At 8:30 pm this evening, on the show Secrets of the News, the French TV channel M6 will broadcast a documentary on the real paranoia that gripped the highest levels of the State in October 1980, when the citizen named Michel Colucci, better known as Coluche the Clown, decided to run for president and the first polls showed him drawing between 15 and 17 percent! The French presidency, then implicated in the affair of "Giscard's diamonds," tasked the Minister of the Interior, Christian Bonnet, to discourage the comic. By any means.
The name of the police officer from the General Intelligence [Service] who was charged with organizing the campaign of surveillance, harassment, calumnies, rumors, and destabilization of the candidate -- which went as far as death threats -- is not unknown to us. It is Guy Dauve, and this successful campaign would be the final touch to an exceptional career that began in the service of the Petainist State and, under the wing of his master, Maurice Papon,[1] blossomed under the Gaullist and Giscardian Republics. In 1997, I had the occasion to quickly sketch Dauve's "professional" itinerary in The Taste of Truth: Response to Gilles Perrault.[2]
Guy Dauve became a police officer in the Spring of 1943 and, in October of that year, became part of the first Special Brigade led by Labaume (see the archives of Labaume's trial, held in May 1945, in particular to AN, Z6 61, dossier 968). Before the war, the work of this Brigade consisted in collecting information about "the movements of the extreme Left: the socialists, the communists, the anarchists and their unions." In 1941, on behalf of Boemelburg, the leader of the Gestapo in France, this Brigade infiltrated and destroyed the communist resistance. In the newspaper Franc-Tireur,[3] Madeleine Jacob described the head of the first Special Brigade this way:
Head Commissioner Labaume was something akin to the Fuhrer of the informers who were tasked with surveilling the milieus of the extreme Left; his position gave him the right to indulgence. It made for good hunting.[4] To the five victims of his informer, Rastelli, condemned to death, he added Picant, Cadras, Politizer, and Jacques Solomon, as well as all those who were deported and perished slowly in the German camps.
A large number of those who had earned their reputations in the Vichy-era anti-communist repressions were called upon for help at the beginning of the Cold War. Guy Dauve never left office and continued to keep his files in his office, which looked out upon the Marche aux Fleurs. In 1955, when dozens were killed in the troubles in Casablanca, he was dispatched to Morocco to determine the structure of the movements that were opposed to the colonial administration. Having never hidden his extreme Right ideas, nor his military service on behalf of French Algeria, he was in Algers the following year, working with the parachutists under [General Jacque] Massu and Bigead, who subjected an entire people to the Question.
Back in Paris, he was the most relentless pursuer of the leaders of the Algeria FLN. It was by the hundreds that pro-independence militants who had fallen into his net were harshly interrogated and detained in camps such as the one at Thol, in the Ain, where Guy Dauve would visit on business several times. A detailed description of this camp appeared in 1962 in Le Nouveau Candide, the weekly publication of the Extreme Right created by the spy service of Constantin Melnik, the head of General Intelligence and Guy Dauve's boss.[5] Jacques Peyrolles, the "journalist" who ideologically promulgated the work of the police, was promised a brilliant career under the pseudonym Gilles Perrault (see sidebar).
In October 1961, Guy Dauve's men participated in raids during the terrifying repression that bloodied Paris. "The Algerians scream like savages," he had the habit of saying. Several weeks later, Guy Dauve received the Merite Civil medal. The prefect of police, Maurice Papon, gave him a handwritten note that said he would in command and carefully guarded until the end of his life: "I know all that you have done. Your leader is proud of you and thank you." A little later, Dauve would receive the Legion of Honor award.
Some of Dauve's work consisted in surveilling the press. Le Canard Enchaine dedicated a few short articles to him, and Dauve threatened several times to release photos showing the journalists in compromising situations. To blow off steam, Guy Dauve wrote a novel that Marcel Duhamel's Serie Noire would refuse to publish, though it did publish, under a pseudonym, the work of another celebrated agent with the General Intelligence [Service], Michel Baroin. The events of 1968 refreshed Dauve's career, and he became a close collaborator with Raymond Marcellin, the minister of the [federal] police, who was at war with the enemy within. Infiltration, manipulation, the formation of fake political groups and newspapers. . . . All this long before Barril and the affair of the Irish in Vincennes,[6] Thurenge d'Hernu's fake spouse,[7] and Pasqua's real-fake passports.[8] The imagination has taken power at l'Ile de la Cite!
It was around then that the son of Guy Dauve [born in 1947], taking on the pseudonym Jean Barrot to avoid identification by his father, became active in the ultra-Left. In a curious way, because it was essentially through his channels that the negationist writings of Paul Rassinier and texts that banalized genocide, such as "Auschwitz or the Great Alibi," would be promoted. Without his father's knowledge, Gilles Dauve formed a soldarity group for Puig Antich, a Spanish anarchist assassinated by Franco, and the meetings took place at the home of the Commissioner of the General Intelligence . . . Just like old times! During the Faurisson affair, Gilles Dauve wrote or co-edited several negationist texts that would be published in La Guerre Sociale or Le Frondeur. Later on, he would pursue a, shall we say, more discreetly revisionist project, La Banquise, with Serge Quadruppani. (See our article dated 12 March 2001.)
In 1980, Guy Dauve devoted himself to the destruction of Coluche. The arrival of the Left into power [in 1981] coincided with his retirement. For several years, he worked as a security consultant for an important business. He did not balk at lending a hand to his former masters when it was a question of bringing sensitive parcels from one place to another.
In 1996, Guy Dauve's son was in the news. Le Monde revealed on 8 June that the spokesman for Ras l'Front, Gilles Perrault -- the same person who visited Father Dauve's prisoners at Thol in 1961 -- had published a preface that whitewashed Gilles Dauve's negationist past. For good measure, the reputation of Serge Quadruppani -- who defended the "non-anti-Semite" Faurisson at great length in his books -- was also cleaned up. No one remarked at the time that, seven years earlier [in 1989], Gilles Perrault had helped helped his proteges by writing a preface for Serge Quadruppani's book Anti-Terrorism in France, which was based upon the most mysterious sources. . . .
Today, the author of that hardly ultra-Leftist book [Quadruppani] has re-entered the libertarian movement under the banner of situationism. Guy Debord, the founder of the Situationist International, left behind a critique of Quadruppani's book and Perrault's preface to it. In Debord's letter to Jean-Francois Martos dated 24 February 1990, one reads:
I read the Quadruppani. He is obviously a disinformer and perhaps a 'type b' disinformer. At least on the borderline? That is to say, manipulated by his dangerous associations (police-related or repenters) and also by the person who wrote the preface.
Debord ended the paragraph devoted to the one [Quadruppani] who adopted his message [about spectacular terrorism] with this: "Remove your mustache, we have recognized you. . . . Ass." This is a remark that one could place in the mouth of . . . . Coluche!
[1] Convicted in 1998 for Vichy-era "crimes against humanity."
[2] Born in 1931, Gilles Perrault (real name Jacques Peyrolles) was a Rightist as a youth. In 1961, he was among the parachutists who descended upon Algeria in order to work covertly against the resistance to French rule. Later that year, he wrote a book about exploits. After 1968, he "became" an ultra-Leftist.
[3] Published between 1941 and 1944.
[4] The literal meaning of the French (Un beau tableau de chasse) would be "A beautiful hunting picture."
[5] Born in 1927 Melkin was an American Secret Service agent before he started working for French counter-intelligence in the late 1950s.
[6] Captain Paul Barril was a high level military policeman and anti-terrorist expert who had to resign in 1983 due to his (mis)conduct in the Vincennes Affair. On 28 August 1982, the president's special antiterrorist squad arrested three members of an alleged IRA group that was supposedly active at the University of Vincennes in Paris. But the arrests were based upon planted and/or falsified evidence provided by Barril, who was forced to resign and become a specialist in "private" security.
[7] A reference to the destruction of the Rainbow Warrior by French secret services on 10 July 1985.
[8] See events of 1997 involved the the Minister of the Interior, Charles Pasqua.
Written by Didier Daeninckx [born 1949] and published 3 April 2001 by Aministia. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! 25 December 2009. All footnotes by the translator.
See notes added on 25-27 December 2009 concerning the censorship of this text.
