Pierre Goldman, an activist and outlaw haunted by death

2023-10-04 09:30:10
Pierre Goldman arrives at the Amiens Courthouse, for the sixth day of his trial before the Somme Assize Court, May 3, 1976. AFP

There were already weapons and leaflets hidden in the cradle of Pierre Goldman, born on June 22, 1944, in still-occupied Lyon, to two Polish Jewish parents involved in the Communist Resistance of the FTP-MOI, the Francs-tireurs and supporters – Immigrant labor. “I have no memory of that time., Goldman later wrote, constantly haunted by death, but I keep, I know, the mark of this fight and I have wandered to rediscover its flavor. »

At the age of 15, he joined the Communist Youth, and, during the putsch of the generals of Algeria, in April 1961, waited (in vain) for the paratroopers to land, dreamed of fighting, and always said to himself “filled with images of the Spanish War”. He took philosophy courses by correspondence, joined the Union of Communist Students (UEC), and soon the National Union of Students of France (UNEF), where he joined the security service, to escape “to the ignominy of the pure handling of concepts, which constitutes the essential part of our activity”. Above all, it is about confronting an extreme right nostalgic for the wars in Algeria and Vietnam. In 1964, he forced himself to learn karate, because he felt like he had “from a line of humiliated, bruised, murdered rabbis and tailors” which he thinks he is wearing “the indelible and lasting brand”.

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A year later, during a Cuban party, he fell in love with the Caribbean: “I felt languorous at not being in this space, at being deprived of it”writes Pierre Goldman, in Obscure memories of a Polish Jew born in France (Seuil, 1975), a deeply touching book written in prison. “And I wanted to go there and fight, and I felt that death could be sweet to me there. » He spends his life with West Indians, speaks Creole, drinks rum, gets drunk with music and dreams of leaving.

Three confessed robberies

In 1966 he boarded a cargo ship for the United States as a kitchen boy, was arrested in Mexico and deported after a few days in prison. The following year, he was in Cuba and came into contact with a group of Venezuelan resistance fighters, whom he joined in August 1968, for fourteen months, in complete clandestinity. It’s a fail. The group fails “to save the armed struggle from the deadly decline in which it found itself”. Back in Paris, he dreams of urban guerrilla warfare in France; his old friends look at him in silence, “like looking at a madman”.

Goldman no longer has a penny, and is preparing to commit hold-ups, notably on the writer Jean-Edern Hallier, whom he hates, or the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whom he admires, to inform him that his pistol “was not a phallic symbol”. He would like to meet thugs, but he doesn’t know any, and in 1969 he robbed a pharmacy alone to help a friend in need. Two weeks later, another hold-up at Vog, a haute couture store, uncovered and in front of more than ten witnesses.

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