Garaudy joined the
French Communist Party in 1933.[7] By mid 1940s, Garaudy was considered a leading
polemicist within the party.[8] He rose through the ranks and in 1945 he became a member of the party's leadership[7] and its Central Executive Committee, where he occupied positions for 28 years.[5]
Garaudy remained a Christian and eventually re-converted to Catholicism during his political career. Eventually he converted to Islam.[9] He was befriended by one of France's most prominent clerics of the time, the
Abbé Pierre, who in later years supported Garaudy, even regarding the latter's most controversial views.[10]
Garaudy lectured in the faculty of arts department of the
University of Clermont-Ferrand from 1962 to 1965. Due to controversies between Garaudy and
Michel Foucault, Garaudy left. He later taught in
Poitiers from 1969 to 1972.[2]
His main research subject was foundations of revolutionary politics.[5]
Political and philosophical views
As of 1940s, Garaudy was critical of
Jean-Paul Sartre's view of freedom, maintaining that it lacks any social, economic, political or historical context.[8] He criticized Being and Nothingness for what he deemed not going beyond the domain of metaphysical pathology, and Sartre's novels for "depicting only degenerates and human wrecks" and describing his existentialism as "a sickness".[8]
In 1974, Frederic Will described him as sympathetic towards
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and
Gabriel Marcel. He held that the Western culture was something of a coalition between the
idealistic philosophy and the
elite class, which is devoted to turning man away from the material world.[13] The goal of
socialism in his view was not simply economic or providing social justice, but also giving each individual their personal chances for creativity.[5]
Conversion to Islam
Around 1980, Garaudy read The Green Book by
Muammar Gaddafi and became interested in Libya and
Islam, meeting the country's leader on several occasions in the desert. He converted formally at the Islamic Centre in Geneva, an organisation managed by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia at the time.
In The Case of Israel: A Study of Political Zionism (1983), Garaudy portrays
Zionism as an
isolationist and
segregationist ideology that is not only dependent on
antisemitism to nourish, but also willfully encourages it to achieve its goals.[14]
In 1996, Garaudy[15] published, with his editor
Pierre Guillaume, the work Les Mythes fondateurs de la politique israelienne (literally, The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics), later translated into English as The Founding Myths of Modern Israel. In the book he wrote of "the myth of the six million" Jewish victims of the
Holocaust.[16] Because of this breach of
French law concerning Holocaust denial, the courts banned any further publication and on 27 February 1998 fined Garaudy 120,000
French francs.[6] He was sentenced to a suspended jail sentence of several years.
Garaudy v. France
Garaudy appealed this decision to the
European Court of Human Rights, stating that his book was a political work criticizing the policies of
Israel that did not deny that the Nazis had committed crimes against humanity, and that his freedom of expression was interfered by the French courts. At his hearing, Garaudy stated that his book in no way condoned
National Socialist methods, and that book was an attack on the mythologizing and use of "the holocaust" by Israeli government as policy. He argued that his book dealt with the Israeli government's use of "the holocaust" as a "justifying dogma" for its actions, mainly in Palestine and toward Palestinians.[17]
His appeal was rejected as inadmissible.[16][18] The ECHR ruled that Garaudy has denied historical facts in his book which is not a research work. It also argued that the interference pursued two of the legitimate aims included in
Gayssot Act articles and is not a violation of Garaudy's right for free speech. The ECHR did not use this rationale in Perinçek v. Switzerland.[19]
Iranian support
In
Iran, 160 members of the
parliament and 600 journalists signed a petition in Garaudy's support.[20][21] On 20 April 1998, Iran's
Supreme LeaderAyatollahAli Khamenei met Garaudy. Khamenei was critical of the West which, he said, condemned "the racist behavior of the Nazis" while accepting the
Zionists’ "Nazi-like behavior."[22] Iranian president,
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, insisted in a sermon delivered on Iranian radio that Hitler "only killed 20,000 Jews and not six million" and that "Garaudy's crime derives from the doubt he cast on Zionist propaganda."[23] Iranian President,
Mohammad Khatami, described Garaudy in 1998 as "a thinker" and "a believer" who was brought to trial merely for publishing research which was "displeasing to the West."[22]
According to
Azzam Tamimi, Tunisian thinker
Rached Ghannouchi was inspired by Garaudy in the early 1980s, after he read a translation of his book on women. He subsequently authored a treatise on women rights and on the status of women in the Islamic movement, partly influenced by Garaudy's work.[27]
^
abcdefEdouard, Morot-Sir (1980), "Garaudy, Roger (1913–)", The Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature (2nd ed.), Columbia University Press,
ISBN978-0-231-03717-4
^
abcDrake, David (2010), "The 'Anti-Existentialist Offensive': The French Communist Party against Sartre (1944—1948)", Sartre Studies International, 16 (1): 69–94,
doi:
10.3167/ssi.2010.160105,
JSTOR23512854
^
abMenashri, David.
"Iran, the Jews and the Holocaust". The Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism, Tel Aviv University. Archived from
the original on 1 February 2009.