Farewell to Alexandre Adler, political scientist, essayist, curious

One of the most brilliant French “italianisants”, commentator for Monde, Figaro, Libération, and other magazines, dies. He never needed to deny the past, or pass himself off as a Kennedyan like the contemporary Walter Veltroni

And now that Alexandre Adler is gone too, Paris is moving even further away from Rome. One of the most brilliant of the French “italianisants” disappears with him. Political scientist, essayist, commentator for il Monde, il Figaro, Libération, and other magazines, Adler, river verb and hawk’s gaze, was a vast, round man, animated by an unbreakable optimism; a cosmopolitan intellectual born in 1950 into a family of Bohemian Jews, of Russian-German origin and who lived in Turkey, where his father, who survived deportation, had worked as an engineer on the railways before arriving in France in the 1930s. Polyglot, he spoke Italian fluently, even though he had never studied it. He had been a communist, but being a free and libertarian spirit, married to the historian Blandine Barret Kriegel, daughter of the hero of the resistance and leader of the PCF Maurice Kriegel, he never needed to renounce the past, or pass himself off as a Kennedyan like the contemporary Walter Veltroni. “What kind of story is that? – he wondered – He could have said that as a communist he understood that he was wrong. But to say that he has never been ideologically communist means having the wrong relationship with reality and with oneself”. Provocative and irreverent like someone who traditionally has an open dispute with the Almighty, as well as being very close to his double Gregor Gysi, leader of the SED, and then of the Party of Democratic Socialism, did not fear the truth. “I was a communist with great enthusiasm. I have tried in good faith to organize good things. I learned the lesson. We weren’t wrong about the details, on the contrary, the details weren’t that bad. But the general context, Marxism, suspicion of the market, appreciation of the dictatorships of Eastern Europe, in short, it was the very heart of communism that didn’t hold”.