The television channels will never give up light entertainment, least of all at present, when they stock up on every theater of the world’s events. There is, of course, no question of choosing soft subjects, ineffective on the viewer’s mind, inconsequential to the climb of the ratings.
Bosnia is a subject of concern for the French when, sitting comfortably on their sofa, they follow TF1’s “spectacularized” news, the lightning conquests of yet more villages by the Serbs who practice ethnic cleansing, without any repression from the international bodies, fallen into lethargy. Letting things slide seems to have become the done thing.
Must the war in the former Yugoslavia henceforth make its own that famous line: “Ah, God, how lovely war is”?
One laughs with a helpless sadness at the derisory grimacing of the regular news anchor on France 2. We wonder whether, sometimes, he really grasps what he is reading on his teleprompter.
The profusion of images tends to trivialize the conflict — ever more murderous — by demobilizing the public figures who, only yesterday, were sincerely trying to reconcile the parties present. There would be some reflection to undertake on the news that is broadcast to us. The rule of the genre being to transmit enough nourishing, redundant “news” to give the event a flavor of veracity.
Fortunately, Planète chaude on France 2 presents a fascinating documentary by Fritz Zeilinger, Ne détruisez pas le rempart de l’Europe (Do Not Destroy the Rampart of Europe), which retraces the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The emphasis is placed on the incalculable consequences that the dislocation of this great empire will bring about. In two parts, this work is rich in historical facts that must be retained in order to understand the tragedy being played out a stone’s throw from us.
The news, of late, ceaselessly rejoins history. There had been, in the past, the Barbie trial in Lyon — the torturer of Jean Moulin and of so many victims, often Jewish. The survivors had come to testify for the new generations. Following the court’s hearings allowed men and women to understand history. The history that should never again be forgotten.
And now, on TF1, a man bustles about. His name is Christian Didier; he has not won 50 million in the lottery, but a somewhat strange place in the pantheon of the assassins of monsters. Indeed, this man found nothing better to do than to kill René Bousquet, the brilliant organizer of the Vel d’Hiv roundup carried out in Paris on July 16 and 17, 1992.
After having tried everything to make himself known to the media, by forcing his presence at the Césars and on Sabatier’s show, Christian Didier invented this stratagem: commit a murder, then summon the television.
TF1 made hay of it to the point of indigestion, since it broadcast, without the slightest embarrassment, the whole of the murderer’s confession. The channel, hardly concerning itself with either the morality or the legality of airing this document before the courts could intervene, Gérard Carreyrou pontificated endlessly, asserting that TF1 would never allow child-killers to appear live. Apart from the fact that this ferryman of information risks, with such remarks, arousing vocations, it seems, for his part, that other crimes might find a platform… But did we really understand his pompous philosophical digressions?
In reality, we wonder whether Didier, fifteen subway trains behind, did not take himself for Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi-hunter who devoted his life to that cause.
The cameras installed by the journalists in Christian Didier’s hotel room obeyed his orders. The image was dominated. It had never been seen before — the television-slaves-of-their-subject. It was a change from the dominated subject, repressed, dishonored, as in the many reality shows. At this level, we could be entitled to worry about the extreme danger of such a program, which glorifies the murderer and seeks out mitigating circumstances for him.
The transition, without transition, between current affairs, the reality show, and History prevents our brain from recovering from the “media bad weather.” We lose ourselves in a darkness in which all ideas and all facts would have the same status — disquieting, no?
Very aptly, Daniel Cordier, the secretary and biographer of Jean Moulin, disapproves of the assassin of René Bousquet, who prevented France from rendering justice by bringing to light, in the course of an impartial trial, certain obscure facts known to the accused alone. Cordier is scandalized to see, after what he has lived through, the resurgence of an underhanded antisemitism, shocking to a man of his generation.
Other historians, on Arte, in Transit, deal with the practice of history. The program is fascinating, the guests are select: Bronisław Geremek, Georges Duby. Two researchers of renown. They answer the questions of the host, dazzled, impressed even. A few reports are presented, bringing commentary — among them one on the Hamas movement, the armed Palestinian branch of religious-fundamentalist tendency. One sequence describes the clashes between Hamas and the Israeli army. Georges Duby’s judgment on these images will be disconcerting for a historian of his quality. Coming out of his reserve, he declared, in substance, that the German occupation was quite restful next to the Israeli occupation. These remarks troubled no one; neither the presenter nor Bronisław Geremek offered any contradiction to this peremptory sentence. How can we grant any moral credit to television presenters, who let anything pass when it comes from a public figure?
Historians will not be rewarded by so flippant an attitude. These amalgams, especially on the part of historians, are bewildering, even destabilizing. They contribute to the generalized denigration of history, which obviously serves the political cause of certain people…
And what should one think of the display on Ex-Libris, devoted to the theme of memory, of Pierre Touvier, seeking by every means to rehabilitate his father Paul Touvier, one of the zealous executioners of Lyon, when so many men were ground down, heart and soul, by such assassins? On the same set, Annette Kahn, dignified, listened to surreal words. Her father had been murdered by that pitiless Lyon militia; and today, what was she being told on television? Don’t think about it anymore, let us be reconciled, victims and assassins. The very limit! Annette Kahn, for her part, was not speaking of abstractions, but of a hard reality: that of a recovered card index, which had aided the police during the great roundups. How can one make sense of this face-to-face between this denialist-leaning “literature” and the reality of lived history?
History is a science that requires rigor and reflection. This is what Marc Ferro admirably achieves on Arte in Histoire parallèle (Parallel History), by setting differing theses against one another, backed by documents of varied origin. Should we not draw inspiration from such a method in order to grasp better the very essence of history?