The Douarnenez festival, in Brittany, includes films but also books to explore the chosen theme, in this case this year the “underground Helvetians”. The French-speaking Swiss writer Daniel de Roulet accompanied the debates all this week and brought his point of view on this country where secrecy, whether banking or otherwise, has a long history. Meet.
From our special correspondent,
Nuclear in France: four reactors, including three at the Cattenom nuclear power plant, are shut down due to corrosion problems. It is a title of the daily press of this Friday August 26, date on which Daniel de Roulet, Swiss writer and former computer engineer, has an appointment with his readers at the Douarnenez festival. ” I once worked on the site of a power plant “, writes Daniel de Roulet, in the chapter devoted to Cattenom in his latest book Atomic France (2021). In the footsteps of Julien and André, the two children of the famous book The tour of France of two children (1877) written in homage to hardworking and inventive France recovering from the defeat of 1871 and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, Daniel de Roulet toured the atomic power stations in operation to understand this scientific and technique and tell how little by little an opposition emerged. In the passage on Cattenom, he points out the poor state of the plant. ” Not everyone is as enthusiastic as Julien and André when it comes to the marvels of technology. The German and Luxembourg ministers, whose countries are ten kilometers from the plant, were surprised that Fessenheim had been arrested, but not Cattenom, which, according to them, is in much worse condition. “.
In the book, very documented, he also underlines the semantic contortions over time on the term atomic, gradually erased from the vocabulary, in favor of nuclear now more used. The atom is the bomb, the nuclear is light. On this theme of the atom, he also wrote a saga retracing its history and its civil and military uses by featuring two families. Dear Julien and dear André, he writes again in Atomic Francee, ” you had learned to love progress, I’m not sure I still believe it when each novelty comes at such a high price », regretting, during our interview on « blocking in France on this issue, particularly for strategic and military issues.
► Also to listen : Daniel de Roulet, author of “You didn’t see anything in Fukushima”
About thirty books in total, ten novels on the atom (the famous saga), several texts – novels and chronicles – on the marathon or the walk (in the footsteps of characters or writers), and the Swiss national novel too on the job: Daniel de Roulet does not belong to any literary chapel. Unclassifiable and difficult to present “, recognized Christian Ryo, director of the festival at the opening of the round table of readers. He also became a writer late in his fifties, after turning the page on his previous jobs as an architect and engineer. At the very beginning of my life as a writer, which coincided with a stay in the United States and the discovery of the marathon, my project was to write for the scientists with whom I worked, explains Daniel de Roulet. These are people who read little, apart from technical texts, and there was no literature for them. However, his pen, if it is precise, is not technical but in tune with the characters or the subject.
The other side of the Swiss national narrative
“ There is a political dimension in the writings of Daniel de Roulet, relatively little present in the writings of other writers from French-speaking Switzerland. “, also explained Christian Ryo. Son of a pastor, Daniel de Roulet told how he had become aware very early, because of the vocation of his father, of the existence of social classes, the poor as well as the rich coming to the cure. Denouncing the Swiss political system of consensus “ monopolized by money », he explores the other side of the national narrative, the history that the Swiss want to forget, the one that is little or not told. It reminds us, for example, and it is also a subject that Stephane Goel explored in his documentary West of the Pecos, that Switzerland was a country of poor peasants, forced to emigrate so as not to starve, in the 19th century, like the Irish. A hidden story, which he tells from a particular angle in The Ten Little Anarchists, big success in Douarnenez where the title has disappeared from bookstores. We are at the time when the anarchist movement is structured in Switzerland, in Saint-Imier in 1872.
This book was born from a trip to Latin America and the desire to tell the forced exodus – by the public authorities – of the poor Swiss, says Daniel de Roulet.
This is not a historical novel, he says. It’s about using ” fiction to explain that people whose story has not been told still had a story. In Switzerland, these are not promising themes “.
About this book and the concept of globality which is dear to him – as opposed to globalization which means the competition of each against everyone to generate the maximum profits – the writer pays homage to the anarchist geographer ELise Reclus, coiner of the term. ” Globality is not to be (or feel?) dependent on a single culture, a single country, a single nationality “, proposes the one who likes to define himself, in the form of a joke, as” cross-border “. ” It is to admit that we were born in a place by chance, that we speak a language by chance but also that we are part of a humanity which is not by chance “. According to him, anarchists like Élisée Reclus also had another merit, that of having reflected on themes left aside by the dominant labor movement (of Marxist inspiration) such as the environment, the place of women, alternative forms of social organization, so many very topical questions, according to Daniel de Roulet. This is perhaps what explains the current renewed interest in the work of Reclus.
The hidden stories
Daniel de Roulet, who lived with his family for 18 years in a squat in Zürich (during the famous movement of the 80s), also tells how he became aware of the more than 3 kg of documentation that the Swiss police had collected on him. A large system of listening to citizens set up secretly by the power during the Cold War. ” We noticed that a quarter of adults had a police file “. The writers Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt – both German-speaking Swiss – were also the subject of this surveillance and were very affected by it, continues Daniel de Roulet who salutes their memory and for whom their sudden death undoubtedly has to do with with this track. All countries have their shameful sequences, looted Jewish property, Nazi gold, dirty bank money for Switzerland; France as well of course, and he evokes Hitler’s tribute and his officers on June 23, 1940, as soon as they entered Paris, to Napoleon in his tomb. A photograph that cannot be found in French history books.
He tackled another phenomenon in Swiss history, that of mercenaries. In Switzerland, he says, there is a story that we are told, that of the founding of the country in 1291 and which has since been success story. We just had a little hiccup in Marignan (1515) after which it was decided not to fight against the big guys anymore but to put troops at their disposal “. There begins the story of the mercenaries on which he is currently working: the sequence takes place in 1791 when a company of mercenaries revolts because their salary had not been completely paid… Money, in Switzerland as elsewhere, the sinews of war… Mercenaries who will end up as heroes of the Revolution, leaving to posterity the famous red cap and the motto Liberty-equality.
This will therefore be his next novel – to be published next year – and necessarily the best, he explains. Because if we are not convinced that we have something even more interesting to tell, we don’t write anymore! »
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