The assassination of Hélène Rytmann by the philosopher Louis Althusser, a feminicide that did not speak its name – Libération

2023-12-25 20:43:59

Domestic violence fileFor a long time, the intellectual aura of the leader of the Ecole Normale Supérieure served to relativize or even romanticize the murder of his wife. “Libération” investigated the life and death of the field researcher made invisible by her illustrious assassin.

Should we rename the student hostel on rue d’Ulm after Hélène Rytmann, known as Legotien, a brilliant researcher who was strangled to death at the hands of her husband, the philosopher Louis Althusser? It all started with a dispatch from Agence France Presse, on the evening of Monday, November 17, 1980: the autopsy revealed that the death of the wife of the secretary of the Ecole Normale Supérieure was indisputably due to strangulation, headline the newspapers. The previous hypotheses – natural death, accident, suicide, even suicidal pact – fall by the wayside in favor of a myth, that of the cursed philosopher, cultivated by his posthumous writings but also thanks to the positions of his idolatrous students, and which grew stronger the more its victim was erased. Because what do we know about Hélène Legotien Rytmann? “She was sucking the air out of him,” according to Philippe Sollers; “He asphyxiated her under a pillow to save her from the anguish which was asphyxiating him,” explained Régis Debray; she was “a surly woman”, even “cantankerous”, say “friends of the couple”.

Libération retraced the story of this great resistance fighter, assistant director to Jean Renoir, sister of the “Emperor of Montparnasse”, research fellow at the OECD, field sociologist until her last hours. “He is unwell, he is violent, I fear returning,” she said to those around her a few hours before her death. All the mechanisms of femicide are there. “I hug you tenderly in my arms, my little living comrade,” he wrote to her in one of his first love letters. Is it a coincidence that the book which today retraces this murder properly, Althusser Assassin, is written by a Canadian researcher, Francis Dupuis-Déri, ​​and was not published by a French publisher? A plaque at the entrance to the Ecole Normale Supérieure would be the minimum.