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ChAPTER 1

Showdown at Bruay-en-Artois

We made war and revolution in our imaginations. We

pretended to believe. It was like birth pangs without

giving birth, without passing over to the act. The suffering

was internal. It was all theatrical. And that permitted us

to remain outside the gates of hell—that is, murder.

—Roland Castro, Maoist student leader

April 6, 1972. The scene was a mining town in provincial Normandy,

Bruay-en-Artois. A young working-class girl, Brigitte Dewevre, had

been sadistically murdered, her mutilated, unclothed corpse left in a va-

cant field. The crime scene bespoke a level of brutality to which France

was entirely unaccustomed. Adding to the event’s macabre nature was

the fact that Brigitte’s body was discovered the next day by her younger

brother in the course of a pickup soccer match.

Within a fortnight of the murder, the police had arrested a local

notable, Pierre Leroy. Leroy was a notary public who specialized in

real estate transactions and was a prominent member of the local Ro-

tary Club. There was considerable circumstantial evidence linking the

suspect to the crime. Earlier in the day, Leroy’s white Peugeot had

been observed near the crime scene. Brigitte’s body had been found

in a field adjacent to the villa of Leroy’s fiancée, Monique Mayeur.

Shortly before her disappearance, Brigitte had been seen talking to

a man in a turtleneck sweater. Leroy had been sporting a turtleneck

that day. That night, Leroy’s mother had washed his clothes by hand

with ammonia instead of taking them to the dry cleaners as usual.

There was also a telltale fifteen-minute gap in the suspect’s alibi. More-

over, there were rumors that Leroy had been a prodigious consumer

26 c h a p t e r 1

of pornography. Recently, he had been involved in a number of shady

real estate transactions.

Nevertheless, in lieu of more concrete findings explicitly linking Le-

roy to the victim or the murder scene, the examining magistrate realized

he had a relatively weak case. Thus, shortly after he was arrested, Leroy

was released. Once again he walked the streets of Bruay-en- Artois a

free man.

The Maoists wished to spare Brigitte a second death—this time, at the

hands of a class-based judiciary system—by ensuring that her murderer

was brought to justice. To the brain trust of the pro-Chinese Gauche

prolétarienne, Leroy’s guilt was never in doubt. His release was a typical

instance of the fecklessness of bourgeois justice. The plotline was simple,

one that the Maoists had observed time and again: a bourgeois kills a

member of the working class, and no charges are pressed. The culprit is

released with impunity. For the Maoists, although there were some dis-

senting voices, Leroy’s guilt was a foregone conclusion. As a bourgeois,

he was objectively guilty. His crime was merely a logical extension of the

everyday injustice members of the working classes endured at the hands

of their bourgeois tormentors. (“First they kill us at the bottom of the

mines; now they kill and mutilate our children,” lamented the miners

the fact that in recent years several women in the same region—all of

humble origin—had been murdered in similar fashion. In each case,

although the women had not been raped, their torsos had been muti-

lated. The police felt seemingly little pressure to apprehend the culprit.

In each instance, insinuations surfaced implying that the victims were

“loose women”—a widespread assumption in the region about miners’

daughters —hence, intrinsically blameworthy. Ironically, the Maoists

themselves were nearly all normaliens—students of the elite Parisian

Ecole normale supérieure. As such, their backgrounds were preponder-

antly upper middle class. Were they, then, seeking to expiate their own

guilt as sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie? Who could doubt it?

1 Philippe Gavi, “Bruay-en-Artois: Seul un bourgeois aurait pu faire ça?” Les Temps

Modernes 312–13 ( July–August 1972): 196.

s h o w d o w n a t b r u a y - e n - a r t o i s 27

The Maoist daily La Cause du Peuple, with Jean-Paul Sartre as its tit-

ular editor, sprang into action to defend Brigitte’s honor as well as that

youthful gauchistes, or leftists, remained wedded to a Manichaean op-

position between “bourgeois” and “proletarian” that bore only a vague

resemblance to the realities of contemporary French society. In postwar

France, the working class, whose revolutionary potential Marx had

glorified, had ceased to be a dominant political and economic force. It

had been largely replaced by “salaried employees” (salariés), composed

of white-collar workers and middle managers (cadres). The Maoists’

conception of the proletariat was a highly idealized image inspired in

part by Louis Althusser’s books and seminars.

At one point, the court inexplicably issued a search warrant for the

Dewevre family home. A group of irate miners promptly invaded Le-

roy’s garden, demanding justice and fulminating verbal threats. They

one Brigitte had endured would be suitable. Rocks were hurled at the

Mayeur estate adjacent to the crime scene. A few days later, a group of

miners’ wives directly petitioned the examining magistrate, Henri Pas-

cal: “We speak from the bottom of our hearts as mothers. Brigitte was

our child. The bourgeoisie treat our children like chattel. If they want

to have a good time, they do with our children what they want.”2 Ulti-

mately, the French Supreme Court of Appeal (Cour de cassation) found

2 Ibid., 188.

28 c h a p t e r 1

Judge Pascal biased against Leroy and, to the outrage of local residents,

A commemorative plaque was placed near the empty lot where Bri-

gitte’s body had been found. Beside it lay an appeal to the townspeople

to form an independent committee for truth and justice. A brainchild

of the Maoists, the committee was intended to keep pressure on the ex-

amining magistrate and to ensure that Brigitte’s murderer was brought

to justice. The GP activists acted as catalysts. In keeping with the Mao-

ist doctrine of the “mass line,” according to which truth resides with

the people, they shunned an active leadership role. Town elders, siding

with Leroy, with whom many had business dealings, actively sought

to disrupt the committee’s activities. One miner’s daughter told of be-

ing taken into custody while distributing leaflets and detained for two

hours at a local police station. “They threatened to send us to the Dis-

trict Court in Béthune [a neighboring town],” she explained. “The

police commissioner told us that we did not have the right to distribute

such literature.”3

The Maoists had already planted several militants in the area, who

jockeyed with the pro-Communist trade union, the CGT (Confédéra-

tion générale du travail), to win over working-class loyalties. In the

Maoists’ view, manifestations of working-class rage were an unequivo-

cally positive development. It meant that the miners had surmounted

six working-class militants who had thrown a Molotov cocktail at the

mining company’s offices. In December Sartre arrived to convene a

popular tribunal in order to apply public pressure with an eye toward

bringing those responsible for the explosion to justice. Medical experts

3 Ibid., 190.

s h o w d o w n a t b r u a y - e n - a r t o i s 29

testified concerning the condition of advanced silicosis, or black lung

disease, affecting the deceased.

lières, guilty of murder for having placed profits ahead of worker safety.

Sartre, employing the idiom of Hegelian-Marxism, argued that the

Houllières directorship “intentionally chose output over safety, which

is to say, the production of things over people’s lives.”4 The French ju-

diciary remained unmoved, and no one was ever indicted for the ca-

tastrophe. At Lens, Sartre’s one modest achievement was to secure the

the merits of popular justice in Sartre’s Les temps modernes. For the stu-

just? Student radicals hoped that third-world radicalism would inject

meaning and substance into an otherwise moribund global revolution-

ary project. A casual glance at the Kremlin’s ossified, septuagenarian

leader ship helped explain this desperate political wager.

In the debate with Foucault, Victor argued that because of the exist-

ing court system’s manifest class biases, the Left needed to establish its

own revolutionary people’s tribunals. He had fully imbibed the “popu-

list” spirit of China’s Cultural Revolution: its mistrust of experts and

bureaucrats (“better Red, than expert” had been a popular slogan), its

Rousseauian veneration of the popular will. Victor excelled at pushing

radicalism to its absolute limits. It was this capacity that had won him

tribunals favored by Victor, Sartre, and other GP activists. Such or-

days of the French Revolution: the September massacres of 1792, when

hundreds of helpless prisoners were put to death for fear that, with

Now my hypothesis is not so much that the court is the natural

is to ensnare it, to control it and to strangle it, by re-inscribing it

lutionary struggle—at least an approximation to an act of popular

justice; a response to oppression which was strategically useful and

politically necessary?5

In Foucault’s eyes, spontaneous mass action possessed the added advan-

tage of transcending the “bourgeois” division of labor between judge

and executioner. Henceforth, the masses would assume both functions.

In terms of the logic of revolutionary one-upmanship, Foucault won

flanked. He could hardly believe his ears and retreated in shock.

Back in Bruay, journalists throughout France descended upon the de-

pressed little mining town, which could have served as the setting for

Zola’s Germinal. A miner’s life expectancy was short. Black lung disease

was widespread, and the living conditions squalid. In 1906 a mine col-

lapse at a nearby pit had cost 1,101 lives. Miners told gruesome stories

of coworkers who had been trapped in cave-ins. One was decapitated.

The bosses demanded that the miners keep working rather than pay

their respects to the deceased. Many of the accidents in question were

avoidable, the result of placing profits above worker safety. As one miner

explained: “In the mines, only one thing counts: your ability to work

and the state of your health. You’re in a situation where the older you

become, the less you earn. When your health deteriorates and you lose

the ability to work, you’re placed at the bottom of the scale. You can

make 70 francs a day for ten years and then 30–40 for the next twenty.”6

In the eyes of the press it was Leroy’s arrest rather than Brigitte’s

murder that was the real scandal. The Journal de Dimanche claimed it was

inconceivable that someone of Leroy’s educational background and so-

cial standing could have committed so heinous a crime. Even Le Monde

glossed over the Bruay residents’ outrage over Brigitte Dewevre’s tragic

demise. For France’s newspaper of record, the injustices of class were

5 Foucault and Victor, “On Popular Justice: A Dialogue with the Maoists,” in

Power/Knowledge, 1–2.

6 Gavi, “Bruay-en-Artois,” 118.

32 c h a p t e r 1

inconsequential. Instead, Brigitte’s murder was trivialized as a fait divers,

a “human interest story.”

Outraged by Leroy’s abrupt release, the Maoists decided to con-

vene an independent truth and justice commission. The GP leader-

ship, along with fellow travelers such as Sartre and Foucault—known

as “democrats,” since despite their “pro-Chinese” sympathies, they

stopped short of becoming full-fledged Maoists—traveled to Bruay in

full force. If the French justice system, in collusion with the local bour-

geoisie, failed to mete out just retribution for Brigitte’s brutal slaying,

GP activists would ensure that the people’s will was carried out.

The GP inclination toward militancy had been stoked by the Feb-

ruary slaying of a young Maoist, Pierre Overney, at a Renault factory

on the outskirts of Paris. Weeks earlier, factory officials had uncovered

several Maoist militants who had infiltrated the plant for organizing

purposes. Once they were discovered, the undercover Maoists were

ensued. The Maoists outfitted themselves in riot gear. Victor himself

Overney’s death, at the tender age of twenty-three, precipitated a

major crisis among the Maoists. For years, in keeping with their self-

understanding as militants, they had glorified the virtues of revolu-

tionary violence. This ethos of uncompromising revolutionism in part

distinguished the Maoists from the reformist orientation of the French

Communists (not to mention the openly reformist Socialists) who, since

the Liberation, had enjoyed a comfortable niche in the French electoral

system. But with Overney’s senseless murder, the Maoists were forced

to face up to the political implications of their own rhetorical excess.

They realized that their own doctrine of violent class confrontation

was indirectly responsible for the young worker’s senseless death. Many

Gauche prolétarienne activists were justly horrified when they were

forced to confront directly the sanguinary repercussions of their own

political radicalism. According to some reports, the intrepid Victor was

observed leaving the Renault factory scene convulsed with tears.

Several days later, Overney’s corpse was interred at the Père Lachaise

cemetery. Remarkably, a cortege of two hundred thousand mourners

ing the filming of Jean-Luc Godard’s ode to the recent spate of French

factory occupations, Tout va bien.) There could be no mistaking the fact

not burying Pierre Overney; they are burying gauchisme.”7

In retaliation for Overney’s killing, the Gauche prolétarienne’s “mil-

itary wing,” the so-called Nouvelle résistance populaire (NRP), kid-

napped the Renault plant foreman, Robert Nogrette, only to release

him two days later, unharmed.8 Until then, the Maoists were perceived

as victims of government repression and had enjoyed broad popular

support. However, the decision to abduct Nogrette backfired egre-

giously. The Maoist “action” was roundly condemned by the “bour-

geois” press but also by other gauchistes.

The political mood in France had perceptibly changed. The pub-

lic’s tolerance for demonstrative acts of violence was negligible. It had

observed the consequences of left-wing terrorism in the neighboring

lands of Italy and Germany and found them wholly distasteful.9

Later on, the Maoists claimed that the weapons they had used during

the Nogrette abduction had not been loaded. A similar attraction and

revulsion vis-à-vis the lure of revolutionary violence would character-

ize Maoist militancy throughout all its phases. That the term “résis-

tance” figured in the group’s name was hardly an accident. It bespoke

the gauchiste conviction that under de Gaulle’s rule (and, as of 1971,

under Pompidou’s), the French were living under a right-wing dicta-

torship. According to the Far-Left political optic, France was an “oc-

cupied” country that needed to be “liberated.”

7 Althusser, L’avenir dure longtemps, 197.

8 See the fictionalized account of the Maoist Popular Resistance movement by

Rolin, Paper Tiger.

9 For more on the relationship between leftism and terrorism, see Sommier, Vio-

lence politique.

34 c h a p t e r 1

Coming on the heels of Pierre Overney’s death, for French gauch-

isme the showdown at Bruay-en-Artois represented a point of no

return. Memories of the unprecedented revolutionary upsurge that

was May 1968 were rapidly receding. A period of political normalcy

had set in. Many Gauche prolétarienne activists had begun to doubt

whether they were still living in a revolutionary age. Moreover,

several prominent Maoists—among them, the philosopher André

Glucksmann—had serious doubts concerning Leroy’s guilt. They felt

that, by prejudging him, their comrades had proceeded rashly and

irresponsibly.

How would the Maoists act in the event they adjudged Leroy guilty?

Would they cross the line to political murder, or terror, as their oppo-

site numbers in Germany and Italy had already done?

Victor, channeling Saint-Just, observed that under the circumstances

revolutionary violence was entirely justified. As he commented in the

pages of La Cause du Peuple:

It is necessary to pose the question: if Leroy is set free, would the

population be justified in seizing him? We respond: Yes! In order

to reverse the authority of the bourgeoisie, the humiliated popu-

lation would be right to institute a brief period of terror and to strike

at a handful of contemptible, hateful individuals. . . . A principle of

“popular” justice that would suppress that natural course of justice

on the part of the population would be a principle of oppression

that would reproduce the principle of all the judiciary apparatuses

based on exploitation. . . . For us, class hatred is creative. It is the

necessary point of departure.10

Surprisingly, one of the “democrats” who argued vigorously for re-

straint was Sartre. On the one hand, Sartre wholeheartedly endorsed

the Bruay miners’ involvement in the struggle to determine Leroy’s

guilt or innocence. Their activism proved that they refused to be

duped by the system, that class consciousness was alive and well. On

the other hand, Sartre strenuously objected to the inculpatory tone of

10 Victor, La Cause du Peuple, May 17, 1972; emphasis added.

s h o w d o w n a t b r u a y - e n - a r t o i s 35

the Cause du Peuple articles. In “Lynching or Popular Justice?” he ex-

pressed his concern that the miners’ visceral class hatred would trump

the presumption of innocence.11 After all, the evidence for Leroy’s guilt

remained sketchy. Moreover, as Sartre pointed out, lynching was a

reactionary form of justice, a species of mob violence that had been

popularized in the American South. As such, it was hardly a model

for committed leftists to emulate. Sartre also claimed that it would be

a tragic error to allow the dictates of class belonging to determine an

individual’s fate. Thereby, he remained true to his later philosophical

mission: reconciling existentialism’s focus on individual freedom with

Marxism’s emphasis on the dynamics of history and class struggle. In

Nevertheless, led by Victor, the Maoists remained immovable. Re-

plying to Sartre in the same issue of La Cause du Peuple, they accused

him of driving a wedge between the bourgeoisie as a class and Leroy

the individual. Thereby, the editors insinuated that by defending Leroy

and the norms of due process, Sartre’s analysis, like his philosophy in

general, remained beholden to an ethos of “petty bourgeois individual-

ism.” They contended that Sartre had lost sight of the “class character”

of the Leroy affair. The editors claimed that in the mind of the average

Bruay resident, the “Leroy gang” and the “bourgeoisie” had become

synonymous.

But was class justice in the name of the downtrodden genuinely

preferable to bourgeois class justice? The lessons of history associ-

ated with the names of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot—who, during the

1950s, learned the Marxist catechism at the finest Parisian universities

— suggested otherwise. One observer correctly noted: “What type

of political power will this revolution produce if it succeeds in im-

posing a ‘Communist catechism’ that . . . proves conducive to an op-

pressive authoritarianism in its will to extirpate laziness, ‘perversity,’

and marginality? The perfect society would be that of honest families,

good workers, devoted comrades, heroic résistants, courageous women,

11 Sartre, “Lynchage ou justice populaire,” La Cause du Peuple, May 17, 1972, 12.

36 c h a p t e r 1

[and] noble laborers.”12 The intemperate leftists risked substituting the

Communist definition of “normalcy” for bourgeois “normalcy.” The

resultant “right-thinking” individuals would seem little more than pale

tenets of dialectical materialism with the “joyful wisdom” (Nietzsche)

sought by the counterculture.

Such dilemmas would impel a number of prominent GP stalwarts

to become staunch human rights advocates. They had experienced the

excesses of leftism firsthand and recoiled in horror at what they had

seen. One could say that the ethos of droit-de-l’hommisme that flourished

during the 1970s and 1980s was one of the primary, if unintended,

consequences of the gauchiste experience.

After Judge Pascal was removed from the case, the new judge failed

to convene a grand jury to review the evidence, and Leroy never stood

trial for Brigitte’s slaying. Sadly, to this day, her death remains an un-

solved crime, and her murderer has never been found.

Bruay-en-Artois had turned into a mini-laboratory of left-wing po-

litical correctness. Soon, the fault lines of leftism stood fully exposed,

and the delusions of gauchisme began to unravel. Remaining faithful

to the Maoist doctrine of the “mass line,” the GP leadership held that

truth lay with the masses. In opposition to Sartre, they insisted that

were popular justice exposed to the formal hindrances of rules and

procedures, the “natural movement of justice on the part of the popula-

tion” would be fatally impeded. As a result, a formal judicial apparatus

“external to the masses” would gain the upper hand.13

Since Foucault, like Sartre, was a prominent Maoist sympathizer, he

was numbered among the so-called democrats, or well-disposed fellow

travelers. Foucault’s attitude toward the Bruay-en-Artois affair was rife

with ambivalence. On the one hand, he was convinced that Leroy was

guilty. On the other hand, the situation’s political explosiveness made

12 Gavi, “Bruay-en-Artois,” 200.

13 Victor, La Cause du Peuple, May 17, 1972.

s h o w d o w n a t b r u a y - e n - a r t o i s 37

him distinctly uncomfortable. He therefore resigned himself to the role

Although in the debate with Victor, Foucault had posed as an ad-

vocate of popular justice, in Bruay, having observed the phenomenon

from up close, he was revolted by what he saw. In his view, the Bruay

protests risked degenerating at any moment into the crudest form of

unthinking mob violence. Thus, despite his theoretical attraction to

the September massacres, ultimately Foucault realized that this was not

a political model to be emulated or encouraged. Instead, he came to

view the potential for unmediated popular violence he had witnessed

as distinctly fascistic. He began to wonder: was not the gauchiste in-

ics of totalitarianism long suggested that left- and right-wing dicta-

formulated his thoughts on these challenging political themes. As he

one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant? How do we rid our

speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? How do

we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior?”15 Here was

an authoritarian temptation from which left-wing militants were by no

means immune.

At Bruay a growing contingent of Maoists suddenly refused to fol-

low Victor’s lead. In essence, Victor was confronted with a palace

revolution. Among the prominent defectors were André Glucksmann,

Christian Jambet, and Cause du Peuple editor Jean-Pierre Le Dantec.

They rejected the claim that the Leroy affair was the turning point

in working-class history that Victor and his allies had made it out

to be. Victor felt that, at Bruay, his puritanical ideological line had

been undermined by Maoism’s “libertarian” current. Shortly after the

May 1968 uprising, French Maoism had split into two groups: a more

14 For Foucault’s views, see Claude Mauriac, Une certaine rage (Paris: Laffont, 1977),

254. See also Hamon and Rotman, Génération 2:428–39.

15 Foucault’s preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, ix.

38 c h a p t e r 1

dogmatic, neo-Leninist, orthodox wing, represented by Victor and the

Gauche prolétarienne, and a “Dionysian” current that focused on the

“politics of everyday life”: women’s liberation, homosexual identity,

and experimentation with alternative lifestyles. In retrospect, Victor

viewed the crisis at Bruay as the revenge of French Maoism’s so-called

libidinal wing.

For years the Maoists strove to construct an alternative political

reality to compensate for the paucity of creditable domestic political

choices. In this way, the GP leadership had fabricated a delusory, es-

chatological image of the proletariat as the “solution to the riddle of

history” (Marx). Amid the hysteria and confusion of Bruay-en-Artois,

such delusions proved unsustainable.