The famous French lawyer Jacques Vergès takes the stage to tell us that defending is a way of life. He explains that during a trial, a real drama unfolds before our eyes, a duel between the prosecution and the defense. The lawyer and the prosecutor tell two stories that are not true but verisimilar. And when even the last echo of eloquence has faded, in the courtroom it is not so much a matter of asserting the right to the truth as of proclaiming the winner.
Can it be said, then, that truth is not within the reach of Justice?

Caio Melisso July 10 at 6:30 p.m.
MEETING with Jacques Vergès

Jacques Vergès
Born 1925 to Ubon Rachtani (in present-day Thailand) from father from Reunion and mother from Vietnam. From his teenage years he is very sensitive to political issues, and once he obtains his high school diploma he will leave the island of Reunion to join the Resistance in France. In 1945 he joined the French Communist Party, which he would leave in 1957. He graduated in law, and his work as a lawyer would always be influenced by his political views. From 1970 to 1978 he literally disappeared, and never wanted to reveal where he spent those years, although there was speculation that he might be in Lebanon, to Moscow or to collaborating with Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge.
Known for his anti-colonialism, in his career he has defended Algerian guerrillas such as Djamila Bouhired, Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, and terrorist Carlos, setting up his defenses in a wholly original way: the so-called "breakthrough" trial sees the accused impeaching those who try him, calling the public to to testify.

(from an interview by Frédéric Franck to Jacques Vergès)

A theater scene is exactly where impossible trials can take place in reality. If your trial could have been held after the war, would you have agreed to defend Adolf Hitler? And if so, to what a breakthrough trial (ed, a trial in which the accused becomes the accuser and calls to public opinion as a witness) against such a man, who would have had primarily among his charges the concept of the "final solution," the extermination of Europe's Jews, homosexuals, and gypsies?
Defending Hitler is obviously the dream of any lawyer worth the name, of a judicial artist and not an expert in social climbing. And to instruct his case, one would have to rely not on Mein Kampf, opera circumstantial and commonplace of all the racisms of the time, but on the precisely collected conversations from Martin Bormann, from which comes out a Dostojveskian hero, a possessed man, a Stavrogin capable of realizing all his challenges to current morality, more concerned with aesthetics than rationality. He is the kind of ambiguous character made to give rise to the most contradictory myths.

April 2009: Osama Bin Laden is captured in the Pakistani mountains in the border area of Afghanistan by the U.S. military. He offers no resistance. He chooses her as his defense attorney. Does he accept? What breakthrough process for the man of 9/11? How would you plan to defend him?
I would definitely accept. In this case the defense is simple. You Westerners occupy materially part of the Muslim community and spiritually the whole, as heads of state and kings are pawns in your hands. We bring war from you as you bring it from us. And the attacks that we commit are no different from the bombings and embargoes that civilians are victims of from us.

One news story, after the invasion of Iraq from by the U.S. military, said that in a country in North Africa a trial against the most powerful man in the world, U.S. President George W. Bush, was planned to . Such a trial today is evidently impossible except in one place in the world: a theater scene. More, not of in a state theater, but of in a private theater, the Théâtre de la Madeleine. You have stated that you would also take on Bush's defense. How would you set up your defense? How would you explain the intervention in Afghanistan, the intervention in Iraq, and the Guantanamo camp? Again, how would this be a breaking process against George Bush?
The Bush process cannot be a breaking process, because his action corresponds to the morality of the West. There is a world of Good, ours, and a world of Evil, the world of others, and the earth is too small for them to coexist. It is necessary for one of them to disappear. Since we are the strongest it will be the world of others. And there is from no wonder that our methods do not correspond to what we claim to believe, for in a war situation the same rules that mark normality do not apply.

It seems to us that one of the common threads of her opera advocacy through her successive and contradictory posts are the pressing questions directed at the certainties and good faith of the Western world. It is as if she is forcing the world's powerful to to look in a mirror. In looking back on her life, is this not what guided her? Consciously or unconsciously? Or is this too reductive a view?
Just as Tolstoi was according to Aragon the mirror of the Russian Revolution and Chrétien de Troyes that of feudal society, its customs, its greatnesses and weaknesses, the trials are indeed the mirror of our society. Every age has the mirror it deserves, but there is Beauty in the horrid, and Goya is no less human than Raphael.

Does her own playful and aestheticizing approach reveal a distance regarding the search for truth? And if so, is it because in her eyes there is no truth? Or rather because in her eyes a plurality of truths coexist at the same time regarding the same action, none of which is more so than the others?
I should quote Pascal: "Truth on this side of the Pyrenees, error on the other side." No truth can emerge from a trial, because more important than facts is man, and that man escapes the blurred lenses of our judges, the binary logic of interrogations. from this comes the ambiguous beauty of the characters in successful trials, ready to all metamorphoses. Joan of Arc, commander of soldiers, becomes a witch, then a saint; the smuggler Mandrin becomes a knight without a king; Raymond la Science is not the same in the eyes of a banker and in the eyes of a proletarian.

When you argue that the lawyer's role would go as far as to giving meaning to the life of the accused, do you not reveal yourself to be an unsuspected humanist?
If humanism is understood to mean considering man as the sole end, I am a humanist. But when humanism becomes humanitarianism and humanitarianism gives one the right to judge others on the basis of one's ideal self-image, I am not a humanist. The true humanist is a pacifist. The humanitarian, an aggressor in good faith.

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