Albert Paul-Lentin

Albert Paul-Lentin born with Constantine the August 28th 1923, and dead the December 23rd 1993 was a French journalist.

Biography

He is high in a pied-noir family whose father is a linguist Arabist. Aspiring to the lawyer trade, it follows studies of right, but also of philosophy at the university of Algiers where it binds friendship with Jean Daniel. It leaves there graduate right and philosophy. Engaged in resistance within a network gaullist, it takes part with this last in the takeover of Algiers on November 8th, 1942 then in the engagements for the release of Corsica in 1943. Operations manager (2nd class) with the court of Nuremberg at the sides of Edgar Faure, he becomes press attaché with the French High commissioner in Austria.

Journalist

Embracing the career of journalist in 1948, it takes part in the launching of the Caliban review and enters to Libération of D' Astier of Vigerie where it is essential as specialist in the Maghreb and the Middle East where he becomes deputy manager of his foreign service. Enthusiastic anticolonialist, near to the Moroccan leader Mehdi Ben Barka, it supports walk towards the independence of the third world and Maghreb countries in the various newspapers (Action, France Observer,…) or reviews ( Spirit, Modern times) to which he collaborates. If it is expelled into 1961 of Algeria where it special correspondent for Libération, it takes part thereafter in the secret negotiations between French and Algerian persons in charge. It draws some from the War of Algeria of the books of testimony like Algeria of the colonels (brought together French Editors, 1958), the last Fifteen minutes (Julliard, 1963) or the fight tricontinentale (Maspero, 1967).

Its knowledge of the files and the actors “is sometimes reduced by the ideological Manicheism” of which it makes share. with the fact, as it defines it in the foreword of the last Fifteen minutes, its code of conduct wants to be singular: “If, according to a criterion rather generally admitted, the ideal witness is not impassioned of a great able cause, for it, to be made cut the throat of (and to cut the throat of if necessary), but the recorder well placed, privileged, but passive, physically in the middle of the fray and psychologically above, then I challenge the quality of witness. I assert that of spectator-actor rather. ”

Entered with the foreign service of the Nouvel Observateur in 1965, it continues its combat anticolonialist and anti-imperialism there on the questions of Vietnam or the israélo-Palestinian conflict. About the latter, it takes part in the creation of a movement of assistance to the Palestinian cause and the Arab revolution which reveals it, within the newspaper, like “Palestinian with the knives between the teeth”. On this question, it is favorable to creation two States having for finality to amalgamate in a whole having Jerusalem like common capital.

With some of its writers on the left, it leaves the newspaper in 1969 and founds in 1970 Policy-Hebdo with Paul Noirot. The weekly magazine of which he is member of the direction disappears in 1978. After its retirement, he was chronicler with RFI.

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