Postcards and Proofs 1979–1981 321
École, M. Bousquet, was unavailable for comment. The con-
cierge had been instructed to remain discreet. As for the École’s
doctor, he replied to our questions straightaway: ‘People are
over-dramatizing the situation, Louis Althusser’s wife passed
away overnight, and he has fallen prey to a deep depression.’
But perhaps the doctor was merely seeking to ward off the
spectre of public rumour from the famous establishment.^39On the Tuesday morning, on its front page, France-Soir soberly
confi rmed that it was indeed a case of murder: ‘Psychiatrists are
examining Althusser. The magistrate has not been able to inform
him of the charge as the philosopher is not in a fi t to state to
understand.’ The tone was much more brutal in Le Quotidien de
Paris, which devoted an entire page to the aff air, with a venomous
ed itorial by Dominique Jamet: ‘So many precautions, Messieurs, so
many reticences, so many pious lies, so many pens dipped repeatedly
into the inkwell until they no longer come out again, so many friend-
ships, to the point of complicity, so many silences or half-silences,
some stemming from self-censorship, others, in all probability, from
political or social censorship.’^40
The most exorbitantly right-wing hatred broke out: to believe the
editorial writer, the police would have been called immediately if
the murderer had been anyone else, but Althusser was an ‘eminent
member of the Communist Party’ as well as belonging to the
‘French intellectual establishment’:
He is on the side of the mighty, although he has turned his kind
gaze to the poor. [.. .] Are there then state privileges? Should
a philosopher never get his hands dirty? And who are these
people who arrogate such a right, one that lies outside common
law? [.. .] How dare the paragons of virtue who protest against
inequalities and class justice attempt to organize this inequality
for their own benefi t?On Wednesday, 19 November, Jamet returned to the attack:
‘Althusser, the scandal’, proclaimed Le Quotidien on page one,
before describing ‘the amazing corporative plot woven by all those
many people who claim they want to suppress classes, no doubt
so that they can preserve castes’. And the newspaper pondered,
quite seriously: ‘Should we be afraid of philosophy?’ Jean Dutourd
also held forth in France-Soir, while the extreme right-wing weekly
Minute, describing the philosopher as an ‘anormal supérieur’* wrote
in a sadly predictable fashion: ‘How typical is the Althusser aff air
- ‘Superior abnormal’, with a ‘pun’ on École Normale Supérieure. – Tr.