Tribute of the President of the Republic to Mr. Claude Lanzmann

MIL OSI Translation. Government of the Republic of France statements from English to French – Published July 06, 2018

Claude Lanzmann wrote in his kaleidoscopic memoirs, The Patagonian Hare (Gallimard, 2009) that "one hundred lives would not be bored". It may be that there have been more, lived, lived or dreamed, present or past, and it is the infinite richness of this existence that France will keep the memory.

The story of these lives crosses the story of the twentieth century, since the maquis of Auvergne where the young Jewish resistant who defined himself as an "old French" was illustrated in the fighting of Mount Mouchet, until his questioning on the future of Israel – discovered in 1952 with a passion that summarizes the title given in 2008 to his interview with Ehud Barak: Lights and Shadows -, through the exploration of the world, from Germany to North Korea, adventures intellectual (his link with Les Temps Modernes was unfailing as was his loyalty to Jean-Paul Sartre), famous love with Simone de Beauvoir or secret with nurse Kim Kun-Sun (substrate of his film Napalm in 2017), turbulent marriages and controversial arguments against Raymond Barre, Elie Wiesel or more recently Yannick Haenel.

But Claude Lanzmann, this great living man, had as companion of road, omnipresent, death. That of his sister, Evelyne, who committed suicide in 1946; that of his son, Félix, who died of cancer at age 25 in 2017. That also of all these unknown, deported death camps, which he found traces and set the grave in the monumental Shoah (1985), narrative labyrinthine, where the faces of the executioners rub shoulders with those of the victims, in a dialogue at a distance where the sudden unstoppable is revealed in an excitement of memory that will never heal.

It is in the hollow of this constant and paradoxical confrontation that Claude Lanzmann, "scholar and artist" (in the words of Pierer Vidal-Naquet), has developed a love of truth and is sometimes carried away by his passions. This look will have built our era.

The President of the Republic extends his sincere condolences to his family and loved ones.

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