The novelist Dan Franck will recount in a book to be published in September his trouble with the law, including a 40-day incarceration, in the case of the Direct Action group, his publisher announced Thursday. L’Arrestation (Grasset editions) is to be published on September 27, according to a publication program sent to the press. Dan Franck was placed in police custody for the first time in March 1984 during the terrorist investigation into this far-left group. Questioned again two months later, he does not consider that he has anything to reproach himself for or to declare.
In October 1984, he was arrested again, charged by Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière for “criminal association” and imprisoned in the prison of Health on his 32nd birthday. “He will stay there for forty days, half of which in complete isolation. During the last major Action Directe trial in 1987, he was given an 18-month suspended prison sentence,” recalls Grasset in the presentation of the book. Dan Franck wanted to help a friend by subletting him an apartment. However, the latter, Claude Halfen, had set up a Direct Action rear base there.
During the writer’s detention, his second novel, La Dame du soir (Mercure de France editions) appeared. He also continues from his cell, with the agreement of the examining magistrate, the writing of My natural medicine by the singer Rika Zaraï (Michel Lafon editions), which will be a bestseller.
Grasset speaks of this time in prison as “an episode known only to those close to him, a traumatic event that it took him forty years to write”. Direct Action remains in collective memory for the assassination of Renault CEO Georges Besse outside his home in Paris in November 1986. The group claimed responsibility for or was attributed nearly 80 other attacks between 1979 and 1987, which caused many casualties, killed or injured.
