The writer Gilles Perrault, who had weighed heavily in the 1970s in favor of the abolition of the death penalty by publishing Le Pull-over rouge, died at the age of 92, AFP learned Thursday August 3 from from his family. The author died “last night” of cardiac arrest, his family told AFP, confirming information from Ouest-France.
Jacques Peyroles, his real name, had started a career as a lawyer before branching off into journalism and then literature. Under his pseudonym, he signed in 1969 a successful spy novel, Le Dossier 51, adapted into a film with Michel Deville. He was “not just a terrific storyteller. But also a committed man”, greeted journalist Edwy Plenel on Thursday evening in a message on Twitter, renamed X.
The name of this former member of the Communist Party comes up in many forums committed against racism, for the legalization of euthanasia, or in 2007 in favor of the former Italian activist Cesare Battisti. In 1978, the publication of the investigative book Le Pull-over rouge, which fueled doubts about the guilt of Christian Ranucci, guillotined two years earlier for the murder of a little girl, gave rise to a lively controversy, fueling the newspaper pages for more than thirty years.
Later books on the affair, and his repeated remarks about him (he had called the investigation into the murder of little Marie-Dolores Rambla a “forfaith”), would lead to his conviction, in particular for defamation of police officers from the criminal brigade of Marseilles. The death penalty was abolished in France in 1981, but the three requests for revision of the trial were never successful.
“A search for review is not a sprint, it’s a marathon,” the writer told AFP in 2006, still hoping one day to see the case re-examined. “There are authors and works that know how to arouse debate, and sometimes even vocations. If I became a lawyer, it is partly thanks to the red pullover”, reacted Thursday the president of the National Assembly Yaël Braun-Pivet.
In 1990, Gilles Perrault had been at the origin of one of the most serious crises in the history of Franco-Moroccan relations by publishing the resounding “Our friend the king”, which made a damning assessment of 30 years of the reign of Hassan II. “Gilles Perrault’s books are markers for my generation. There is a before and an after Our friend the king in Hassan II’s view of Morocco,” said Pierre Haski, journalist and president of Reporters Without Borders.
The work also wondered about the complacency of certain French elites with regard to the monarch. Perrault had prefaced in 2014 a book very critical of the current king of Morocco, son of Hassan II, written by a former Moroccan journalist for AFP Omar Brouksy. Entitled Mohammed VI behind the masks, it was subtitled “the son of our friend”, in reference to his famous work.
