Clément
Duprest, the hero of Didier Daeninckx's new novel, reminds us of
the description Hannah Arendt gives of the Nazi criminal in her work
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality
of Evil ( Eichmann in Jerusalem: Ein Bericht von der Banalität
des Bösen, Munich, 1964). For as much as Duprest lends
himself to historical analysis, he is rather ill-suited to the role
of literary figure. His exemplary career as an official of the police
machine, persecutor of Communists and Jews, which he begins under
the Vichy regime, continues under the Republic, and brings to an
end in 1981 due to his age, is a tour de force through
20 th century history, the likes of which had thus far only been
attempted by Jean-Patrick Manchette in La Princesse
du sang (Paris,
1996).
Duprest is steadfastly dull and impassive,
with one exception: when he throws away his son's birthday present,
a pair of Levi-Strauss jeans, shouting at the boy and hitting his
wife because she bought them. Otherwise he leads a dreary little
middle-class life in a lacklustre relationship and carries out,
without any emotion, his role as persecutor. Around him, the world
changes, but Duprest remains the same. In contrast to other novels
by Daeninckx, readers learn nothing here that has not already been
revealed by historiography. The novel recounts known facts, although
there are connections with Meutres pour mémoire /
Murder in memoriam (1984) where Daeninckx first described the massacre
of hundreds of Algerians on October 17 th 1961 and in which he unmasked
the primary culprit, Maurice Papon, a collaborationist and friend
of François Mitterrand.
The most intense passages are those
which describe the period around the Algerian War of Independence
and decolonisation. Particularly the passage in which Daeninckx
describes the music club in the oriental milieux Duprest has under
surveillance: “A man with feverish eyes
had just emerged from behind the scenes in the restaurant's kitchen
and slid into place in the middle of the orchestra. […] Emotions
were at their peak, and, thanks to their bulging pockets, the inspector
immediately spotted the four Algerians responsible for ensuring the
star's safety. Whereas he had the impression that he had been listening
to the same tunes over and over again since the beginning of the
evening, he could tell from the audience's reaction that the musician's
personality gave them an incomparable solemnity. A kind of oriental-style Marseillaise.
It was all about fighters keeping watch, the resistance, memory,
victory over the French yoke, there, in the heart of Paris, not two
feet from the Column on the place de la Bastille.” (from page 253)
The star is Farid Ali, born in Algeria in 1919, a member the group
of FLN artists after having fought in the Spanish Civil War.
The reader is amused by references to famous figures from French
cultural life and the description of the ways in which Duprest spies
on them. Yves Montand's career is recounted in this way, from his
first appearances on stage to his marriage to Simone Signoret, via
his support for the Communist Party. Daeninckx is thus able to establish,
through a character, another form of continuity which benefits his
plot.
Daeninckx describes with precision the historical chronology of
France since 1942, but he goes from one event to the next, frequently
just skimming the surface. There is no place in this chronology for
possible sources of intrigue, like the story of photo booths whose
popularity was booming under the Vichy regime with the persecution
of Jews and Communists, or disagreements within the Algerian liberation
movement or anticolonialist movements in general.
In L'Ame au poing (Paris,
2004), a novel about FTP-MOI, the Jewish group within the Communist
resistance, Patrick Rotman recounts in far more precise fashion
the persecution of Jews in occupied Paris. He also depicts a policeman
who, when the Cold War breaks out, retrieves his file from the
Vichy years and, on top of that, receives the Cross of the Legion
of Honour for his involvement with the resistance movement. But
nobody has succeeded in describing the last days of the Occupation
of Paris better than Dominique Manotti in Les
Corps noirs (Paris, 2004) where she recounts the
activities of the French Gestapo. Daeninckx himself has also written
about the Algerian conflict in a more exciting manner, and Maurice
Attia's Alger la Noire – published this year by Babel Noir
and a summary of which features in this issue of Europolar – gives
us a better idea of what life was like in a country terrorised by
the OAS than does Daeninckx's brief synopsis. By seeking to evoke
so many events, Daeninckx, in the end, describes hardly any of them.
Completely fixated on the personality of his negative hero, he accords
him no evolution. And a reader who is not well-versed in history will
scarcely be able to follow the transformations of French society. However,
Daeninckx does nevertheless succeed in painting a macabre and fascinating
picture, where we see Duprest build his career without being disturbed,
creating and controlling files with meticulous precision, files in
which his surveillance activities are evident, regardless of the French
political regime in place.
