Ah, those Parisian intellectuals! An amusing tale from Adam Sage in the Times (£):
An anguished debate has erupted among French intellectuals after an Italian Marxist whom they lionised as a victim of oppression and injustice confessed to being a murderer.
Cesare Battisti, 64, a former member of the Armed Proletarians for Communism, embarrassed the French literati who were his most ardent defenders when he admitted last week to a series of killings and knee-cappings in Italy in the late 1970s.
Battisti lived openly in France for 14 years from 1990 despite having been convicted in his absence in Italy of carrying out two murders and aiding and abetting two others. He earned a living as a crime writer, a television scriptwriter and an occasional contributor to Playboy.
When a French court upheld an Italian extradition request in 2004, authors, artists, philosophers and politicians sprang to his defence. They denounced Italian justice as biased, proclaimed his innocence — even though he refused to do so explicitly for many years — and said that he should be able to live freely in France.
Some likened him to Victor Hugo, who was forced into exile in 1851 after criticising the French emperor Napoleon III. Others compared him to Alfred Dreyfuss, the French army captain who fell victim to antisemites in 1894.
They continued to campaign for him when he fled to Brazil, where he was given shelter until the arrival in office late last year of the right-wing President Bolsonaro.
Battisti left Brazil for Bolivia but was arrested there in January and extradited to Italy. Under questioning he not only admitted to the crimes but said that he had “never been a victim of injustice”. He went on to say that his backers had been interested only in his ideology and not in his innocence or guilt.
The publishing house Seuil, based on the Left Bank in Paris, said that it would postpone the publication of Battisti’s latest work, which was handed in by his French supporters after his arrest. Gwenaëlle Denoyers, 38, the head of Seuil’s crime-writing department, said that she had “fallen in love” with the text before seeing that he had confessed. “My jaw dropped,” she said. “It was obviously a shock.”
Laurent Joffrin, 66, the editor of Libération, the left-wing newspaper that campaigned for Battisti, said: “How can we not recognise that as far as France is concerned this campaign, which occupied a large place in the media, had something seriously frivolous about it, or even dangerously naive?”...
Fred Vargas, 61, France’s most popular crime writer, who led the campaign for Battisti to be given asylum, said she still believed in his innocence: “People are going to think I’m an idiot again.”
Yep.
Other French intellectuals who backed Battisti, such as Bernard-Henri Lévy, 70, the country’s best-known philosopher, have not commented.
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