Francis Deron, in memoriam

To: Retort
From: DNS

[Donald sends us his translation of  Vienet's eloge for the courageous Francis Deron, and also a review (attached) by Simon Leys of Deron's final opus, The Trial of the Khmer Rouge. Apologies for the absence of sundry diacritics, due to MacGremlins. IB] 


Francis Deron (1952-2009): I N   M E M O R I A M
Rene Vienet 
Histoire et Liberte
Autumn 2009

[Translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith]

Every thirty first of July from now on, that being the date of Francis Deron's death this year, the friends of the late journalist intend to republish his article 'Les Cimetieres du Maoisme' (The Graveyards of Maoism), a postscript to his many writings on China and on all the woes caused by Maoism. Histoire & Liberte starts the ball rolling by reprinting it here for 2009. This will serve as an annual reminder of how the proprietor of Monde chinois, Pascal Lorot, in order to suppress this text, pulped fifteen hundred copies of issue number 14 of his magazine, in which Francis's article had already been printed for publication in 2008.

Two years before being censored in this way, Francis had had his mouth mutilated and part of his tongue cut away in an attempt to remove the cancer that eventually killed him. Neither the readers of his articles in Le Monde nor many of his colleagues in Paris were aware of this, for he continued to file his reports as usual. In the wake of his surgery, he rapidly put together his last
book, a towering work of synthesis entitled Le Proces des Khmer Rouges: Trente ans d'enquete sur le genocide cambodgien (Paris: Gallimard, 2009). It was around this time in 2008 that Le Monde decided to close its Southeast Asian bureau. Francis opted to accept a severance package from the paper so that he could remain in Thailand near to his son Eric, who had just graduated from Thamassat University, and build a house in Huahin that would, among other things, be a repository for the books and souvenirs that were to be his legacy to Eric. It is doubtful, of course, whether one could ever truly pass on the flavour of a life so replete with the kind of encounters and struggles that explain why, at Le Monde, with respect to China and Cambodia, there was a time "before Deron" and a time "since Deron".

>From 1974 to 1977, Francis could very often be found in a former laundry, converted into a film-editing room and a publisher's office; there, still a young student in Paris, he was given to firing off telexes to Alain Bouc, Patrice de Beer, Andre Fontaine, Jean Daniel, K. S. Karol and not a few others. These communications were salvoes of telling invective denouncing the then indulgent attitudes of such leaders of opinion towards Maoism. This was the time when Andre Fontaine of Le Monde could write that the anthology Revo. cul. dans la Chine pop. was nothing but latrine rumour and Simon Leys's The Chairman's New Clothes mere embroidery on theories salvaged from the CIA's waste-paper baskets. And it was not long since Alain Bouc, also of Le Monde, had evinced incredulity concerning the death of Lin Biao, a scepticism upheld at the paper for a whole year. For an unconscionable period the newspaper's editorial board showed an utter indifference to the millions of deaths caused by the Chinese civil war known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Similarly, in 1975, in this same celebrated Paris daily, Patrice de Beer greeted the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Maoists with cries of joy. 

In those days, when not at work on the editing and publication of the books in our 'Bibliotheque Asiatique' series, Francis was often virtually eating, drinking and sleeping in that editing room. On the day Mao died, and Antenne 2 TV attracted the entire French television audience by broadcasting our Mao par Lui-meme (Mao by Mao), his name on the credits reflected a hands-on as much as a formal relationship to the film, which went on to represent France in the short-film competition at Cannes (1977). It was Francis who, on that September day in 1976, a day supposedly permeated by reverence for the lamented 'Light of Mankind', much to the dismay of Maoists like Joris Ivens and Maria-Antonietta Macchiocchi, slipped in front of the television cameras the cover of the first Chinese samizhdat to be translated into French. Originally a set of 'big wall posters' stuck up in Canton, this was the pro-democracy manifesto of 'Li-Yi-Zhe', which we published as Chinois, si vous saviez (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1976), and later in book form in Chinese in Hong Kong. (The English title is On Democracy and Legality under Socialism). 

At times Francis seemed to have two pairs of hands, as when he worked alongside Chan Hing-ho on the compiling and translation of Revo. cul. and simultaneously with me on the editing of Chinois, encore un effort pour etre revolutionnaires/Peking Duck Soup, the feature-length film that we finished the week of Madame Mao's arrest and that became the French entry in the "Director's Fortnight" at Cannes (also in 1977).

As codirector of Chinois, encore un effort, Francis decided (and for good reason) to use a pseudonym. Meanwhile, alerted to the merits of these basic lessons in Chinese reality, as likewise to the virtuosity of Francis's telex-borne raillery at editorial submissiveness, Francois Feijto suggested to Agence France-Presse that Francis be posted to Beijing to work with Georges Biannic. His performance there led to his appointment at a very young age to the regional directorship of the AFP in Bangkok. Later, Jacques Amalric persuaded him to join Le Monde as their Beijing correspondent and help reverse the downward spiral of a newspaper that had suffered so horribly from Maophilia. 

Francis published several important books on China that deserve to be revisited in the spirit of Simon Leys's recent praise for Proces des Khmer rouges (French version in Commentaire, no. 127; English in The Monthly (Melbourne, September 2009). 

In China Francis was a comrade, well before many others, to Li Zheng-tian, Wei Jing-sheng, Ren Wan-ding, and Wuerkaixi.

On 31 July 2009 we lost a great journalist, historian, documentarian, and friend.

And how can we ever convey to Francis's son Eric, along with the photographs in Thamassat, and those in Huahin, the relentless tap-tap-tap of his father's telex machine in that converted laundry in the Rue Mandar, Paris? For those who remember, and in some way for all those who in the future enter Eric's house in Huahin, that sound will surely be audible still.

Attachment: Leys on Deron.pdf
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Attachment: DERON-ENGLISH.pdf
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