Sorj Chalandon: “The street made me a sentinel”

His gray eyes sometimes laugh and cry at the same time, as he sits on the terrace of this café where he frequents, Place Victor-Hugo, in Paris ( ^16th ). A journalist for fifty years, first at Libération and now at Le Canard enchaîné , he has recounted in his books his terrible father, his childhood stutter, the betrayal of an Irish militant friend in the Irish Republican Army. He had not yet revealed this year spent on the streets, at the beginning of the 1970s, before meeting a group of Maoist militants. The Book of Kells (Grasset, 384 pages, 23 euros), which he has just published, recounts this battle fought at the age of 20.

… If my father had been kind and loving. If he had been a kind, good radical-socialist from Lyon who was in love with Edouard Herriot [1872-1957] , if he had been kind, and if I had had a happy mother, I would not have ended up here at all! I would not have written any novels, because, like all novels, mine come from a wound linked to my childhood and my education. I probably would not have been a journalist either. So I would not have gone to Lebanon or Ireland, which later counted so much in my books and articles. And then, I would not have had cancer…

First of all, he's a liar. My father invented a job for himself every day. Not a boilermaker, no, he had to be a singer one day, a footballer the next, a Presbyterian minister, a judo teacher, a personal advisor to General de Gaulle, and even a secret agent for the CIA! A true mythomaniac who had changed uniform five times during the four years of war, he enlisted at 17 in the French army, then in Marshal Pétain's armistice army, then in the Tricolor Legion, a far-right militia, then in the German army and, finally, in the Resistance.

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