The Writer as Witness and Social Critic: Charlotte Delbo on October 17, 1961, and May ’68

CHARLOTTE DELBO (1913–1985) is best known for her searing accounts of Auschwitz and deportation, but she also produced a rich and varied corpus of plays, poems, and essays denouncing oppression in France and beyond. This article examines two highly original yet little known works in which Delbo lends her voice to protesters in 1960s France: her eye-witness account of the demonstration of Algerians in Paris of October 17, 1961, “La septième année de la guerre d’Algérie” [The Seventh Year of the Algerian War], and her remarkable play about the student and worker movement of May 1968, La théorie et la pratique [Theory and Practice].1 Taken together, these two texts display Delbo’s range as a writer, vibrant political commitment, and determination to engage the diversity of voices in the public sphere. In examining Delbo’s writings on French protest movements of the 1960s, this article necessarily also interrogates the longstanding resistance to Delbo’s work in France, indeed, the degree to which a significant part of her work remains marginalized and neglected.2 “La septième année de la guerre d’Algérie” is still unpublished in Delbo’s archives. Jean-Jacques Vierne’s radio adaptation of La théorie et la pratique was broadcast on French national radio on October 29, 1970,3 but the play has never been staged in theaters. The script was published in 1968 by Éditions Anthropos, the same small Parisian press that brought out Henri Lefebvre’s essay on May ’68, L’irruption de Nanterrre au sommet [The Explosion: Marxism and the French Upheaval],4 and has been reprinted in a collected edition of nine plays by Delbo, Qui rapportera ces paroles (Paris: Fayard, 2013); nonetheless, it has yet to receive the critical attention it merits.5 This article seeks to counter this erasure by bringing the breadth of Delbo’s work into fuller view. It also takes up a question raised by Michael Rothberg as to the fascinating and under-acknowledged intellectual rapport between Delbo and sociologist Henri Lefebvre, whom she makes into a major protagonist in La théorie et la pratique. As documented by Lefebvre’s biog-