The death was announced this week of the French publisher, writer, translator and poet François Maspero, at the age of 83. In this homage to Maspero, Mediapart editor-in-chief Edwy Plenel recounts, in words and video recordings, the extraordinary life of a man who was characterized by his unflagging combat against injustice and imposture, and also how he became an inspirational and tutelary figure for Mediapart itself.
FrançoisFrançois Maspero died on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald, the concentration camp where his father, the sinologist Henri Maspero, exhaled his last breath on March 17th 1945. François was used to writing and saying that his second birth came on July 28th 1944, the day that the Nazis arrested his father and mother, Hélène –the only one to return. “Yes, but a second birth in death, I was twelve and one-half years old,” he said, in one of the last interviews he gave, at the end of 2014.
