Lecture delivered on February 25, 1972, at the invitation of the Jeune Barreau de Bruxelles (Young Lawyer's Association of Brussels). Scanned from Sartre, Jean-Paul. Life/Situations: Essays Written and Spoken. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. 172-197.

I have not been accused of any crime in Belgium. Yet I have never seen -- and probably never will again -- such a gathering of judges and lawyers. Because justice must be impartial, the fact that the offenses with which I am charged and for which I assume responsibility took place in another country guarantees me an impartiality I would not find in France. Thus it is before you, gentlemen, that I will present my defense. It is not the same defense that I will be presenting in Paris to answer the accusation of libel that has been leveled against me; here I will attempt to take a more general point of view. I have entitled my lecture justice and the State. This title might seem rather pretentious, since what is involved is only a misdemeanor stemming from journalistic activities. But it so happens that in France today, even the least significant trial raises the question of the fundamental relationship between justice and the State. It was General de Gaulle who strongly emphasized this relationship. When he was asked to allow the Russell Tribunal to sit in France, he answered me in a published letter: "You will not be the one to teach me that all justice, in principle as well as in practice, belongs only to the State."

I will therefore try to understand what justice in a bourgeois democracy -- France -- consists of, and I will attempt to apply the concepts that I formulate to my own case.

On one point history supports de Gaulle: since the late Middle Ages, the tribunal has been a correlative of the development of the state apparatus. In the beginning the Germanic peoples did not have organized judicial forms. For them, the normal judicial response to a case of damages was compensation in kind. At the time of feudalism, Justice had become an obligatory service rendered primarily by the lords, and they drew the profits from it. In fact, a third of feudal revenues came from judicial revenues. That is to say, it was profitable because the plaintiffs bad to pay for it. Between two men who sought to benefit from the law of compensation, a third would appear and say: "I am impartiality, I am justice. This is my decision, and you must submit to it" -- which implied a kind of military power. Then came the king, who brought together the three independent powers of the treasury, the army, and justice. The parliament of the late thirteenth century, the royal army, and the great financial system perfected by Philippe le Bel were more or less contemporaneous.

During the Revolutionary disturbances of 1789-1794, when the bourgeoisie wanted to impose its power on the people, it created a new judicial system and replaced the great movements of the common people by specialized bodies such as the Revolutionary tribunal. These bodies were supposed to have originated among the people, but in fact they were created by the movement. Then the idea developed that the judges were neutral toward the two parties appearing before them, and that they judged impartially according to ideas and values which were labeled absolute but which were in fact a product of bourgeois ideology. Thus the judicial body was, and has remained tip to the present, a bureaucracy appointed by the state and backed up by the state's "forces of order" -- the police and, if need be, the army. Bourgeois justice seems, as de Gaulle said, to belong to the state both in principle and in practice.

However, I will make two objections to this theory. The first is based on the distinction between the state, which is an abstract reality, and the government, which is a concrete reality. Montesquieu -- and then the revolutionary deputies who followed him after 1798 -- strongly emphasized that the impartiality of judges must be based on their independence from the government. "There can be no freedom when judicial power is not separated from legislative and executive power. If it were combined with legislative power, the power over the life and liberty of the citizens would be arbitrary, for the judge would be a legislator. If it were combined with executive power, the judge would have the force of an oppressor." This principle of the separation of the three powers is still advocated in our democracy. We must, then, try to understand what it means and decide whether or not the post-Gaullist Republic is still applying it.

The second objection, which is infinitely more important, is the notion that justice originates not in the state but among the people. For the people -- that is, for the majority of Frenchmen -- situations are basically either just or unjust. Ideology is not involved here, but a much deeper feeling which expresses the fundamental nature of the popular conscience. No social or political activity could have popular support if it were not felt to be just. On the other hand, the justice of a cause inspires enthusiasm and dedication, and induces certain groups to undertake actions which the official magistrates judge punishable according to a code that has been handed down to them and principles that have been instilled in them. As an example I need mention only the lock-ins of management or staff, which the bourgeoisie judges to be intolerable crimes and which aside from their political and social importance, have an important incentive: moral indignation and the desire for justice.

Stated in other terms, justice is rooted in the people. When I say this, I mean that the oppressed and exploited can, under certain circumstances, demand their liberation, demand an end to oppression and exploitation. Michel Foucault, who sides with the Gauche prolétarienne, says that popular justice does not depend on any absolute principle: if a damage is done to it, it demands compensation. Today the damage, in this sense, is what we call the exploitation of man by man. The compensation at any particular stage will be a series of actions attempting here and now, in the present circumstances, to put an end to practices of exploitation. The Justice which "belongs to the State" obviously knows nothing about this compensation and would be incapable of understanding it, since State justice was created precisely in order to perpetuate exploitation. To cite Foucault again, its role since the eighteenth century has been to set up two categories of the masses in opposition to each other. One category consists of the men who are forced to accept work at a very low salary and who are considered blameless: they accept a situation they cannot avoid. These are the members of the proletariat. The second category consists of those who reject the conditions of exploitation and who are therefore guilty of the misdemeanor of vagrancy. But it must be noted that the first resign themselves to agreeing to the so-called work contract which buys their work force at a low price. Often they find liberty -- or the will to be liberated -- deep within themselves and end up rebelling, thus becoming subject to the same penalties that are applied to vagrants.

So there exist in France two kinds of justice. One is bureaucratic justice, which ties the proletariat to its condition. The other is primitive justice, which is the profound movement of the proletariat and the common people asserting their freedom against proletariatization. When de Gaulle declares that all justice belongs to the State, he is either mistaken or showing his true character, for the source of all justice is the people. The government takes advantage of the tendency toward justice that it finds in the common people and creates organs of justice that represent the bureaucratization of the people's will to justice. These courts pass judgment by simply applying the law, and they draw their inspiration from bourgeois principles. Thus they are based on fraud and a falsification of the popular will. In choosing between the two kinds of justice, the one codified and permanent, the other irregular and primitive, you must therefore be aware that they are contradictory. If you choose one, you will be held accountable by the other.

I have chosen popular justice as the deeper form of justice, the only true justice. Which leaves me open to attack by bourgeois Justice. I made this choice after May 1968, and it was the only one that I could make. May 1968 began as a revolt of the students against bourgeois culture; then a little later it turned into the greatest wave of strikes that France has ever known.

What does this revolt against bourgeois culture mean?

Bourgeois culture is a totality. Those whom the sociologists Bourdieu and Passeron call the "inheritors" -- that is, the bourgeois sons of bourgeois fathers -- are immersed from childhood in this culture and do not have much trouble assimilating it completely during the course of their education. Bourgeois culture claims to be humanistic. So far, however, it has profited by the error of the bourgeoisie -- which considered itself to be the "universalist class" during the Revolution -- and confuses humanity with the bourgeoisie, refusing to consider the proletarians as whole men simply because they are not bourgeois. This is what allows it to create the type of teaching we call elitist, which starts in early childhood. Based on selection and competition, it eliminates more and more students and ends by forming a kind of elite of finalists which serves as a base for the complex hierarchies of the bourgeois system.

The elite has been filled with a knowledge that is supposed to be universal, while in reality it is only the minimum required by businesses in order to hire these young people. If they attain the position of finalists in the championship, this knowledge then becomes abstract: it is separated from the things on which it was established. At the same time, it becomes a kind of power, that is, the capacity to call upon other men and impose tasks on them. Moreover, the university is a place for empty talk: there, nothing is taught to few people. The students, especially those from petit bourgeois backgrounds and those who are sons of workers, understand that many are called and few are chosen, particularly in the social sciences. They know that bourgeois culture allows a great many individuals to enter its culture but rejects the majority and thus tends to create a proletariat of degree holders. It reserves for its elect the positions of testers and supervisors in businesses, where they can use the knowledge they have acquired to put the workers and staff to the test, or can use the principles of "human engineering" to deceive or pacify the workers. The elite do either no work or a kind of police work that will reinforce the hierarchy. But in May 1968 the students rejected both possibilities; that was one of the causes of what happened.

However, the workers went on strike too. Bourgeois culture did not suit them at all. It had established a hierarchy of bosses, and the workers found themselves at the very bottom, forced to obey and never allowed to lead. Because of this they saw the elite as they really are; that is to say, they looked up from the bottom at statues on pedestals which were crushing them. The statues were blind to the fact, though the workers could see it clearly enough. The workers perceived that bourgeois culture is a superstructure which tends to justify oppression and repression in the eyes of the bourgeoisie.

In a certain way, however, the bourgeois culture joins in the effort of massification in order to make sure that the proletariat will be impotent. It is absorbed by the workers and occasionally by the peasants as a negative divisive power. In fact, if the I.F.O.P. had decided to conduct polls among workers in many of the businesses that had not had a strike for five or ten years, it would certainly have received many answers based on an ideology that included racism ("Nothing can be done about immigrant workers"), defiance toward the surrounding communities ("The country people are too stupid; they wouldn't help us"), sexism ("You can't get anything from women"), and so on.

However, there is another, deeper kind of thinking among the workers, which the ruling class suppresses in favor of its ideology. This thinking is truly their own: it is the refusal to accept their condition. The oppressed and exploited work like convicts, with supervisors and foremen on their backs. They cannot become conscious of this situation except by rebelling against it in the most radical way. But when the masses are atomized, when each person feels himself to be alone and to some degree resigned to his impotence, the deeper thinking does not occur to them in a very clear form. It is disguised by bourgeois ideology, which separates them and justifies their separation. In 1968, however, a change of circumstances brought about a concrete and specific refusal on the part of the workers. Solitary individuals merged into a group whose behavior expressed a radical rejection of exploitation. Racism, sexism, and defiance toward the country people disappeared, not because these components of bourgeois ideology had been identified and denounced, but because they were facets of the separatist idea and were no longer needed.

In brief, we can say that every popular movement, rejecting as it does the so-called bourgeois liberalism, is an active affirmation of freedom. There are thus two types of culture and two types of justice. The bourgeois culture, which is complex and diverse, is still founded on the oppression-repression and exploitation that it requires. The popular culture, unrefined, violent, and hardly differentiated, is nevertheless the only valid one, for it is based on the demand for absolute freedom. And freedom should be understood to mean not license but rather sovereignty and responsibility for each worker.

Simply by asserting the need to choose between these two cultures and two kinds of justice, one is already choosing the second. What stops many people from doing so is that they do not have to take any action in order to choose the first. Bourgeois culture and justice already hold their negative sway over large areas of the population. To choose popular culture and justice, on the other band, one must opt for action at all times. This is because in France the people have been atomized; as an entity they no longer exist -- or do not yet exist. But everywhere that the class struggle intensifies, the masses recover their unity and are therefore already the People at the beginning of its re-establishment. Then and only then do they rediscover deep within themselves their need for freedom and sovereignty, a need which underlies all popular needs. Anyone who chooses the People must therefore help to re-establish this concrete unity wherever he can. He will find himself involved in all forms of action demanding that the need for freedom and sovereignty be fulfilled.

For this reason, if an intellectual chooses the People, he must know that the time for signing manifestos, for quiet protest meetings, and for publishing articles in "reformist" newspapers is over. His task is not so much to speak as to try, by any means available to him, to let the people speak for themselves. It is from this point of view that the affair of La Cause du peuple must be understood.

In late 1968 or early 1969 Geismar described a certain project to me: he wanted to create a journal in which the masses would speak to the masses or, even better, in which the People, when it bad been partially re-established through its struggles, would speak to the masses in order to bring them into the process of restoration. This meant that the journal would attempt to give an account of all the actions of the workers and country people in France. Thus if the workers who read it found themselves in a situation in which they were ready to engage in an active struggle, they would no longer feel isolated and would perhaps be inspired by descriptions of certain types of action -- for example, the lock-ins, which might have been impossible in some places but possible in others. The project was just getting started and I was supposed to work on it with Geismar. Then, for practical reasons, be suddenly abandoned the idea. At that moment Geismar was not yet connected with the Gauche prolétarienne. He soon entered it, and the Maoists started a newspaper, La Cause du Peuple, which actually was the realization of our original project. As a matter of fact, the newspaper did not have an owner; it belonged to the People. It was sold in a militant fashion and included articles written directly or indirectly (in interview form) by workers. For the benefit of other workers, they gave accounts of action they had just taken or were then taking, or they described situations in various factories -- that is, management practices creating tension among the workers, such as layoffs, lockouts, and increases in production quotas. The newspaper wanted to present the larger picture of struggles in France from 1970 on, using the words of the workers themselves. It created a scandal.

Why? Because the bourgeoisie is elitist. It assumes that the masses delegate their powers to an elite -- a political elite, a journalistic elite. It can tolerate hearing qualified editors speak of the masses, or if absolutely necessary, for the masses. But these editors must speak in a bourgeois language with the type of reasoning sanctioned by the bourgeoisie. L'Humanité is no exception to this rule. In some leftist newspapers the editors have come from the People. But that is precisely the point: they have come away from it. Occasionally they register protests in the name of the People, but their tone is moderate and by this very fact they show that they have been co-opted. They are revisionists, even when they don't want to be. For even if they become advocates of the masses, they do not feel or no longer feel within themselves the lassitude, the anger, and the needs of the men for whom they are speaking. They can speak about these needs, but they turn them into statistical objects, quantities that can be foreseen as decreasing at a reasonable rate, that is, at a rate compatible with profit.

In La Cause de peuple, the complete reverse is true: the needs are expressed just as the workers feel them. The workers expose their indignation and even their hatred as oppressed people, emotions which are often intensified by defeat or victory. Their rough, primitive, and violent language deeply shocks the bourgeois. In the first place, none of the accepted forms are there. Take an article in Le Monde, in which the facts are put in the conditional to deprive them of all that might be disturbing, and in which the conclusion is always formed as a question. Compare it with an interview of a worker who talks about his fight against the bosses and which reads like war reporting. Read the slogans, which La Cause de peuple does not make up but simply prints ("Bercot, you bastard, the people will have your skin"), and you will see the difference. Here, the people speak to the people. This experience benefits the workers who are still atomized. A worker explains a particular fact that he knows well -- for example, that the vast majority of work accidents are neither due to inattention on the part of the workers nor destined to happen from the beginning, but are outright murders. What be says, in short, is not addressed to the bourgeois reader, of whom nothing is expected and who does not feel any kinship with the message. It is the popular language that accompanies a certain stage in the struggle -- exactly the kind of language the bourgeoisie does not want to recognize, because it ignores bourgeois subtleties and consistently affirms the popular morality and the popular meaning of justice. This is the very Justice that has been stolen from the People and disfigured.

Language, I suppose, is the difference between the journal planned by Geismar and La Cause du peuple. It was inevitable. It should have been predictable that if the workers were allowed to speak, they would reveal, even in the very nature of their idiom, the profound rebellion of the exploited and the oppressed, that rebellion which the bourgeoisie would prefer to ignore.

All the more because the Assembly elected in 1968 was a "Nonesuch Chamber," as was said under the Restoration, and one which was brought to power by the rich elite's great fear. From the time it first convened, it claimed that May 1968 was over, that all trace of it had disappeared. As a result there was a blind and harsh wave of repression that weakened the student movement. But the workers remained combative: the number of lock-ins after 1968 increased considerably. What the Assembly wanted to hide, La Cause du peuple shouted from the rooftops. (Now and then it had a somewhat overtriumphant tone, but this fault gradually diminished.) As a consequence, the government arranged for a "coup" against La Cause du peuple. Its principal editor, Le Dantec, was arrested, as was a second editor, Le Bris. Then came the day of judgment. In order to influence the judges, the government announced that the Gauche prolétarienne was to be dissolved by an official measure. And in his indictment the prosecutor -- who is entirely dependent on the executive branch -- demanded that the judge punish the defendants severely and that he suspend La Cause du peuple for one year.

The result was not all that had been hoped for, perhaps because of the modicum of independence which judges had at that time. The defendants were harshly sentenced, but the judge refused to ban La Cause du peuple. The reason he gave was that no one owned it. That was correct, because it belonged to the People. But a more important reason for the magistrate's attitude seemed to be that although he would readily punish two men who were responsible for what he thought to be excesses of language, he felt that the suppression, however temporary, of the publication in which these excesses had appeared would be an attack on the freedom of the press.

Shortly before this sentence was passed, Geismar and his comrades had come to see me. Le Dantec and Le Bris were going to be convicted; another editor would have to be found. They suggested that I take the job, and I agreed. Here I must explain why.

I should first point out that if I accepted this proposal, it would necessarily change their political line. Until then La Cause du peuple had been hostile to intellectuals, to those who were called the "leading lights," and occasionally to me as well (for example, in several of its articles during the trial of Roland Castro). But they were at an impasse: if the new editor were not a well-known figure (and therefore a "leading light"), he would run the risk of being put in prison as soon as be took over his duties. They wanted to continue publishing La Cause du peuple openly as long as possible. Even though the manner in which the newspaper was sold was often rather militant, the time had not yet come to think of going underground. There was only one possibility: to approach a well-known intellectual.

But this solution would eventually induce the Maoists to think about the status of intellectuals and about the possibilities of undertaking joint action with them. It seemed to me that to broaden the idea of the People, to allow intellectuals to participate in their struggles, would be particularly beneficial. First of all, because I was an intellectual and was sympathetic to their cause. Secondly, because I was in favor of uniting the forces of the true left -- and by this I mean something completely different from the partnership of the Socialist and Communist Parties. Now, if it was possible to bring the workers and intellectuals together in at least one area, there could be hope of eventually rebuilding the alliance of the intelligentsia and the proletariat which had been widespread in the nineteenth century and which the Communist Party had broken up. I will quickly add that I was not wrong. At the end of last year, workers and certain intellectuals came together in Dunkirk on the occasion of the Liscia affair. Many other cases could be cited. But this alliance called for some changes on both sides: On the one hand, certain prejudices of the former Gauche prolétarienne would have to disappear. On the other hand, the men who had only very recently been called "classical" intellectuals would have to protest as intellectuals against bourgeois repression, thereby changing their relationship to society.

But my most important motive was to save La Cause du peuple, the only newspaper which allowed the voice of the people to be heard. I should admit that I agreed to take the post because I was a well-known figure. Cynically, I took advantage of my fame; for the first time in my life I actually behaved like a "leading light." Why? To provoke a crisis within the repressive bourgeoisie.

The bourgeois have always been wary of intellectuals, and with reason. But they mistrust intellectuals because they see them as strange creatures who have emerged from their very midst. Most intellectuals were born of bourgeois parents who inculcated them with the bourgeois culture. They seem to be the guardians and the transmitters of this culture. In fact, a certain number of technicians of practical knowledge do eventually appoint themselves watchdogs of the culture, as Nizan called them. The others, having come out on top, remain elitist even when they profess revolutionary ideas. They are allowed to protest because they speak the bourgeois language, but they are subtly manipulated until the right moment comes, and then a chair in the Acaérnie Française or a Nobel Prize or some other lure is enough to co-opt them. This is how it happens that a Communist writer is currently displaying his wife's memoirs at the Bibliothèque Nationale, in an exhibition that was inaugurated by the Minister of Education [1].

However, there are some intellectuals -- and I am one -- who have no longer been willing to engage in dialogue with the bourgeoisie since 1968. Actually, it is not that simple: every intellectual has what can be called his ideological interests. For a writer, this means the totality of his work so far. Even though I have always protested against the bourgeoisie, my works are addressed to it, are written in its language, and contain elitist elements -- or at least the earliest ones did. For the last seventeen years I have been engaged in a work on Flaubert which can be of no interest to the workers, since it is written in a complicated and definitely bourgeois style. Furthermore, the first two volumes of this work were bought and read by bourgeois reformists, professors, students, and the like. It was not written by the people or for the people; it was the product of a bourgeois philosopher's reflections over the course of most of his life. Two volumes have appeared, the third is at the printer, and I am preparing the fourth. I am committed to it -- meaning that I am sixty-seven years old, I have been working on it since I was fifty, and before that I dreamed about it.

Now, we must say that this work, assuming that it has some value, by its very nature represents the age-old bourgeois swindle of the people. The book ties me to bourgeois readers. Through it, I am still bourgeois and will remain so as long as I continue to work on it. However, another side of myself, which rejects my ideological interests, is fighting against my identity as a classic intellectual. That side of me knows very well that if I have not been co-opted, I have come within a hair of it. And since I am challenging myself, since I refuse to be an elitist writer who takes himself seriously, I find myself among those who are struggling against the bourgeois dictatorship. I want to reject my bourgeois situation. There is thus a very special contradiction within me: I am still writing books for the bourgeoisie, yet I feel solidarity with the workers who want to overthrow it. Those workers were the ones who frightened the bourgeoisie in 1968 and who are the victims of greater repression today. As one of them, I should be punished. Yet as the author of Flaubert, I am the enfant terrible of the bourgeoisie and should be co-opted.

It is therefore a question of communicating to the government the profound contradiction that lies within me. I am writing a work of literary history, and I have assumed editorship of La Cause du peuple and three other "leftist" newspapers, two of which have disappeared for financial reasons (Tout and La Parole au peuple) and have been replaced by a new bimonthly, Revolution, which I also direct. What does it mean to "direct"? First of all, I must admit that it is a challenge to the government. In effect I am saying: "You have sentenced Le Dantec to one year in prison and Le Bris to eight months. I am the third director; therefore arrest me. If you arrest me, you will have a political trial on your hands; if you do not arrest me, you will be showing that Justice has two different standards."

During Le Dantec's trial I went to the bench and expressed to the magistrate my amazement at being free while my two colleagues were behind bars. He told me that he couldn't do anything about it, and lie was right: he could only judge the defendants who were brought before him. But in its indecision the government was making a fool of itself. It had been caught in the contradiction of my situation. There were those in the government who wanted to indict me. There were others who took their cue from what de Gaulle had said during the trial of the 121, feeling that a political trial could only do them harm and preferring to let it pass -- just as, in fact, the bourgeois newspapers had originally advised them to do.

In the beginning the government was so embarrassed that it did not interfere with my first issue of La Cause du peuple, which appeared on May 1, 1970. Then for a period of many months the Minister of the Interior employed a new tactic: he no longer talked about the editor responsible for La Cause du peuple, but instead had each issue of the newspaper seized as soon as it came off the press. This tactic was absolutely illegal, since the judge had refused to ban the paper. Of course, individual articles might have been liable to prosecution. But no one could know that, because no one had read the newspaper before it was seized. It was thus not in application of the law of 1881, or the modifications of 1892, called the lois scélérates [outrageous laws], that the seizure was made. It was purely and simply a matter of smothering an organ of the revolutionary press by force.

The crime against the freedom of the press was obvious. Furthermore, the tactic was ineffective: we managed to distribute the great majority of copies, and the police were able to seize only what was left over. The Minister of the Interior then tried to take action against the people who were selling the newspaper. He arrested them everywhere he could and had them brought before an emergency court [cour d'exception] for having re-established the outlawed party. We proved once again that there were two standards of justice, because well-known intellectuals and I myself openly sold La Cause du peuple in the heart of Paris and were not interfered with. At the time of the first sale, a policeman took me by the arm and told me to follow him to the police station. I still remember his shock when someone in the crowd shouted out to him: "You're arresting a Nobel Prize!" He immediately let me go and rushed away. A group called Friends of La Cause du peuple was formed to give us support. All in all, the government tactic had failed -- a fact which they themselves admitted after several attempts at seizure, so that one day the police simply stopped harassing the printer. La Cause du peuple was then freely sold on the newspaper stands -- with the same contents that seem so scandalous compared with France-Soir or L'Humané.

This was no solution, however: the right wing of the majority was understandably aware of the fact that I was escaping justice while Le Dantec and Le Bris had been found guilty. Furthermore, a newspaper called Minute which belonged to the right-wing opposition was crying out for my imprisonment. Again the government confined itself to a half-hearted measure: it indicted me for libel. The plaintiffs were the Keeper of the Seals, the Minister of Justice, and the Minister of Interior. The incriminating articles had been chosen from issues of La Cause du peuple and Tout dating back to 1970, which means that according to French law the charges were no longer valid. The prosecutor must have taken official steps to obtain permission to ignore the statute of limitations. I was indicted in June 1971. Charged and freed on my own recognizance, I spent my vacation in Italy as I do each year and came back in October for the preliminary bearing, which was over very quickly. I was charged on five counts. When will I be judged, and how?

When, I do not know. But to find out how, it would be helpful to examine the history of the judiciary during these post-Gaullist years.

There is no question that up to the time of the Fifth Republic, the independence of justice as Montesquieu described it was a greater source of pride to the judges than any other characteristic of the system. They refused to serve the government, whatever its political leanings, and during the years of the Third and Fourth Republics they often asserted their autonomy. In the 1950s the president of the Chambre des mises en accusation [Grand Jury] freed Jacques Duclos, a deputy whom the government claimed to have arrested in the act of participating in a demonstration against General Ridgway.

However, there is a general trait which does not belong only to the present period -- and I am pointing it out in order to show the limits of judicial independence. The judge is almost always a bourgeois and the son of a bourgeois; his elitist education thus began in childhood. He was put through a competitive course of study, won certain prizes, and emerged a product of this system, a member of the elite by virtue of his ideology, his character, and his profession. Montesquieu wanted accused persons to be judged by their equals in the true sense of the word. This is clearly impossible: because he is the product of a competitive system based on the bourgeois idea that the finest things are the rarest things, the judge feels that he merits his power by his very rarity. He is an important member of the bourgeois hierarchy, and the defendants be judges seem to him to be his inferiors.

Foucault remarks that the topographical analysis of a courtroom -- including the bench which separates the judge from the accused person and the witnesses, and the difference in levels between the judge and the others -- is enough to indicate that the judge belongs to another species. No matter how impartial he might be, he will treat those who come before him as objects and will make no attempt to understand the subjective motives of their acts as these would appear to the defendants. In any case he is remote from popular justice, which rarely appears in a court and which has a completely different topography. Figuratively speaking, the witnesses and experts in a court of popular justice file past in the highest place and the judges are down in the main part of the room, the jury being the public. But these remarks have little to do with the present period. They merely attempt to show what kind of impartiality I expect from a judge. Let us say that I expect class impartiality, which is a natural wish, since I am going to be appearing before the justice of the bourgeoisie.

What we see in our own period, on the other hand, is a tendency on the part of the Gaullist bourgeoisie to limit the independence of bourgeois justice. It would like not only a class justice, but a party Justice. De Gaulle's remark about justice, which I quoted before, is interpreted by the present government to mean that the judicial branch should take orders from the executive branch. Actually, the government today thinks that it has a twofold mission: it wants both to give France up to private enterprise, and to integrate the working class into bourgeois society, not by improving the condition of the proletariat but by the constant use of repression. It keeps bourgeois ideology and the code of the nineteenth century as a cover, but it knows very well that both are out of date. It represses by distorting the present laws or by having new ones passed. In either case a judge who must apply these laws can no longer identify with them.

As an example of distorted laws, take the Geismar affair. A meeting was held to protest the arrest of Le Bris and Le Dantec, and the five thousand or so present were shouting, "On the twenty-seventh, we take to the streets!" Several speakers who shared their feelings spoke before this crowd of overexcited people. Only one of the speakers was arrested -- Geismar, who spoke for eight minutes and said nothing more extreme than any of the others. He alone is held responsible for what took place on the twenty-seventh. What actually did happen? No one will say. No medical certificates were brought forward; there was no testimony to support the case of the prosecution. The prosecution admitted, in fact, that it was a question of "contusions and not serious injuries." What was more, it was established that the police were the ones who started the disturbance at Censier by throwing tear-gas grenades. The demonstrators responded by throwing back the plus. On the other side, at the quay, the police did not fire and the demonstrators, not having been provoked, did not counterattack. It is clear that the decision to demonstrate crystallized at the meeting and that the forces of order wanted to strike back harshly, even violently. Unfortunately, no policemen were wounded. It didn't matter; Geismar was guilty in advance; he was sentenced to eighteen months, with no parole. It was because he was one of the leaders of the Gauche prolétarienne, about which Marcellin had said on the radio: "I am dissolving this party because its members will want to re-establish it and then we will be able to put them in prison." As we can see, a former member of the Gauche prolétarienne is guilty in advance. That is what happened to Geismar: the bourgeois guarantees had been denied to him; there was no need to prove his guilt; it bad been established a priori. He bad been found guilty according to pre-existing laws, but laws that had been grossly tampered with.

The affair of the Friends of La Cause du peuple shows how one first tampers with the law, then goes on to pass a new, unconstitutional law because the earlier one was insufficient. The Friends declared itself an association to the Prefecture of Police, which was supposed to give it authorization. This is the law: every new organization announces its existence and is recognized, even if it should later be harassed and dissolved. For the first time in France since the law was enacted, the Prefect of Police, following the instructions of Marcellin, refused to give us authorization. The government was not concerned with either harassing or accepting our association, but preferred to reject it against the law. We brought suit and the court ruled in our favor: a good example of independence. We were therefore granted authorization.

But the government, which was now very displeased, had its docile majority quickly push through a new law making it possible to refuse authorization when this was judged necessary. Under the new edict the court was ultimately responsible for whether or not authorization should be given. We can see that the law not only severely compromised the freedom of assembly, but also attempted to make the judge the accomplice of a particular politics. Only politics, in fact, can furnish the motivation for rejecting or accepting an organization, since criminal organizations, when they exist, are clandestine. Fortunately, the constitutional council showed discretion and rejected the law as unconstitutional. What is significant in this episode is the sequence of events: the government tampers with one law and then proceeds to vote in an unconstitutional law, in other words, an illegal law. In this particular case, justice was well defended. Can as much be said when it is a question of applying new, regularly voted in and unconstitutional laws such as the anti-vandalism and antidrug laws? The judge must apply them because they have been approved by vote. But no one knows what he really thinks of them; it can easily happen that he enforces the law even though he is opposed to it. What becomes of his independence when the judgment he gives contradicts his ideology or the will of the people which is expressed in the code?

Yet we must not stop here. The fact is that judges are given cases to decide which they are not allowed to know very much about. In point of fact my case, like those of so many French people -- especially the young -- since 1968 is political in nature. Now, there is no such thing as a political crime in France. If there were, one would have to recognize that another politics exists (one which has to be ignored), and the mere fact of practicing it would be enough to have you taken to court. In fact this politics does exist; it is revolutionary socialism. It used to be Communism, but since that large party has become part of the respectable opposition, there remains only one kind of politics which is forbidden: the politics that aims to overthrow the bourgeoisie through violence. Even to state this fact would be to publicize the forbidden politics. Thus we can see how judges with very little independence -- unfortunately, they do exist in France -- are obliged in court to separate the violence from the politics behind it. They must cut it off from its goals and its purpose and turn it into a common-law misdemeanor.

Among other examples I remember the trial of the militant Roland Castro, in which I was a witness and which I followed from beginning to end. Castro -- an activist of the V.L.R., which has since disbanded on its own decision -- had joined his comrades and some intellectuals in occupying the office of the C.N.P.F. [Conféderation National du Patronat Français]. They were protesting the death of five immigrant workers who had been asphyxiated by gas when they had tried to use it as a source of heat. This symbolic and peaceful occupation, in which Maurice Clavel, Michel Leiris, and Jean Genet also participated, was an attempt to point out to the public the people who were truly responsible for these deaths -- the French bosses. The C.R.S. [Compagnie Républicaine de Securité, or riot police] was called to the offices of the C.N.P.F. and violently removed the protestors, who did not offer the slightest resistance. The police struck all of them, and pushed Maurice Clavel and Jean Genet down a staircase. They brutally forced the protestors whom they could catch into police wagons and hauled them to the station. All were soon released except Roland Castro, who had left the police wagon at a red light and tried to escape. He was caught, held and struck, and at the station he was charged with assaulting an officer. Still, it had to be proved. When the two policemen had caught him, they had gripped him tightly, twisting his arm and so on, and it was difficult to see how his reactions could have constituted an assault against the officers. They therefore bad to testify, in spite of seventeen witnesses to the contrary, that they had caught him a first time, that he bad violently broken free and run away, and that they had run after him and caught him again.

But what counts here is the offense. Castro, outraged by the manner in which French management treated immigrants, unlawfully occupied premises that were not his property. This is what an elitist Judge who respected property could reproach him for. Castro's defense was political: he had exposed and passed judgment on management policy toward the immigrants. There was no question of such defense being taken seriously for even one moment, though most of the defense witnesses and lawyers eagerly attempted to present it. The problem became very simple. Had there been, or had there not been, officers outside, in front of the door of the wagon, and had Castro pushed them as he was getting out? This militant could just as well have been a thief or a drunkard arrested for disturbing the peace. Not one word was said about the police brutality at the C.N.P.F. office, which easily could have justified his attempt at escape. And yet we are asked to tell the whole truth.

But the judge wanted the whole truth concerning an infinitesimal incident: were these two men in such and such a place? And none of us could understand why the event was not dealt with in its totality -- that is, by starting with government and management policies. To tell the whole truth about an infinitesimal instant is a pure contradiction. Truth develops over time. In a closed, limited instant, there can be no truth. But if the truth bad been established, if the discussion had included the deaths of the black workers and the occupation of the C.N.P.F., the trial would have been political. This was something which neither the government (and its representative, the prosecutor) nor the judge wanted. From that point on, the outcome was obvious: Castro was found guilty. The scandal came to an end when the militants in the prisons went on a hunger strike to demand political status. It was given to them, under a false name.

There is an even more serious aspect to contemporary state justice: judges have been turned into abstractions. They give their verdict and sentence the defendant to a prison term -- but without realizing it, they have levied a much heavier penalty. In their eyes and in the eyes of the law, the sentence is simply the deprivation of freedom. But for the past ten years there has been a steady deterioration in French prisons. Guards beat the prisoners, and an internal court -- often directed by a single person -- sentences them for a mere trifle to the mitard, an unheated cell in which they remain half naked for one or two weeks. When a prisoner attempts suicide, which often happens, he is put in a straitjacket for several days, forced to defecate in place, and left to wallow in his excrement for long periods. The guards watch the prisoners, the guards watch the guards, and some prisoners even watch the guards. The penal administration rules supreme, which means that the sentences are carried out by this headless body, this group of poorly paid functionaries who are recruited without screening, who are afraid of the prisoners, and who little by little become sadists. When the judge sentences the defendant to a year's loss of freedom, he has in fact sentenced him to much worse. He has put the prisoner into the hands of an administration which has total control over him. This deterioration in prisons is partly intentional, for the Keeper of the Seals is carrying out the policy of the government, constantly striking down the people on the fringe of society and the young. A question that interests me personally is what the judge thinks when he gives his sentence. Is he really abstract, as I have said, and unaware of the truth, or has be allowed himself to be won over by the politics of the regime?

In fact -- and this is the last point I will discuss -- judges are subjected to considerable pressures. First, there are what I will call external pressures -- and I am not even speaking of the concern of the magistrates for their own advancement. I am referring to the kind of pressure that was applied, for example, when the judiciary as a whole was insulted by an important deputy from the majority, Tomasini, who reproached it for cowardice because he felt that it did not come through with enough convictions. Furthermore, it is not safe for a judge to tell the truth. The sentencing judge [le juge d'application des peines] at Toul was deaf as a doornail, which is symbolic. But the judge at Clairvaux had his eyes and ears open. He made a long report to the Keeper of the Seals on the Clairvaux prison and was immediately replaced, which proves that when Pleven must choose between a judge and the penal administration, be automatically chooses the administration. One will understand this when one learns that before the revolt, the director of the prison at Toul was held to be the best administrator of the period. Imagine how great the pressures will be in my case, since one of the two plaintiffs is the Minister of Justice.

Then there are also pressures which I will call internal, that is, pressures inherent to the judicial system. The Judge needs the police, who belong to the Minister of the Interior. He must treat them with consideration, and it is rare that he convicts a policeman of anything. Policemen are sworn in, and when they testify, they are unconditionally taken at their word. In Castro's case, two policemen maintained that they were in front of the police wagon door, seventeen witnesses contradicted their statement, but it was the policemen who were believed. This is particularly serious today, because the French police have changed a great deal since the Algerian war. They often use violence without cause; there are fascists, racists, and former members of the O.A.S. among them. Now, if it happens that these policemen are too rough with someone, they often claim that the person -- no matter what his size and strength -- has assaulted them. The judge believes them as a matter of course, for he cannot do otherwise. The system thus forces him to protect men who are often no more than bullies and sadists, if not murderers.

Justice is therefore compelled to apply laws that have been tampered with or new laws that are unconstitutional. It does not have the means to judge a political offense and must necessarily reduce it to an offense of common law. This was seen recently in the trial of the newspaper Coupure, which had reprinted the articles from La Cause du peuple which the prosecutor had cracked down on during Le Dantec's trial. The president of the court said to a witness: "We do not engage in politics here." If politics are not engaged in, then what the devil were they talking about? The government considers Justice to be under its orders and subjects it to violent pressures. justice must be considerate to the police and believe the testimony of policemen. The sentences that Justice pronounces are not the ones that the sentenced man undergoes. Am I saying that the government has succeeded in taking the judiciary's bourgeois independence away from it? Not yet, but the situation has become worse, and one must admire the judges who resist and who are still independent. All the more so because most of the time their background and culture are bourgeois, and they can hardly be said to share the views of the revolutionaries who come before them. They have nothing to sustain them other than the abstract idea of independence.

This is the situation of my judges concerning political offenses and, as a consequence, the offense I am accused of. I do not know who my judges will be. Until now I have had dealings only with three examining magistrates. They all behaved correctly, but only one gave me his hand when I entered his office. Was it a mild attack of conscience? At a party or reception the others would certainly have shaken my hand. The most I can hope for from the magistrates who will be convicting me is that they will conscientiously do their job, which is to apply the laws of class justice. The worst would be for me to be assigned to one of the judges who have given up their independence. In that case I would be judged indirectly by Pleven and Marcellin, those important plaintiffs who scarcely feel any affection for me.

There is not the slightest doubt that I have been eager to help liberate popular ethics and justice: this is my crime. A popular court would acquit me. But how can I reasonably think that a member of society's elite would be able to lower himself -- if it can be called lowering himself -- to the level of the oppressed and exploited people and to consider with the eyes of the people the crushing pedestals on which the bourgeois hierarchy sits? Nothing allows me to hope for that. I do not think I will be sentenced to prison. Or if I am, perhaps the sentence will be suspended. But I imagine -- for this is the usual government practice -- that a heavy fine will be imposed on me to cure me of my desire to leave my class. That is the price I will pay for having used my trial as a platform and having presented a political defense of a crime that cannot be political, since the government does not believe that such a thing exists.