Serge Livrozet is finally dead. Taulard, writer, activist, figure of prisoners’ protest in the 1970s, whose voice and thoughts are heard beyond the walls of remand prisons, banner of the struggles against the prison administration behind “the bars of silence”, the man also represented the margin, the exceptional libertarian margin of those who reject society while refusing to leave it to fight it better. Born in 1939 in Toulon (Var), from a modest background, marked in his childhood by the war, frequenting thugs when his mother, a prostitute, worked at night, apprentice plumber at 13, he was imprisoned in the 1960s for a series of burglaries. “For me, the only way out of my social condition was to open safes and take money where I thought there was too much,” he explained on television in the 1970s. Twenty years later, in front of Mireille Dumas, he specified: “Why didn’t society give me, at that age, the same chances as everyone else? I would never have been a delinquent. That’s why I resented him in society, and that I will always resent him, not for me because I got away with it, but for the others. A war against the structure and its rules, against injustice and social determinism, in the name of all but with limited effects, which he will have waged for a long time. “If I hadn’t revolted, I wouldn’t have done anything with my life.”
“Letting people know what prison is”
The organization of his revolt begins behind bars, where the conditions of detention are unbearable, and where Livrozet is formed intellectually, in particular at the prison of Lille-Loos, where he reads Marx and will then pass the baccalaureate and a diploma in accounting, then to the prison of Melun (Seine-et-Marne), where he asserts rights for prisoners, such as paid leave. In 1971, Livrozet took part in the Prison Information Group, launched by Michel Foucault – with whom Livrozet corresponded –, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Jean-Marie Domenach. The GIP, by giving the floor to prisoners, in particular via forms passed to families, and to the actors of the penitentiary sector, wants to make known the reality of the prison universe, “one of the hidden regions of our social system. […] We propose to make known what prison is: who goes there, why and how we go there, what happens there, […] how do we get out of it and what it is, in our society, to be out of it”, wrote Foucault in a manifesto to which magistrates, lawyers, doctors or journalists subscribe. Grievances arise, prison by prison, documents on the intolerable conditions suffered by prisoners.
“The thing that sickened me the most and hurt me the most was seeing people tied up for a week or more. I can swear under oath that they were not untied to eat.” testifies for example the psychiatrist of the prison of Toul (Meurthe-et-Moselle) in September 1971. This same month, in the United States, the revolts of the prison of Attica make 39 deaths. In France, Claude Buffet and Roger Bontems, after violence against detainees, take three hostages at the Clairvaux power station (Aube) before killing two. The prisons are blind powder kegs, which will explode a few months later.
Livrozet, released in 1972, knighted by Foucault with whom he established a solid friendship, then took over from the GIP, which the author of Keep an eye on and punish dissolved the same year, creating the Prisoners’ Action Committee, a movement made up of prisoners who then demanded the abolition of prison – “prison does not rehabilitate the ‘con’ but drags him into an endless spiral” – and advance political motivations which are then found in the first work of Livrozet, From prison to revolt. Released in 1973, the book gave birth to an original author, a prisoner with documented realism as much as an intellectual of the prisoner’s condition, a thinker of a “philosophy of the people”, as Foucault writes in his preface.
“We met him, he had no specific place”
In the fall of 1972, rue de Bretagne, in Paris, in the smoky room at the end of the corridor of theLiberation press agency, Livrozet is taking part in certain preparatory meetings for the birth of the daily newspaper that you are reading at this very moment. “He was a companion, in the first circle of the newspaper, recalls a former managing editor. We passed him, he had no specific place. I don’t believe he was ever part of the team in the strict sense. He was a big mouth, a very good speaker, who defended many things. The newspaper relays the social struggles as well as the catastrophic situation of the prisons, and Livrozet, by militantly, “supported this project which may be able to defend its own struggles”. Divergences of views and a resolutely anti-establishment anarchist fiber nevertheless keep him away from the core of the team.
On the other hand, his wife Annie, a keyboardist, “an extremely fun girl, powder blonde, who vibrated with passion for him and sang In life, don’t worry», as described by a former journalist, works at Freed and participates in particular in the Convicts section. This is the time when the small hands of the newspaper buy books of stamps so that the prisoners can correspond. “We canteen, we were fully into it”, smiled another, referring to the Prisoners’ Action Committee. Livrozet, a shadowy figure who sometimes comes to discuss prisons in the editorial staff, is sometimes described as “a nonchalant guy, who cultivated the unkempt look – at that time, materiality was not essential”, sometimes like “pretty handsome guy, tall, lean, rather elegant, a lot of talkers, flirty, charming, talkative, boaster… but a real bandit. Organized crime, not crime. Who, however, believed that there were abnormal things happening in the prisons”.
Nine years in total behind bars, a cigarillo between his lips and here Livrozet became a man of letters in the mitterrandie of the 80s. stopped, “As well as three other people, on August 29, 1986 after the discovery, in the Parisian printing works of his publishing house, of 70 million false 100-franc notes”, teaches us dryly the world. After a long legal battle and a few months of detention, Livrozet was released, his partner having admitted having made the counterfeit notes without his knowledge.
“Better to smoke, drink and fuck, you die later”
Free, Livrozet then returned to the South, to Nice, as well as writing some fifteen books: advocacy against the death penalty, detective thriller in the form of a variation on the contaminated blood affair, participation in the Jean-Bernard Pouy’s “Octopus” collection… On sale, he never forgets to give this hated company a little nudge. “I don’t think that man is born good or bad, born criminal or not. These are searches for explanations that make the individual feel guilty more than they identify the social, economic or even psychological causes of delinquency, he explains to France 3 in 1992 when France discovered the riots in Sartrouville or Vaulx-en-Velin. When we see the suburbs exploding, we always try to say: yes, but they are thugs. They are not born thugs, they were born there and that makes them thugs. Why does society give birth to and live in such places? “This rotten society creates the conditions of misery. We must not cry, we must be indignant,” he completes on Radio libertarian, where he also hosted the show Dark mood.
At the turn of the 2000s, Livrozet abandoned the pen and tried his hand at cinema, this conversion factory. Behind the camera as a technical advisor in the TV movie Wife of a thug (1991) by Georges Birtschansky. In front of the camera for Laurent Cantet, who notices him during one of his television appearances, and offers him in the timetable (2001) the role of a malefactor (read below). He puts the cover back fifteen years later alongside Gilbert Melki in Seller. He also takes part in Nicolas Drolc’s documentary, On the roofs (2014), where alongside Henri Leclerc and former prisoners, he examines the thirty or so mutinies in French prisons during the years 1971-1972. Before the filmmaker follows him for a formidable large portrait: Death is deserved (2017). In this black and white film, Serge Livrozet, aged but still smiling, coming out of a heavy operation, delivers his libertarian considerations on life, prison, death. And society. With a hint of bitterness: “We thought the revolt was going to happen, it didn’t happen. And it is not about to arrive. Or humor: “Look at Christ, he didn’t smoke, he didn’t drink, he didn’t fuck, he died at 33, being a son of God. Better to smoke, drink and fuck, you die later.”
It also emerges from this shattered journey that this life, unequal, unfair, Livrozet does not like. “Life is absurd, it’s ephemeral, it’s nothing at all, he explains, cigar in hand. It’s very precarious, I didn’t want that. That’s why I wrote books that encouraged not to give birth to other people who were able to suffer as I suffer myself. On Tuesday, Serge Livrozet finally left this world “where [il] would not have wanted to be born” and who will have held it for 83 years.
Laurent Cantet, filmmaker of “Timetable”: “Such a singular man”
“What characterized him was romance, which he embodied on one level. His life was romantic, and he loved to tell it, without drawing glory from it, but with the pleasure of a gourmet storyteller. He was a great seducer, and his eye smiled every time he felt that a sentence struck home. “The character I imagined was largely inspired by him. I was writing when I first saw him on a talk show. The immediate impression of being faced with a man so unique that the desire to offer him the role was instantly imposed. The next day, I contacted him, and without hesitation, he accepted the proposal. He had never acted in a film but I offered him one more experience in his life, which already had so many, and I think it amused him. “I have a very precise memory of the rehearsal days when he gradually took on the character, or rather gave substance to the character, lent his voice to the warm timbre, to the very particular rhythm, which makes it recognizable among all. He corrected dialogues, adding a slang word, which was his language, and therefore immediately sounded very right. He was correcting a cog in a scam that he didn’t find up to par. I am pleased to have understood right away that it was necessary to take it from a block, to adapt the character to what it proposed and not the reverse. Assume its strangeness too, which made all its charm. “I think he really liked the film, which he presented on numerous occasions when it was released, with a pleasure and a warmth that touched me a lot.” Collected by Didier Péron