Archives of the Friends of Jean-Paul Kauffmann: “Everything was at the back of a barn in the Landes,” says his son

The son of Jean-Paul Kauffmann, a journalist held captive for three years in Lebanon in the 1980s, has used documents from the committee created to support his father to write a book retracing his family history.

With his book "The Abduction, An Intimate History of the Affair of the French Hostages in Lebanon," Grégoire Kauffmann does much more than stir up the archives of the Friends of Jean-Paul Kauffmann. One of the children of this journalist, who was held captive for three years, from May 1985 to May 1988, pays tribute to the work of the committee founded by his mother, Joëlle Brunerie, and the architect Michel Cantal-Dupart.

But, through his training as a historian, he also manages to describe what this sticky period was like. A meeting before his talk, this Sunday, June ^1st at 11:30 a.m., for Une Dune à la page, the new Contis literature festival.

Why did you open the archives of the Kauffmann family's "tin-colored years," as writer Frédéric H. Fajardie put it?

Everything was at the back of a barn in the Landes region, next to my parents' house. I went there with a friend from the National Archives to see what was there. And there, we were confronted with documents that were like little gems. They told us about the mobilization in support of the hostages and allowed us to understand what the 1980s were like. We had material, a common thread to immerse ourselves in that electric era.

In my opinion, these were years when everything changed. The hostage affair shows how we shift from one world to another. Post-war France was ending. The France we know today was beginning, with social issues that are still in the public debate: the place of Islam in French society, the power of images, the rise of the far right, globalization...

How can you make history when you are an actor in that history?

This is the big question I faced. When I was doing my university work, my research supervisors taught me that the historian disappears behind his subject.

But for several years now, historians such as Michel Winock - who was my thesis supervisor - and Annette Wieviorka, in her book "Tombeau," have also been using family archives to weave stories that are intimate. So I tried to find a fair balance between the historian's position and the subjectivity of the family member who recounts what they experienced.

What comment did Jean-Paul Kauffmann make about his son's book?

My brother and my mother were not at all keen on me talking about these painful years for our family. But my father encouraged me in this work, discreetly at first, then by explaining that this book is the story of those who remain. He is the conspicuous absentee from the book, because the mobilization is precisely sparked by his kidnapping. Everything falls into place because he is not there. Of course, we talked to him about all this upon his return from detention. But I wanted to restore chronological coherence to this story, starting with the facts to explain the causal links in this confusing story.

Is your book a tribute to the investment of your mother and the Friends of Jean-Paul Kauffmann?

Of course. My mother spoke at the time of the "rage" she felt in wanting her husband released. My brother and I were minor players, the sons of a hostage sent onto television sets to increase the mobilization. There is a media dimension and a power of the image that takes hold in the society of that time that I wanted to show in the book.

But we weren't alone. Above all, there's this collective that speaks volumes about a generation. Veterans from 1968 who have become pragmatic urban executives who capture the spirit of the times. They succumbed to the lure of Mitterrand's social liberalism. They have softened their resolve regarding great causes and their dreams of changing lives. And yet, with their activist backgrounds, they will use this expertise in the fight to free the hostages.

This collective will even receive support from the owners of the great classified growths of Bordeaux!

This is the strength of the Friends of Jean-Paul Kauffmann. They succeeded in bringing together Jean-Michel Cazes's Château Lynch-Bages and Georges Marchais's PCF comrades: the greatest winegrowers of Bordeaux, allied with the French Communist Party. Denis Tillinac—a right-winger driven by nostalgia for the France of church towers and General de Gaulle—demonstrated with Frédéric H. Fajardie, an anarcho-Maoist writer who wanted to burn social traitors.

Speaking of politics, did reading the archives make you angry or disappointed?

There have indeed been attempts by politicians to exploit the hostage situation, which has contributed to delaying their release. Both sides are equally despicable, with very base motives. The right wants to return to power after the left has buried its dream of changing lives and truly making a difference on the social level. We went from Karl Marx to Bernard Tapie in the 1980s. This is the great Mitterrand betrayal: abandoning the working classes to convert to neoliberalism, turning SOS Racisme into a tool to demonize the National Front to better divide the right.

Is your book the one that Jean-Paul Kauffmann will never write?

My father tends to use metaphors to talk about his detention, but he talks about it a little in all his books, in filigree. Insularity in the case of Napoleon on St. Helena, the metaphor of the confines in "Courlande". There is also "La Maison du retour", which is a book about regained freedom. He talks more directly about this period in his last book, "L'Accident" . And above all, he talked about it in 1989, in a book that was out of print for a long time but has now been reissued in the Bouquins collection. It is "Le Bordeaux retrouvé", a book about relearning freedom through the metaphor of wine.