"Child of bastard" by Sorj Chalandon: the truth about his father revealed in the shadow of the Barbie trial

Après avoir fait dans Profession du père (2015), le récit romancé deson enfance avec un père mythomane et violent, l'écrivain et journaliste Sorj Chalandon publie Enfant de salaud, un roman encore plus ouvertementautobiographique dans lequel il raconte comment il a découvert la vérité sur son père. En jouant la fiction sur la temporalité, il entremêle habilement son histoire personnelle avec un événement historique majeur : le procès de Klaus Barbie, en 1987. Son roman est paru aux éditions Grasset le 18 août 2021 et figure dans la première sélection du Goncourt 2021.

History: a hero is the image that a son has of his father, who has been driving him since childhood of the epic stories of his resistant exploits, among others."You have to know," said his grandfather, a day of anger, announcing him as a goal in white that his father had been "on the wrong side" during the war;adding that he saw her from the German uniform place Bellecour in Lyon.Of hero's child, the son passes to "child of bastard".

Some sentences, a few words released without more explanation, open a breach in the paternal story.The doubt is niggled in the child's head.He is ten years old, and now no longer has the right to see his grandfather.The father will continue to "make other lives to illuminate his".

Later, in 1987, the son who became an adult and journalist covered for his newspaper the trial of the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, chief of the Gestapo during the war in Lyon."Do you think I could attend the trial?" Asked his father.During the testimonies of the victims, the father yawns, or smiles.This is the moment that the son chooses to open the judicial file of his father exhumed at his request from the Departmental Archives of the North.The son discovers amazed that his father was sentenced for anti-French activity to five years of national unwanting after the Liberation.A collaboration with a thousand lives, changing the uniform five times in four years: engaged at 17 years in the French army, then in the Armistice army of Pétain, then in the Tricolor Legion, a far-right militia, then in the German army, downright, and finally in the resistance, at the very end, to redeem a conduct.

"The bastard is the father who betrayed me"

This last novel by Sorj Chalandon resonates like the outcome of a lifetime, that of "the child who has become a journalist to understand, to seek the truth.So that we stop lying to me, "Sorj Chalandon told Franceinfo.

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The son discovers in this judicial file a deroman life, and the distress of "a lost kid, who dreamed of carnival uniforms and too heavy rifles", a kid without education, a genius of the lie.This father, the son could have forgiven him if he had said the truth."Yes, I am a child of bastard", but the bastard is not that "of disorderly wars", the bastard is it betrayed, the one "who threw his son in life as in the mud".All his life, the Son waited for the truth, the one that allowed him to build himself and meet his father.

Missed

While the son tries to make his father tell his father, Barbie, he decided to desert the accused box.Two denials, two stories, the great, and the intimate, collide, on the scene of this historic trial.By having his war coincide, that which he had to carry against a mythomaniac father, "the first of his traitors", with the trial of a great criminal of war, which he followed at the time for the newspaper LiberationAnd which earned him the Albert London Prize, Sorj Chalandon questions both his own history and that of Vichy France, and the unfathomable evil who led during the war of Lands Barbie to torture the resistance fighters with sadism, or to drivewithout cillerThe children of Izieu, and so many others, towards the death camps.By choosing this temporality, Chalandon propels its autobiographical story into a much larger dimension, that of collective memory.

Written as a logbook chanted by the dates that limit the Barbie trial, and deployed in a language with accents of tragedy, child of Salaud is a song of despair addressed to a father who did not know how to love his son, theHistory also of a double failed meeting, that of a son with his father, and that, long awaited by the victims of Barbie, worthy, who were courageously testifying to the trial, to which their executioner, condemned to life, ifis cowardly stolen, also unable to take on a "man's habit".

"Child of bastard", from Sorj Chalandon (Grasset, 336 pages, € 20.90)

Extract: "I would have liked you so much that you learn that.And that you see this big little lady collapsed with discomfort on the steps of the courthouse when leaving the hearing, struck down by what she had just revived, and die, again for all of us."(Child of bastard, page 239)