François 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.
Death that came so early: not only that of the father but also that of his admired brother, Jean, born in 1925, a heroic Resistance fighter with whom François shared secrets, who was killed in combat on September 8th 1944 after having volunteered to work for the American army as a translator.
During our last meeting, a few weeks ago during one of our regular lunches together, he again told me that between the summer of 1944 and that of 1945 he had lived both the most wonderful day and the saddest day of his life. The most wonderful was, during the liberation of Paris, the popular uprising of August 19th 1944. The saddest was on May 8th 1945, at the end of the world war, with the realisation of the legacy left to him of an absence of both a father and a brother.
The more he advanced in age, the more François Maspero defined himself by the French word “résistant”, as in someone who is a resister. Far from the suffering complaints of those that create postures of victimisation, too often blind to others and the present, he had taken on his family’s imprint that commanded action and engagement. In all the diversity of his activities - manager of a bookshop, ‘La joie de lire’ (‘The Joy of Reading’), a publisher under his own name, a writer, and a translator – his lifelong route never stopped following, and prolonging, the original path.
In that aforementioned interview at the end of 2014, he was asked the question “this family history, then, was a founding one?” to which he replied, cutting straight to the point: “Yes, I think so, by all that I lived very, very young. I was more or less aware of my family’s activities, rather more than less, and perhaps even a bit too much. I was just 12-years-old and had already taken part in Resistance activity. I got it in the neck, but that’s all for the good. Because there’s one thing I always say, and which I want to say again: I’m not a victim and never considered myself as such. I knew very well what my family did, I was very proud and I am still always very proud that my brother, at 19-years-old, shot dead three German officers in the street.”
The interview was with Bron Magazine, a monthly published by the municipality of the Lyon suburb Bron, and was timed for the premiere there of a documentary film about him (see below) called 'François Maspero, les chemins de la liberté ('François Maspero, the paths of freedom').
His last public appearance was on March 24th this year, as his friend Marcel-Francis Kahn, the last of us to have seen him alive, recounts on his Mediapart blog. It was for a screening in Paris of the same documentary. Previously, in 2009, there had been an exhibition and a book, to which I contributed, dedicated to François Maspero and which honoured a man who, for all of us, with different backgrounds, professions and engagements, was “our substantial ally”.
Beyond friendship, François Maspero was for Mediapart a tutelary figure, both protective and inspirational, who reminded us that combat never comes without wounds, and that one always wins when one does not not give up on what is essential. We owe to him our logo, that of the paper seller, a Gavroche-like urchin of the streets and revolts who emerged, transformed for the digital world from the paper seller visual symbol of his publishing house - and which is still used by its successor, publishing house La Découverte. When, in September 2014, the number of subscribers to Mediapart passed the 100,000 mark, we very naturally began our regular monthly programme of live debates by an interview with François (see below - in French only).
'To translate poetry is an act of loving'
There exists a network of people, one made up of friendship and loyalty, for which François Maspero was our common figure, who gave us our bearings, our point of reference. Just as his bookshop and publishing house, from the end of the 1950s to the end of the 1970s, were common places for generations who espoused international and libertarian combats against both imperialisms and colonialisms and against dictatorships and totalitarianisms. Knitted with discretion and reserve, this network was neither high-profile nor Parisian, but rather Breton, or Algerian, standing in the background, with distance.
It is no accident that the only friend who François counted as his ‘big brother’ was Chris Marker, who died in 2012 and who cultivated self-effacement to the point of no longer communicating beyond fax messages and, subsequently, emails. For what was peculiar to these men, who succeeded in transforming their anger into creation, was their rigour - an extreme meticulousness regarding facts, words and images - which they had understood, before us, to be incompatible with dominating media vulgates, with their imperfect urgencies, their hurtful flippancies, their injustices.
Until the recent documentary film, a project led by a plot of friendship, Chris Marker was the only person to have filmed François Maspero. It was in 1972 (see below):
It was 40 years later, in 2012, that François Maspero gave me the surprise gift of two books, which he had gone to the trouble of rebinding. It was a sort of silent message, made with no rambling presentation. The two books were like two points between which a line could be traced, a path established, a direction mapped out. Of these two first editions, one was Notre jeunesse (‘Our Youth’) by Charles Péguy (1873-1914), published in 1910 by his Cahiers de la Quinzaine. The other was Aden Arabie by Paul Nizan (1905-1940), the sixth in the Cahiers Libres series published in 1960 by François Maspero’s publishing house, in a new edition presented by Jean-Paul Sartre.
François was part of that dreyfusisme (a French word that refers to the spirit of those who defended Alfred Dreyfus) which has no age, in which “one single injustice, one single crime, one single illegal act, above all if it is officially recorded, confirmed, one single insult to humanity, one single insult to justice and to law, above all if it is universally, legally, nationally, comfortably accepted, one single crime breaks and suffices to break all the social pact, all the social contract, one single treachery, a single disgrace suffices to lose honour, to dishonour a whole people.” Those words are, of course, from Péguy’s Notre jeunesse.
It was that heritage that François Maspero claimed when, in 1959, then the young manager of a bookshop in the Paris Latin Quarter, he ventured into publishing in order to knock down the walls of silence and lies that accompanied France’s (and that of its official Left) ruinous path of colonialism. In the catalogue of his first Cahiers libres series, he inscribed the forthright warning, borrowed from Peguy, that they “will have against them all the liars and all the bastards, that is to say the vast majority of all the parties”.
In the re-edition of Nizan’s first book, originally published in 1932, Sartre’s foreword renewed that promise and, in truth, it is never less relevant today. One recalls, such has it become synonymous with the rage of the young, the opening words of Nizan’s appeal for support of the cause for the oppressed and dominated: “I was 20-years-old. I will let no-one say that that is the best age in life.” But less remembered is Sartre’s text, which was no doubt what François Maspero, who was behind the idea of the foreword, wanted to bring my attention to. For it is one that speaks to, and of us, even today. Of this France that deprives its young of hope, and of our old world which has deserted them.
“We have nothing more to say to young people,” wrote Sartre. “Fifty years of life in this backward province that France has become is degrading. We have shouted, protested, signed, countersigned; we have, according to our habit of thinking, declared ‘It is inadmissible’ or ‘the proletariat would not admit…’ and then, finally, we’re where we are: so we have accepted everything.” So is the reason, Sartre continues, that we must listen to the message of Paul Nizan, who was brought back from obscurity by Maspero, and which tells young people “don’t be embarrassed for wanting the moon: we need it”, and who urges them: “Target your rage against those who provoke it, don’t try to escape your unhappiness, look for its causes and smash them.”
Nizan, concluded Sartre, was “the man who said ‘no’ right up to the end”. Just like Maspero, in fact, whose exemplary audacity was not for nothing in the awakening during the 1960s of France’s youth in support of the common causes of equality and fraternity. I have previously written on my blog about the renaissance of François Maspero as a writer after the painful end to his publishing business in 1982. But I did not give enough mention of Maspero-the-translator, a conveyor of the humanities of three languages – Spanish, Italian and English. These past few years, it was not only the profession which materially allowed him to live but, more essentially, it was also what kept him alive, such it was that he had little further taste for life following the deaths of his partner and his elder daughter.
François was a poet, in the sense that he took pleasure from translating poets, and which is tantamount to becoming one by the search for rhythm, musicality, in sum the flow of language – which he explained so well himself in his wonderful translation into French of works by the Peruvian poet César Vallejo (1892-1938). In 1998, at the invitation of the Paris bookshop L’Arbre à Lettres, he offered his friends his book Poésie traduite pour saluer les saisons (whose English-language title could be ‘Translated poetry in honour of the seasons’), which was created as a homage to Guy Lévis Mano, a poet and printer-publisher (under the logo GLM), who gave François Maspero his taste for typographic elegance. “To translate poetry,” Maspero wrote in the introductory note, “is an act of loving. Against death.”
Against the death of François Maspero, which devastates us, there are translated poems. He ended the 1998 collection of poems with Merci à la vie (‘Thank you to life’), a French version of the last song written in Spanish in 1966 by Chilean composer and singer Violeta Parra, one year before her suicide (click on video below to hear a recording by Parra of this celebrated work). It begins with the lines Merci à la vie / qui m’a tant donné (Gracias a la vida / Que me ha dado tanto - Thank you to life / which has given me so much).
François Maspero was born on January 19th 1932 and died on April 11th 2015. Thanks to you, François, who gave us so much.
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- The original French version of this article by Mediapart editor-in-chief Edwy Plenel can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse