Interview of Frédéric H. Fajardie

Elfriede Müller
Translation French to English by Steve Novak

• 28.01.04 •

 

Elfriede Müller: When did you start to write and for what reason?

Frédéric Fajardie: I started to write my first short story around 65 because I always loved to write, I always wrote a personal journal. As a kid I was always a bit lost because I had three sisters, it became better later but when I was a kid I didn’t speak very much with them. Therefore I took refuge in dreams. And when dreams meant the imaginary, which was very developped in me since I had been told a lot of stories and thus was used to write and was always first in French class, writing became the only thing I knew how to do. Both style and the imaginary prepare you well to be a writer. But at the time I lived it all through the anguish of adolescence.

 

E. M: Was the ‘missed’ rebellion of 68 your motivation or reason why you decided to write noir novels?

F. F: No, not directly. I was always writing, I did some novels before that, not noir ones. I was a big reader, above all of American writers, Goodis, Chandler and Mc Coy. I was not into writing noir novels but my books got always refused by publishers with critiques. They rather liked my style which was pretty new for the time… They said ‘there you really speak like those on the dole…’ and ‘ there you swich modes from sadness to happy very abruptly’. I explained that it was on purpose, that for me mode switches were very important. You can both love somebody and laugh in a cementery. I understood in a flash that the noir novel was a genre that wasn’t codified. There weren’t even literary critics in French papers, there were no specialized columns, it was total freedom. And I wasn’t even conscious of it because before me there was only Manchette and Manchette stood in disgust about 68 and the left. We didn’t get along Manchette and I. And there was Vautrin who was a bit of a social democrat. And I was the first coming who had been involved in 68 and in leftist organizations. I was the first one published with the double stamp : 68 and the left. Five years later there were some others. And in the first critiques of my novels there were jabs like : « Here he comes, with May 68 » . I didn’t realize it, since I was having a lot of fun, for example with Tueurs de flics. We set up the genre markers for the next 25 years. I contributed and some others came behind.We created and we codified too, without really realizing it. Crime novels which were very reactionary, very extreme right, changed with Manchette, with Vautrin, with me ; it flipped over ideoligically. And now it’s almost too much. So, they’re all agaisnt Le Pen, but it’s not enough just to be agaisnt Le Pen.

 

E. M: What did you do in May 68 ?

F. F: I was inorganized. I was a bit of a maoist already and in the Basic Vietnam Comitees but as soon as May 3rd I did it all with my friends and it wasn’t about organization. We would go out evey night and hit it out with cops more and more. But there was also an action comitee : we would put up posters, distribute leaflets, talk with people about our ideas, etc… But physically it was every night like a drug : face-off with the cops. And we thought that as long as there were riots every night they wouldn’t dare to reoccupy the Sorbonne, the Odeon theatre, everything that we had occupied. We thought that since they were violent and if they decided to bump us out of the Sorbonne, there would be a massacre. It was the idea we had : we had to maintain the balance of forces. And the problem was that sometimes we were no more than 400 to 500 fighting in the streets of Paris. And it was almost exclusively young workers. May 68 lasted because there was a balance of forces at night, a climate of insurrection. Because of that things lasted in Paris and these were not leftists or intellectuals, it was young workers that were even called louts. One minister said that we were rats.

 

E. M: What’s left of May 68 today?

F. F: Me and individual people, men, women and a myth. Sadly enough May 68 was railroaded by merchants/business, by traitors, by all the people who sided with social democrats, who had a carreer in journalism or elsewhere. We are very few in the literary world, to have kept alive the spirit of that time. But there are lots more within teachers, social workers, people like that, people who are not in the limelight. The elites are not representative of this authentic current, nonetheless made up quite a bit of what the extreme left is, and made up with people who tried to change the world. These people are much more represented in French society than in the media.You pay very dearly because often you send back to the traitors a very negative image of themselves, because you are showing that there was an alternative, that one was not obliged to collaborate with the system.You could be a writer, have readers, even have a well known name and yet keep your ideas. Somehow you pay because you were good.

 

E. M: Is writing a political practice for you or a rest from politics?

F. F: It’s mixed. It’s clear that at the start was the desire to pursue militant work. Tueurs de flics is already an anti-facistic book, because of a tough scene with facists at one time. Le Pen was at .2% at the time. I always had that in mind. Padovani is a cop a bit to the extreme left. He wants to blow up the system from the inside. So there was a militant side to my endeavour and there was also a true pleasure of writing. It’s my life a little bit. My problem is to find a right balance between the books that you always write alone and true life which means your family, your friends, people, militant political action, writing workshops, chance meetings…One has to find an equilibrium. There was a period in my life, about 15 years ago, during which I was too much in my office, I didn’t go out enough. Now, my tendency is to do too much.

 

E. M: What role have the 80’s in your novels and in French society?

F. F: Shitty years. The 80’s were worse than the 90’s. Years without hope. Years only filled with lottsa dough, individual success, all against all. That’s what capitalism is and that’s what Mitterand took up. Not only did they betray but they also perpetrated a deep psychological job to wall in people in solitude. It is nonetheless a capitalist ploy to win the game. Jack Lang developped a culture of representation, but with nothing at the base, in neighborhoods. It is in fact during the left in power that all the troubles in big cities suburbs came up. Nothing was done there.

 

E. M: Do you see some links between the 80’s and 68?

F. F: The 80’s are exactly the contrary of 68. There was a go-forward/offensive action by the powers that ended up shortcircuiting us, shutting us out. We were not structured, all the militant organizations were in a crisis since the end of the 70’s. Television, advertising, cinema, journalism…It was all a quasi-negation of what had happened in 68. Take TV channels like TF1 or France 2 and there was a great negation of the big popular movements which for me betrays the powers’ willingness to act. They wanted to eradicate the memory of the people.

 

E. M: In fact what is the role of history in literature? Which events do you deal with and what determines your choice?

F. F: The 20th is more my century than the 21st.. The big explanation from 1939 to 1945, is just a parenthesis. Everything before leads to this conflict and everything after is post-positioning. The rise of facisms, of anti-semitism, of stalinism, the Spanish war, etc…It’s a party with three guests. You have fascism, stalinism and the democracies as the trio of lovers. Afterwards people don’t have the time to position themselves and to eliminate the sequels. In 70, 72 I believed in all sincerity that fascism had ended. I really believed it. We didn’t understand that with each generation you got to set the table all over again. You got to start over with each generation. It was an error that I made. The focus of the century is that face-off with the three contenders. When you see that Le Pen gets 20% of the electorate in France you just cannot say that the Second World War is a thing of the past. All my life I thought that we didn’t do our job with respect to Vichy. Guys like Papon, Bousquet, all the collaborators. The job of history wasn’t well done. In general it is the bourgeoisie who collaborated. The workers were, on the whole, either deported to Germany for forced labor or went to the resistance. What gave its strength to the resistance was really the labor movement. One can slow down the truth in history as in literature but sooner or later it comes forward and can burst out with a lot more violence. If those things had been said and written in the 50’s there wouldn’t have been this extremely violent offensive upon Vichy. Things would have been explained. We wouldn’t have gone back, we would be somewhere else. And now they start to look at Algeria and at Indochina : it’s quite a shame what we did in Indochina. They never speak of the cities bombed by the French.

 

E. M: Do you see yourself as an historian?

F. F: It’s my education, I’m a novelist, an historian. See for example Un pont sur la Loire, the nazis are there, but it is not very important, there are people who resisted and they were shot in the back, there are Senegalese, who fought in French uniform for the second time, and nothing was done for them. I wrote this book when I discovered that the retirement benefits for an old Senegalese soldier were 20% of those of a French soldier. They gave their blood like the others and even more than the others because the nazis didn’t like them because of the Ruhr occupation and made them pay dearly. 20% of the benefits of someone who maybe spent the war in an office. On the whole, some were not at the front. The Senegalese were sent to the two wars. So writing was like repairing an injustice and at the same time it is always good to tell the truth. Nothing is lost when telling the truth. We are revolutionaries.

 

E. M: Do you believe that history can be written into novels?

F. F: Writers contribute. Hugo for example made a contribution. When I speak about a historical eventas a novelist, I would very much like that afterwards people get into purely historical books. I spoke about the Spanish Civil War in a certain way. Hemingway was there but just didn’t get it. Orwell was there. I though that in France there were things to do and that’s why I wrote Une charrette pleine d'étoiles. I thought that was missing.

 

E. M: Is there a connection between your historical themes and the marker that 68 represents?

F. F: Yes, I think that May 68 determines my choices. If I was part of the Proletarian Left (Gauche Prolétarienne) group it is because it was an extremely violent group and that it kept alive somehow the spirit of May 68. And lots of people got into the PL because it had bitten into the young workers a lot better than the trotskyists had. The language of La Cause du peuple was specific with its tone, its violence – and I’m not trying to defend it ideologically - and those two attributes gave a definite appeal to the PL. We would take the picture of the Minister of the Interior (Home Secretary in UK), and we would place a target on it and stamp it with « To be Shot ! » . Trotskyists never did anything like that. We spoke to people in active rebellion. What worked for me worked for others. It was the only violent insurrectional movement. It’s only after that I read Mao and all the rest. It was totally mythical. A whole world stood in front of that. A permanent revolution was happening – a trotskyist theme nonetheless. Mao had said that class struggle went on after the revolution which the PC (Communist Party) didn’t say. It was trully an internationalist movement. China was financially backing all guerillas in the world. There was an esthetic dimension for me that went like this : it thought that everything I saw about the USSR was in black & white and that all the demonstrations in China were in colour, wide screen and with all the red flags, This vision was wrong because there was colour everywhere but it was a question of generation.

 

E. M: Does May 68 acts as a filter through which one looks at past events ? A filter which – in a certain way – shapes that look?

F. F: Yes in a certain way but there is also my family background. I wasn’t born anywhere and at a random time. I was born right in the middle of the Vietnam war. My parents were anti-facists, my father came from the bourgeoisie and my mother from working class. Me too I’m socially a ‘mixed blood’. When you are a writer that’s good because you have two ways of looking at things.

 

E. M: In your novels, how important is the individual subject as opposed to collective ones?

F. F: I am very collective for everything political, but on the persoanl level I am very individualistic. I don’t go too much either in fairs/celebrations or in places where everyone follows a flag, I go the other way. When it comes to love I’m very individualistic. I tend to be a bit afraid by people but politically I’m still for socialism, collective things, soviets.

In your novels there are always individuals that are very strong, very much loners who are not necessarily part of a collective.
Yes, one writes novels a bit as one’s own image. I think that at a certain time you make your own choices. Look at the pathetic disaray among intellectuals and workers at the time of the Germano-Soviet pact. In France it was a catastrophe : they were all anti-nazis, anti-facists and from one day to the next Hitler became a friend and you couldn’t shoot on the now new comrades from the Wehrmach.

 

E. M: Do you consider these individuals as carriers of ideas, of hope and of change or are they only witnesses of a bygone era?

F. F: At the start I gave them the value of examples. I wantted to create exemplary characters.. Maybe it was a bit pedagogical. The shape of my novels changed in the 80’s. At the start I made people laugh a lot less. Maybe I was rather schematic. I was saying : look at that guy, he’s really great, there is no place for him in this rotten society, therefore he’s going to die. When a great despair rolls over in 80, 81 to 87 one could not further demoralize people who were already beaten by life. So you have to find more optimistic endings. That’s why there is a light of hope at the end of my books from that era. The characters are also symbolic, are also exemplary people a bit, and could be like the models that one would wish to be.

 

E. M: Since 83 the success of the Front National at the polls and in life has been the topic of many crime novels. Do yoou think that this kind of literature encapsulates the means to fight agaisnt the rise of facism?

F. F: I think that one should never be too much of a borish pain in the ass. We are novelists first, we tell stories. One needs to bring about politics a bit more discreetly. I try to create in my books situations in which there are contradictions. It is the resolution of these contradictions that allows people to go forward. Often I don’t explain what needs to be done. I try to show complex situations and then say : « now, you get out of this shit ». I believe a lot in the power of tndividual work otherwise you fall in the stalinian scheme where you explain everything to people, what they need to think, like with this dogmatic side that was present in all the leftist ideas. You must give people instruments so that they understand, and reach positions by themselves. This is the exemplary side of novels.

 

E. M: Do you reach for a particular audience?

F. F: I am read by a disconcerting group of people, men, women, rich ones and poor ones, workers, professors, bourgeois, street sweepers. Frankly, I don’t know anymore. The more we go, the more I am very perplexed by the diversity of my audience. Myself, I would like to write for sensitive, fragile, intelligent and non-racist people.

 

E. M: Is the chosen literary form linked to the audience?

F. F: Yes, I don’t write noir novels as I write Un homme en harmonie which is much more literary. I think history commands style. Of course there is a permanance of my own style in all my books which can be picked out, and I heard « Fajardie, one can pick him out » a hundred times. This proves that I have a personal style, but according to which type of novel I write, I take this or that tone. In Les Foulards rouges the language is very pure, very 17th century. But there are a lot of things that come from the American noir novel, from my own experience. There is always a need for the personal stamp of the author, it is important and inevitable. But one should also have the subtlety to tell yourself : I want to be read by those people. There are some constants. For example I hate it if my readers need a dictionary. There are some writers who take pleasure in putting some hypercomplicated words. I think it is a form of contempt. When you have clear thoughts you tell them clearly.

 

E. M: Manchette said that noir novels went back to a literary form from the 19th century. Do you think this is correct?

F. F: Why the 19th ? You find the same style – the style of Balzac, Zola and others – during the 30’s. Barbusse, etc. I rather think that it is a continuation of polpular literature since Jules Vallès. I don’t believe there was a break. There is a continuity even if they don’t write like Jules Vallès. But the filiation is there. Further, it goes through Eugène Sue . It’s a style that has evolved but which comes from the 19th. Yet in the 18th you had progressive authors. The question is who speaks. In my life I read 3 times Mémoires d'outretombe by Chateaubriand, it is magnificent, there is a sensibility, it is pre-romantic. But, for a lot of people, Eugène Sue, or Zola, were much more accessible. But sometimes Zola when he speaks about people is at the limit of reactionism and biological characterisation. But even in the labor movement of the time, there were lots of asonine things said about that.

 

E. M: Do noir novels belong to a leftist culture since the 70’s?

F. F: Well, it depends. Above all I learned not to be so dogmatic since I was a bit too much at the time. You have to judge individuals through what they do. I think it’s a good side of roman noir because people are judged by what they do. What we need to avoid, what wrongs the noir novel, it is to write tracts/pamphlets instead of novels. A noir novel needs to be escapist literature. If you lose sight of that you become a bore. You can show abject characters and humiliated people, it is better than to simply say that Le Pen is an asshole. You must avoid caricature. We fought hard to prevail but at the same time we are obliged to tell real stories. In my new book Full speed there are many arguments against Sarkozy but there is a real story, Padovani is on three cases and he doesn’t want to let go of any. While speaking about society, about todays liberalism, you can be political, have a really lively style and be funny. If you can do all that, it’s great. You shouldn’t write sinister books and take a somber tone while saying : « facism is dangerous », no you shouldn’t do that. You have to win, we are here to please and seduce. You have to convince by the strength of your talent, of your style. The readers must think that if the guy can write like that then his ideas musn’t be that bad. There you have it.