Ten years after the death of Simon Leys, Public Senate pays a vibrant tribute to this Belgian intellectual who made the mistake of being right too early, by denouncing Maoism at a time when it was venerated by the German-speaking left.
For having deciphered in 1971, in Chairman Mao’s New Clothes, the driving forces behind the Cultural Revolution – Mao’s strategy to keep power despite the criminal failure of the Great Leap Forward – Pierre Ryckmans (Simon Leys is a pseudonym) been ignored, despised, even dragged through the mud by those who held the upper hand, including Le Monde.
It was not until 1983 that Bernard Pivot invited him to speak on television, in an anthology issue of “Apostrophes” during which the sinologist trashed one of the most fervent Maoists, Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, also present on the board.
The documentary by Fabrice Gardel and Mathieu Weschler presents in broad strokes his life, from his birth in 1935 in a Brussels family to his death in Sydney in 2014, including of course his stay in Hong Kong in the mid-1960s and his six months as cultural advisor at the Belgian embassy in Beijing in 1972. However, this film is, in fact, as much devoted to the errors of the Maoists as to the biography of the idol breaker.
Collective myopia
Beyond Ms. Macciocchi, but also Philippe Sollers and André Glucksmann, the film denounces an entire generation for whom ideology was not based on any knowledge. Although he too was fascinated by Maoism, Simon Leys made the effort to learn Chinese, to carefully read the propaganda that reached Hong Kong and to discuss with the refugees who, at the risk of their lives, fled mainland China to find refuge in the British colony. A conscientious researcher’s work, which earned him the name “CIA agent”.
One of the main interests of the documentary is to give voice to several key actors or witnesses of this period, including Amélie Nothomb, daughter of a Belgian diplomat who worked directly with Ryckmans in Beijing, and especially René Viénet, the one of the rare sinologists to have supported Simon Leys from the start. “We imposed the truth against people who were powerful, well-organized and odious,” he testifies.
Apart from the indescribable Alain Badiou, witness to a bygone era, few intellectuals today declare themselves Maoists. But it was not until the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989 that Simon Leys’ analyzes gained definitive support. The damage of this collective myopia has been considerable. If Simon Leys ended his life in Australia, it was in particular because the French university did not want to offer him a position.
Through this portrait, the documentary puts a generation of French intellectuals and sinologists on trial. We can therefore regret that he does not dwell more on the personality of his hero, the role of his Christian religious convictions or his immense literary talent, which made Leys a formidable polemicist.
Decades later, it is with delight that we continue to devour Chairman Mao’s New Clothes (Ivrea) or his Chinese Shadows (Free Field, 1974), while the writings of his adversaries have fallen into oblivion . If the documentary brings little to those who know Simon Leys, it has the merit of introducing this great intellectual and humanist figure to all others.
