2023-09-28 05:30:18
There are pasts that do not pass. And nothing seems to overcome the suffering attached to it, neither the silences, nor the lies, nor the padlocks, nor even the words. The writer Dan Franck, successful author and screenwriter, popular figure in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, has long believed himself capable of protecting his secret: forty days of pre-trial detention spent at the Santé prison in Paris, in 1984, for criminal conspiracy linked to the far-left terrorist group Direct Action (AD), prosecutions which resulted in a suspended sentence for “brigandage”, way of recognizing the weakness of the burdens resting on him.
Some, in the left-wing cultural circles where he has always evolved, would have brandished this episode like a chic revolutionary standard. Not him. This ” That “ as he summarizes a long untold story in a very beautiful story entitled The Arrest (Grasset, 293 pages, 20 euros)“attacks it regularly, like a cancer whose [il n’aura] never right ».
Only a few of his closest friends knew. He talked about it quickly, painfully, like one gets rid of an embarrassing subject. “We felt that it weighed on his existence, on his life, remembers journalist Anne Sinclair, who has known him for twenty-five years. It was overhanging, this burden crushed him with shame, branded him with a hot iron, even though he did nothing except be astonishingly naive. » For others, knowledge of everyday life, professional relationships, the secret was well kept. If he decided, at the age of 70, to tell his truth, it is because he was suddenly caught up by digital memory.
“Lead on the shoulders”
One day in September 2016, Dan Franck was in Marseille where the series of the same name that he wrote for Netflix was filmed. He is preparing to join the mayor and local councilors for lunch, a very important meeting. A few minutes earlier, sitting on a terrace in the Old Port, a journalist showed him her entry on the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which he had not consulted for a long time. In the middle of the list of his books and films, a sentence jumps out at him: “In 1987, during a trial on the Direct Action movement, he was sentenced to eighteen months in prison, suspended. » At that moment he feels like “lead on the shoulders”. Taken from a “frantic frenzy”, he tries to erase the dirty words, in vain: only an external contributor can intervene on the notice of a personality. He thinks of his youngest daughter, to whom he has said nothing, of the parents of her friends, imagines her marked by her own “wilting”. He arrives at city hall in a daze.
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