Natacha Polony began her career as a journalist in Jean-François Kahn’s “Marianne”. A strong and lasting bond that has not prevented divergences over time and the movement of history. But our editorialist reminds us this Thursday, January 23, on the day of the death of “JFK”: she “learned everything” from this man who was as much a part of Victor Hugo, “by his thirst for justice”, as of the 21st century, “by his denunciation of single thought.
Marianne lost his father and France lost its most turbulent child. Jean-François Kahn was one of those brilliant minds who do not fit into any of the expected frameworks. He was expected to be a journalist, he published philosophical books; he was imagined to be on the left, he made himself the most ardent defender of overcoming divisions; we saw him as a press boss, he proudly carried his commitments and transformed each conference, each book signing into a political meeting from which the public left exhilarated.
The project of Mariannean iconoclastic and passionately committed newspaper, alone tells the story of the love that Jean-François Kahn had for his country and the way in which he wanted to prevent it from the chasms that he saw widening and the tensions that he saw rising. Above all, he had seen conformism corrupt political and media circles and alienate them from citizens who were bearing the brunt of this neoliberalism of which he had become the first critic.
Hugo for model
Above all, he had understood that the injunction to “not play into the hands of the FN” was a gag placed on the mouths of the most fragile, the poorest, of all those whom the race for profit was gradually excluding and that, if journalism serves a purpose, it is precisely to “ say what you see » and, in the words of Charles Péguy, “ above all, what is more difficult, to see what we see ».
« My grandfatherwrote Jean-Paul Sartre in The Words, was a man of the 19th century and, like all men of the 19th century, and like Victor Hugo himself, he thought he was Victor Hugo. » Through his culture, through his love of France, its landscapes, its operettas and its literature, through his thirst for justice and freedom, through his immense admiration for Victor Hugo, his model, Jean-François Kahn was a man of the 19th century. But through his vision of major ideological movements, through his denunciation of unique thinking and through his conception of a newspaper supported by a community of activist readers, he was, profoundly, a man of the 21st century.
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From Victor Hugo, he had kept his faith in Man. The dream, too, of the United States of Europe (with Paris as its capital?). It was one of his great fights. But he was not one of those smug idolaters for whom the main merit of the European Union was to get around a people who were a little too cumbersome. This is the reason why, he, the great European, he who voted “yes” in Maastricht (even if he said in recent years that he would perhaps not do it again) and “yes” in the referendum on the Constitutional Treaty, was never on the side of those who insulted the wrong-thinking and the wrong-voters.
Overruns
On the contrary, he was the first critic of this Union and all the force of Marianne was, in 2005, to be the newspaper which organized the debate without propaganda or contempt. For what ? Because, alone among all press bosses, Jean-François Kahn spent his life meeting his readers, and the French in general. In the smallest community hall, in the most remote village, he would debate with these people whom the media had long since erased. This is where he drew his intuitions and his irreverence.
-This irreverence earned him many attacks and many enmities. We must remember what the first years of Marianneaccused by the right of being a leftist firebrand and by the left of being a far-right rag. Jean-François Kahn hated sectarianism more than anything. This “revolutionary centrism” that he theorized was the Copernican revolution which would put Man at the center of the game and make it possible to overcome a left-right divide experienced in France on the model of the wars of religion.
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It was this dream of surpassing himself that made him commit to François Bayrou and run for the European elections in 2009. It was also he who made him consider that Emmanuel Macron, in 2017, could embody political hope. This was one of the areas of disagreement between us when I took over the management of this newspaper that he had founded and where I had learned everything from him.
I saw a major difference between the revolutionary centrism of Jean-François and the alliance of right and left liberals operated by Emmanuel Macron. This is also the reason for his divergence with his newspaper about the Yellow Vests, in which he saw a fascist movement, when I read there the consequences of neoliberal deregulation that Jean-François Kahn and Marianne had been diagnosed twenty years ago.
The courage it took
There is one subject, however, on which Marianne and its founder were always in sync, these are international issues. In Thursday Event as in MarianneJean-François Kahn had a worry and a fight: the worry of seeing the West, under the rule of the Americans, impose an imperialism destructive of international law and the fight against the neoconservative current which, everywhere in the world, has sown wars with tragic consequences.
It took courage in 1999 to denounce the bombing of Belgrade by NATO outside the rules of international law, while the entire media and political community applauded. It took courage in 2003 to be the first newspaper to speak out against the invasion of Iraq through articles and demonstrations. It took courage to tirelessly defend the Israeli and Palestinian two-state solution, even at the worst moments of tension between the two peoples.
Jean-François Kahn, in recent years, feared more than anything the emergence of a new form of fascism, a consequence of the blindness that he had spent his life denouncing. His love of France and the French, like his iconoclasm, are the best antidotes.
