Read more  Front Populaire: The newspaper Libération recently published a rather incriminating portrait of you. What is the context of this article?
David L'Épée: I had been invited by the ID Group, an offshoot of the Identity & Democracy parliamentary group — the group of sovereignist MEPs in the European Parliament — to participate in a conference entitled: "Deconstructing Deconstruction," which was held on April 21 in Paris. This conference, which brought together several speakers, offered a fundamental critique of wokeism, this more than worrying phenomenon that is progressing in Europe after having incubated for a few years in universities across the Atlantic.
Libération being a press title whose editorial line is particularly marked by this woke ideology — this was already the case fifteen or twenty years ago when we spoke, more generically, of "political correctness" —, this daily newspaper of the "progressive" bourgeoisie viewed the announcement of this conference with a very bad eye and therefore launched a sabotage operation by putting pressure, through articles, on the organizers, letting them understand that they had mandated in me a personality questionable and, as the consecrated expression says, controversial. My presence among the speakers irritated them all the more since I had already been invited previously by the same ID Group to Brussels, where I had been able to speak on the same subject at the European Parliament, also giving the anti-woke discourse a "validation" which I understand may have made some teeth grind.
The media pressure was such that the organizers of the conference were forced to cancel me, while assuring me that they were not fooled by this blackmail and that they still held me in high esteem, since my analysis of the woke phenomenon largely matched theirs. Result: Libération managed to “cancel” a speaker who had been offered a platform to denounce… cancel culture! If they had wanted to agree with me, they couldn’t have done a better job! FP: When you read the Libération article carefully, none of your comments are cited. No excerpts from any book or conference. What do they blame you for? Obviously not your comments…
DL: That is the whole imposture of this paper. I have written two books, participated in several collective works, written hundreds of articles, given dozens of interviews and conferences, and a very large part of my writings is freely available online — not to mention my numerous audio and video interventions on YouTube, you just have to search with a simple search engine or via the sites of the main journals to which I contribute.
Furthermore, I have a freely accessible site that archives my old paper articles and another online media, Au fil de L'Épée, where I publish two contributions per week. Have they read all that? Whether they have or have not read it, the result is the same: there was definitely nothing to get their teeth into in those thousands of pages if the goal was to bring me down for anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia, masculinism (sic!) or other "crimes of opinion" that witch hunters armed with their censers and press cards are so fond of today.
My favorite subjects, those on which I write most regularly, are the history of socialism, direct democracy, questions of sex and gender, cinema, literature and eroticism. There is no mention of these in the article. Unable to quote a single word of mine that supports their thesis — the only direct quote concerns a criticism that I formulated during an interview about the undermining work carried out by the multi-billionaire George Soros and the article concludes that since Soros was Jewish, my anti-Semitism was proven, QED! — the journalists of Libération, who nevertheless got together three to come up with this nebulous indictment, are reduced to making a trial of me by association. I am then criticized for my acquaintances, companions that I may have had fifteen years ago and who we are supposed to understand must have contaminated me, me who am obviously incapable of critical distance and independent thought! This is what I call the principle of the man who saw the man who saw the man who saw the bear - and who is therefore necessarily a bit plantigrade himself!
It may not seem like much, but this trial by association says less, it seems to me, about me than about my accusers. Locked away in their Saint-Germain-des-Prés ivory tower, accustomed to only associating with people from the same social backgrounds and sharing the same vision of the world, they have a hard time understanding that outside, in the world of ordinary people, one can appreciate associating with a wide range of people who think differently from each other, that one can enjoy debating — really debating, not just purring, paraphrasing and repeating each other the same thing — and that one can even, sometimes, form friendships among people who harbor other ideals or profess other theses than one's own.
At twenty-five years old, I was already proud of having a large network of acquaintances and friends, ranging from the extreme left to the extreme right, of men and women from all communities, all origins, all religions, and on this point I have not changed: it is this eclecticism that has allowed me to confront otherness, to question myself, to progress, to become what I have become - and it is not, I hope, over, life being an eternal evolution. Although Libération criticizes me for my past closeness (and it's really starting to date...) with people who haven't been my friends for a long time and who criticize me every time they have the opportunity, it doesn't change anything on this essential ethical point for me: you have to talk to everyone, do everything to understand the other person without assuming a priori that they are necessarily in bad faith, make the effort to understand reasons that are not our own in order to broaden our perspectives and avoid locking ourselves in a safe space like a vulgar Libération hack would do. In this regard, I recommend the excellent book by philosophy professor André Perrin, Scènes de la vie intellectuelle française, which sets out with great clarity this ethics of dialogue and debate of ideas. FP: And you, what do you criticize them for in terms of substance and form? Is it a problem of ethics?
DL: Basically, a lack of journalistic rigor, dishonest procedures and an obvious desire not to inform, but to shoot me down at point-blank range. In terms of form, there are sophisms, approximations, misinterpretations and gutter rhetoric that is wickedly reminiscent of a certain far-right sub-journalism, Rivarol type, with the same ad hominem attacks, the same sneering tone, the same bitter resentment. The law is violated on a specific point, I will come back to it, but beyond that there is indeed a huge problem of ethics.
The desire to harm is obvious in every line of this article, an attempt is made to confuse the reader by an accumulation effect: the infamous epithets and the sulphurous names - an old technique of guilt by association - create, in defiance of any coherent demonstration, a heavy, demonizing atmosphere, which, when one reads the article diagonally, tends to make one forget that not only do the "problematic" acquaintances that I am accused of date back nearly fifteen years, but that in addition, none of the epithets to which I was referring apply directly to me. It is smoke and mirrors, a form of "journalism" by stupefaction, which generates a stupefying climate rather than delivering a precise indictment, something that in my case would be a little complicated!
But to tell the truth, I don't take it personally: if they didn't completely make a mistake about the target by attacking me - I am indeed, as they understood, a fierce opponent of wokeness - it is also and above all the magazine Éléments, of which I am one of the spokespersons, which is being attacked through me. Our magazine, which will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary this year, has indeed been at the forefront of this fight for freedom of expression and against the new censors and the new puritans from the beginning, and this at a time when the word "woke" had not yet burst into the vocabulary of ideas. This is starting to get out and they want to make us pay for it and put us out of harm's way. But be careful: today Front Populaire is showing the same clairvoyance and courage, you also risk, in spite of yourself, arousing this type of media cabal! FP: You announced that you are filing a complaint against Libération. On what grounds?
DL: The reason for my complaint is not so much about ideological slander - it is an ordinary malice to which I am accustomed: one cannot be in the opposition and at the same time hope to be sung laurels by the system's press - but about a specific point concerning my private life. Libération crossed the red line by revealing confidential information concerning a brief stay that I was forced to make last year in a psychiatric institution following a personal problem that had nothing to do with my activities as an author: a sort of post-marital depression, to put it briefly. For a daily newspaper that has bored us so much in the past with Michel Foucault's theories praising the mad and the insane, that is a bit much! This revelation made me very uncomfortable, because it is an episode of my personal life that I have difficulty accepting and that I did not want to see spread out in public. This also forced me to confess it in extremis to people very close to me who were unaware of it, in order to avoid them having to learn it through the press! This gives you an idea of ​​my embarrassment and my feeling of humiliation.
Moreover, the disclosure of this private information has two very specific objectives: to harm me in my job search — which is also the case with “political” slander: in both cases, it is a matter of scaring off employers likely to hire me — and, even more vicious, to discredit my speech by putting it down to a loss of reason, a psychological pathology. This was the method used by Brezhnev in the USSR: the old fox had understood that it was more effective, in terms of manipulation, to lock up certain dissidents in psychiatric hospitals rather than in a gulag. The political prisoner can be heroized, can acquire the figure of a martyr, can sow seeds of revolt outside that will germinate after him. The psychiatric inmate will, at best, inspire only pity and his speech will not be made into a revolutionary standard, because this speech will be intellectually invalidated by the madness attributed to him.
This is precisely the method that Libération tried to apply in my case. But this time they hit a snag, because while others were content to keep their heads down and wait for the storm to pass, I decided to react and hit back! This is why I decided to take legal action for violation of my privacy. Given the serious harm caused by this violation, I will not give up until I have won my case. FP: What do you say to those who tell you that you are playing the victim and that you prefer litigation to debate, etc.?
DL: Are you kidding? It is precisely my taste for debate, for free and open discussion with everyone, that has earned me the enmity of Libération! I am not filing a complaint against the publication of an opinion that I do not like — I leave those procedures to the opposing camp — but in reaction to an offense, in this case a violation of my privacy. For the rest, I am obviously ready to debate with everyone, including journalists from Libération — that's to say how open-minded I am! It is the woke activists, with their cancel culture, their propensity for censorship and the penalization of ideas, who flee from debate for fear of confrontation. Since they are, in relation to us, in a position of power, via universities and the major media in particular, they can afford to respond to our criticism only with simple arguments of authority and to silence us as soon as one of our arguments puts them in difficulty. I am firmly convinced that in the context of a true democratic, horizontal exchange, we would win by a wide margin, if only because we are accustomed to the debate of ideas and to contradiction, while they are only used to media red carpets and to being approved by the powerful of the day. This is also the reason why they find themselves so easily offended: all it takes is for someone to come to them, insinuate themselves into their protected and secure safe space, and contradict them for them to immediately get the vapors and feel bad! I wonder how they would react if the balance of power was reversed and if they found themselves in my situation, slandered by a major national daily, dragged through the mud in public, vilified for opinions that are not theirs and demonized by journalists who do not hide the fact that they want to assassinate them socially... Because that, I can tell you, is much more brutal than being "misgendered" in a campus auditorium!
The judicialization of the debate of ideas is precisely one of the flaws that Wokism suffers from. My approach is opposed in all respects to theirs: I try to bring to everyday life an ideal of democracy — I use this precise term deliberately, it is one of my fields of research and I have already written on this question several times in the columns of Front Populaire —, which is not only a model of government, but an ethic valid in everyday life, an intellectual hygiene based on freedom of expression, tolerance, the confrontation of contradictory ideas, civilized debate. These are principles that I hold dear and I will not budge from them. Interview by Maxime Le Nagard Illustration credits: YouTube capture © David L'Epée 

"This post is a summary of information from our information monitoring"