by the Right for his gauchiste sensibilities. In the early 1980s he’d also started to organize his own campaign against pirate videos, a growing and lucrative niche, increasingly threatening the movie business. For all this, and much more, Lebovici had innumerable enemies, each side of the political spectrum and everywhere in the business community, any one of whom could have pulled the trigger or hired somebody else to.

  In the months prior to his murder, Lebovici had been working on a bizarre memoir, an honest presentation of his personality, revealing ‘everything on the character’. What he bequeathed were rough handwritten jottings and preliminary sketches, together with a bundle of letters that assorted friends and associates had sent him between 1974 and 1984. Much of the latter bordered on hate mail, and resurfaced in a posthumous text, Tout sur le personnage, published by Editions Gérard Lebovici, the re-launched Champ Libre – minus its prince. In it, Lebovici comes over as a ruthless editor and producer, a hard-nosed businessman who takes no shit and expects a lot in return. It’s clear he’s mauled manuscripts, rejected proposals, ruined careers and not returned calls. He’s variously cursed and graphically denounced: He’s called a ‘lout’, ‘bloody stupid’, ‘pitiable’, even a ‘neo-Nazi’. Some threaten legal action; others, like former friend and colleague, Gérard Guégan, indict Lebovici for refusing to publish Guégan’s second novel, Les Irréguliers, because it wasn’t sufficiently extreme. Guégan suspects Debord’s hand somewhere, and, under his disruptive influence, suggests that Lebovici’s Champ Libre will quickly demise into ‘Chute Libre’ (free fall).

  More attacks objected to Lebovici’s ‘reckless’ publication of L’Instinct de mort, the controversial autobiography of Jacques Mesrine, then France’s most notorious criminal. Lebovici was as fascinated with Mesrine as he was with Debord. For Lebovici, the legendary gangster, revered by France’s underworld as a latter-day Robin Hood, was a ‘perfect symbol of liberty’.2 Good-looking and charming, Mesrine was courteous and elegant, even while he murdered and robbed banks. He lapped up danger and risk, masterminding armed heists with utmost military precision. He was a genius of disguise, too, donning wigs and changing his appearance in seconds, slipping through police blocks and escaping from maximum-security prisons. On the inside, Mesrine wrote an exaggerated memoir, bragging about killings he may actually never have committed. The book was smuggled out of prison and published, amid uproar, by Lebovici’s Champ Libre a few months before Mesrine came to trial in May 1978.

  Several days after being sentenced to twenty years hard time, Mesrine and his accomplice, François Besse, in a dramatically staged escape, held up warders at gunpoint and climbed over the wall to freedom. They are still the only two men to make it out of Paris’s dreaded La Santé penitentiary. Once outside, they lost little time robbing a Parisian casino and soon plotted a
series of revenge kidnappings. One had to wonder whether Lebovici ever made this list himself, especially since the convict at large was demanding royalties! On 2 November 1979, though, Mesrine had outsmarted the cops once too often. After a tip-off, an unmarked van full of policemen moved ahead of Mesrine’s BMW at traffic lights in Paris’s porte de Clignancourt, riddling the car with bullets, leaving Mesrine and his dog dead and his girlfriend crippled for life. He’d been shot 20 times by police sharpshooters, in an execution-style killing, without warning or proper procedure; Mesrine, plainly, was too dangerous to have rights.

  Meanwhile, Lebovici befriended Mesrine’s daughter, Sabrina, whose name may have been on the lips of Lebovici’s anonymous caller. Lebo took Sabrina under his wing and would later formalize guardianship. Whether Sabrina was involved in the shooting of her millionaire custodian will probably never be known, or whether the François in question was in fact Mesrine’s sidekick, François Besse, the popularly recognized ‘Public Enemy Number Two’. At 5 feet and a fraction over 100 pounds, ‘le Petit François’ had been scot-free for years, leading a Ronnie Biggs-style life in Tangiers. But in 1994 he was recognized and arrested outside a café terrace. In June 2002 he was put on trial for past crime and misdemeanours. Whilst in jail, petit François repented like jeune Raskolnikov, and learnt Latin and absorbed himself in philosophy. When the jury finally cast its verdict – ‘eight-years in La Santé’ – Libération (13 June 2002) described the sentence as ‘mild’. Is petit François a killer harbouring a secret? Did he avenge his partner Jacques, liquidating the man who’d been messing with Public Enemy Number One’s daughter? Perhaps François was a blackmailer and Lebovici refused to cough up? Or maybe, just maybe … the perpetrator was simply another François?

  Lebovici was put to rest in Paris’s Montparnasse Cemetery, where, on a tomb that is crumbling and seemingly forgotten, are, in fading script, stanzas from Guy’s translation of Jorge Manrique:

  What friend for his friends!

  What a Lord!

  What an enemy for the enemy!

  What leader of the fearless!

  What judgment for the wise!…

  What lion!

  Debord completed Considérations sur l’assassinat de Gérard Lebovici in January 1985, probably drafting it over the previous summer in Champot. It would have been a sad period: grief-stricken over a lost friend, badgered by the media, barraged by vitriol. He was often crippled with gout and plagued by insomnia, too. Acquaintances were visibly shocked at how bad 50-something Debord looked. Distant and detached, he took to the pen, and brandished it like a blade. ‘In all’, he noted near the beginning of Considérations,

  Gérard Lebovici’s gravestone with Debord’s inscription, Montparnasse cemetery.

  I don’t believe I’ve read more than five or six true facts reported about me … and never two together. And these same facts were almost always taken out of context, and doctored and misrepresented by diverse errors, and interpreted with much malevolence and nonsense. All the rest was simply invention … Never have so many false witnesses surrounded a man so obscure.3

  What followed in Considérations was Debord’s settling of scores, a crafted and crafty act of retribution, citing an array of press clippings only to rip them apart for their inaccuracy and stupidity. He said he’d learnt a lot about dishing out insults from experts, particularly from the Surrealists, and especially from Arthur Cravan. But the art of the insult, he said, must never be unfair, must never utilize rash denunciations. As such, Debord strikes at his polemical best: mocking and dry, measured and smart. Since he was dealing with an unseemly pile of garbage, ‘I will evoke what has been said in a similarly disordered manner… I would do too much honour to my subject if I were to treat it orderly. I want to show that it is unworthy of such treatment.’4 At one point, Debord even reminds a Parisian newspaper about French regional geography: Bellevuela-Montagne, he informed, isn’t in the Haute Savoie as they stated, but in the Auvergne!

  No, he didn’t know Jacques Mesrine, or any terrorists or killers. Yes, Gérard Lebovici ‘had attachments to the Haute-Loire. I am pleased that he always felt at home there.’5 The ‘inconceivable manner’, he said, in which these publications commented on the Lebovici affair ‘has led me to the decision that none of my films will ever be shown again in France. This absence will be a more just homage.’6 Debord concludes Considérations sur l’assassinat de Gérard Lebovici with words that smack of his own epigraph, ten years avant la lettre:

  It is fine to have contributed to the indictment of the world. What other success do we merit? I do not think I am so ‘enigmatic’ … I even believe I am sometimes easy to understand. Not so long ago, at the start of a passion, a woman whom I spoke to about the brief period of exile we’d each known, said to me in that tone of generous abruptness which goes so well in Spain: ‘But you, you have spent all your life in exile.’ So I have had the pleasures of exile, as others have had the pains of submission. Gérard Lebovici was assassinated.7

  One can’t underplay the effect all this must have had on Debord’s nerves and temperament: it was enough to drive anyone to drink and into self-imposed exile. Lebovici’s death signalled the end of middle age, the beginning of the real end for Debord, the grey on grey of life grown old. He never really seemed to get over it and withdrew even more from the modern world.8 Still, by his standards, the ensuing years would mark a prolific writing period. He’d whip off, in fast succession, a couple of brilliant books, Commentaires sur La Société du Spectacle (1988) and Panégyrique (1989). Despite everything, his analytical and poetic powers hadn’t escaped him. If anything, they may have become more acute, more lyrical, even more accomplished.

  On odd occasions, too, he could be spotted in old Paris, haunting its streets, dressed like an auvergnat paysan, with a copy of Libération under his arm (a newspaper he hated), furtively hunting in the shadows, bracing the chill breeze that came in off the Seine and slithered through the rue du Bac. And sometimes in midwinter nights, in the Square des Missions Etrangères, with an air of indignation and impudence, an owl would obstinately repeat his calls. Like Hegel’s fabled bird of Minerva from The Philosophy of Right, Debord’s truth would now only spread its wings with the falling of dusk. He and Alice ensconced themselves into an elegant apartment at 109 rue du Bac, in the smart 7th arrondissement, next door to a tranquil little public garden at the Square des Missions Etrangères, which thirty years before had been the scene of a daring nocturnal Lettrist dérive. ‘Square des Missions Etrangères’, wrote Michèle Bernstein in her Potlatch field-notes (14 and 26 January 1955), ‘may be used for receiving visitors, for being stormed by night, and for other psychogeographical purposes.’

  Debord’s apartment building at 109 rue du Bac, Paris.

  Number 109 stands amid a handsome row of mid-nineteenth-century buildings near the Bon Marché department store, the quintessential grand magasin immortalized in Zola’s 1883 novel Au Bonheur des dames (‘ladies’ paradise’). The fictional Octave Mouret, the brazen promoter and innovative owner of the Bonheur store, mimicked the equally brazen Aristide Boucicaut, the real-life patron of Bon Marché, whose drapery business began at a more humble site along rue du Bac in 1852. In 1869 Boucicaut commissioned Louis-Charles Boileau to rebuild the premises across the street; Gustave Eiffel lent a further hand in 1876 with another extension, replete with dazzling glass light-wells and iron catwalks and bridges. The misnamed ‘good value’ giant has been growing ever since, into a wealthy corporate giant, a veritable cathedral of consumption, with around 2,700 square metres of retail space; right outside Debord’s door, with spectacular irony.

  On sunny afternoons, out of his front window, Debord would have seen the light reflecting off the scrubbed white walls of number 128 across the street, the Seminary of the Foreign Missions, inaugurated by Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet’s sermon in 1663. Legend has it that in 1830 the Virgin Mary appeared four times at its chapel, always wearing a white silk dress, and always palpable to the same
novice nun, Catherine Labouré. Devout Catholics today venerate the seat as St Catherine’s shrine. Medallions, on sale at the chapel, commemorate the miracle.

  Another devout Catholic and one of the founders of French romanticism, François-René Chateaubriand, lived next door to the seminary between 1838 and 1848, in a basement flat at number 120, at the Hôtel de Clermont-Tonnerre. (His courtyard backed out onto the Foreign Mission’s own.) The celebrated classicist, statesman and adventurer wrote his Mémoires d’outre-tombe there and was laid to rest at the seminary’s chapel. (He ended up in his native Saint-Malo, in a tomb that stands dramatically atop craggy rocks near the sea’s edge.) Gambier’s impressive stone bust of Chateaubriand dominates the shale path at the Square des Missions Etrangères opposite. In Chateaubriand’s posthumous Mémoires, the final passage, dated November 1841, reads:

  my window, which looks out to the west on the gardens of the Missions Etrangères, is open. It is six o’clock in the morning; I see the pale and enlarged moon looming over the spire of the Invalides, fully disclosed by the first golden ray of the Orient. One could say that the ancient world is finished, and the new commences. I see the glint of dawn whose sun I will not see rise. It will only live on in me as I sit down beside my grave, after which I will daringly go down, crucifix in hand, into eternity.9