INTERNATIONAL MEN OF MYSTERY: By the early 1960’s, Jacques Soustelle was known for two things. One was his scholarly eminence; the anthropologist was France’s leading authority on Aztec civilization. The other was a very public disagreement with his old friend Charles de Gaulle over independence for Algeria (which M. Soustelle opposed vehemently). So when a spy novel portrayed an intellectual named Soustelle plotting to assassinate the French president, it was decidedly more than a coincidence -- particularly since the character was shown making jokes about human sacrifice.
M. Soustelle filed a libel suit against the novel’s publisher, and won. In due course, the whole unpleasant matter was forgotten -- until now. M. Soustelle is a pivotal figure in a forthcoming book, Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics During the Decolonization of Algeria (University of Pennsylvania Press, April), by James D. LeSueur, who teaches history at the University of LaVerne, in California. A political man as well as a scholar, M. Soustelle was Algeria’s last governor general under the colonial regime. But the anthropologist, who died in 1990, has an even bigger part in a novel rediscovered by Mr. LeSueur that the University of Nebraska Press will reissue in April, with his extensive afterword: Assassination! July 14 by Ben Abro.
An unusual political thriller, first published almost 40 years ago, now looks like a revealing document of France’s deepest postwar crisis. It’s a very odd story, all around.
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Ben Abro was actually the pseudonym of two British graduate students, Robert Silman and Ian Young (who both have since gone on to distinguished medical careers). They were attending the Sorbonne during a campaign of terror against Algerian nationalists and their sympathizers conducted by the Secret Army Organization (O.A.S.), a right-wing group within the French military. The O.A.S. had denounced President de Gaulle for treason, and had made several attempts on his life by 1962, when Mr. Silman and Mr. Young wrote their novel. But the paramilitary was only half their inspiration.
The book was also a spoof on James Bond. Its hero, Max Palk, is a middle-aged British accountant with asthma and dandruff. He survives an encounter with the fiendish M. Soustelle only through superior knowledge of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (Second Edition) -- then escapes the clutches of the O.A.S. following a series of Socratic dialogues with his guard. It may be worth noting that Silman and Young had studied with a philosopher named Jean-Francois Lyotard -- later notorious for such books as Libidinal Economy and The Postmodern Condition, in which high theory and low sarcasm were perfectly blended.
Jacques Soustelle was certainly not amused: The novel portrays him as part of a fascist attempt at a coup d’etat. In his protracted legal case against the book’s British publisher throughout the late 1960’s -- chronicled in detail by Mr. LeSueur in the new edition -- the anthropologist claimed never to have been a member of the O.A.S., much less to have plotted de Gaulle’s execution. Figures from French political and intellectual life gave depositions on both sides of the case.
While M. Soustelle prevailed in court, the evidence strongly suggests that Assassination! may have been fairly accurate about his role in the paramilitary movement. He could well have been the O.A.S.'s candidate for president (once the messy preparations were complete).
“There is very little scholarship on the O.A.S.,” says Mr. LeSueur, “mainly because the French State is reluctant to release anything. Most of the documents are in archives that will be closed for the next hundred years. With the court papers, you have a body of testimony from people involved in all sides, using the novel to make points about what really happened. It’s a great way to look at recent history.”
You could also read Assassination! for pleasures of a less-erudite kind, summed up by three simple words: grenade-launching dogs.
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