June 5: Adventures in Hasbara

Bibi vows powerful response to Hezbollah; IAEA censures Iran; Biden is old, WSJ reports

---

---

The Big Story

You’ll often hear anti-Zionist types attacking what they imagine to be Israel’s sophisticated hasbara efforts, which—along with bags of Jewish money—“hypnotize” the world into support for Israel, to paraphrase a certain Somali American Congresswoman from Minnesota. 

The truth is that Israeli propaganda is quite bad and often ends up sounding to American ears like a caricature of a foreigner straight out of a ’70s SNL skit: “Israel great country! We kill many terrorists! Israeli women most beautiful. Boys too. Israel best country for gays!” The American public has traditionally been pro-Israel, but that—contra the anti-Zionists—has been due to a mixture of Anglo-Protestant philosemitism, a visceral distaste for Islamic terrorism, and the fact that “Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser,” in the words of Gen. George S. Patton—an antisemite, but also a noted winner, and thus an American folk hero. Hasbara hasn’t entered into the equation.

For Exhibit A, see this Wednesday story in The New York Times on a $2 million, post-Oct. 7 Israeli influence operation, which featured crude fake news sites with names like Non-Agenda and UnFold Magazine and swarms of social media bots—largely followed by other social media bots—posing as American Jews while haranguing Black U.S. members of Congress to support aid to Israel. Far from being effective, the campaign’s sheer stupidity makes for some unintentionally funny reading. The Times reports:

In at least two instances, accounts with profile photos of Black men posted about being a “middle-aged Jewish woman.” On 118 posts in which the fake accounts shared pro-Israel articles, the same sentence appeared: “I gotta reevaluate my opinions due to this new information.”

This fake account network—which “didn’t have a widespread impact,” according to Meta and OpenAI—was discovered in March by the Israeli misinformation watchdog FakeReporter. The Times’ reporting, however, confirms that it was a project of the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, which hired Stoic, a Tel Aviv “political marketing firm,” to run a “digital campaign” targeting the United States to support the Israeli war effort. Many of the social media posts appear to have been generated with ChatGPT. 

On the other hand, what Tablet contributor Lee Smith has dubbed the “Global Empire of Palestine” does have a quite sophisticated propaganda apparatus. Just take the following poll of British voters, published Wednesday in UnHerd:

In a separate question, the poll found that 50% of U.K. voters aged 18-24 blamed the Israeli government for the war in Gaza, vs. only 25% who blamed Hamas. 

As the writer Wesley Yang put it on X in response to the poll results, “We know this from other issues and contexts: the reduction of complex sociopolitical phenomena to easily memorable and repeatable slogans and mantras can remake public opinion rapidly.” And it certainly helps when you have the White House, the State Department, and the Chinese Communist Party-manipulated TikTok algorithm on your side.

We do hold out hope, however, that at least some of those British youth will discover Tablet’s coverage of the war, and decide that they gotta reevaluate their opinions due to the new information.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Jeff Weiss on the strange, sad odyssey of Serge Gainsbourg

---

The Rest

→During a Wednesday visit to Kiryat Shmona, one of the northern border towns engulfed by flames on Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that Israel had prepared an “extremely powerful” response to Hezbollah. Bibi’s comments come one day after IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi stated that the IDF was “nearing a decision” on whether to launch a war against Hezbollah, and as news broke that the IDF had raised the cap on reservists from 300,000 to 350,000—although Israeli military sources told The Times of Israel that the move was related to the Gaza front, not to the north. Our feeling is that Israel’s leaders would do well to act, rather than issue more of the same “extremely powerful” statements they’ve been issuing for months. Eleven more Israelis were injured, one critically, in a Hezbollah drone attack on Hurfeish in northern Israel on Wednesday.

→The International Atomic Energy Agency voted on Wednesday to formally censure Iran over its nuclear program and its refusal to cooperate with agency inspectors, in a move led by the British and French governments. The Wall Street Journal reported last Monday that the United States was lobbying behind the scenes to convince Britain and France not to move forward with the censure vote, despite a confidential IAEA report finding that Iran had enriched uranium to 30 times the limit established in the Iran nuclear deal and was now sitting on enough highly enriched uranium to produce three to four nuclear weapons within a week. According to European diplomats quoted in a Wednesday story in the WSJ, U.S. negotiators waited until this morning to clarify that they would back the censure vote but added—with echoes of Gaza—that the vote must be “tied to a broader strategy.” The Biden administration has stated that it will never allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons, but last March then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley let slip that the U.S. policy was merely to prevent Iran from having a fielded nuclear weapon—i.e., one that is deployed. 

→Quote of the Day: 

It is not too dramatic to say that the Iran deal echo chamber inaugurated a new era of American politics driven by party-directed propaganda. It established the informational networks that allowed the Democratic Party to repeat the formula in the future. And indeed, this is precisely what has happened, in a pattern recurring at increasingly frequent intervals ever since: in, to name but a few, the false claims that Russia “hacked” the US election to anoint Donald Trump, that Hunter Biden’s laptop was an act of Russian disinformation, and most recently in relation to Gaza.

That’s from an essay by Jacob Siegel in UnHerd on “Biden’s secret support for Iran.” If you’re looking for something to send to incredulous friends or relatives who just can’t believe that Biden isn’t on Israel’s side, this is a good place to start. 

Read the whole thing here: https://unherd.com/2024/06/bidens-secret-support-for-iran/ 

→The Wall Street Journal also ran a story on Wednesday, based on months of interviews with more than 45 people, alleging that Biden is “slipping”—i.e., slowing down—behind closed doors, which should be news to anyone who’s been holed up on Lubang Island for the past four years. However, this excerpt jumped out at us:

The White House kept close tabs on some of The Wall Street Journal’s interviews with Democratic lawmakers. After the offices of several Democrats shared with the White House either a recording of an interview or details about what was asked, some of those lawmakers spoke to the Journal a second time and once again emphasized Biden’s strengths. 

“They just, you know, said that I should give you a call back,” said Rep. Gregory Meeks, a New York Democrat, referring to the White House.

Bates, the White House spokesman, said: “We thought it was important that all perspectives be represented” to correct what he said were “false and politically motivated claims.” 

In other words, as The Washington Free Beacon’s Chuck Ross put it on X, the White House is “keeping tabs on journo interviews with Dems about Biden’s cognitive decline and then pressuring Dems to say only good things.” Following the publication of the WSJ story, several Congressional Democrats took to X to praise Biden’s “wisdom, experience, strength and strategic thinking,” in the words of Nancy Pelosi. 

Read the full article here. 

→We noted yesterday that Biden’s executive order clamping down on illegal border crossings included several loopholes, but an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo obtained by The Washington Free Beacon spells those out in detail. Even when the border is shut down, according to the memo, any “noncitizen” claiming to be subject to “urgent humanitarian” conditions—including an “acute medical emergency,” “an imminent and extreme threat to life and safety,” or a “fear of return”—will be referred to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services rather than be subject to expedited removal. The problem, as Art Arthur explained yesterday, is that “poor and/or non-existent vetting of such migrant protection claims by Biden’s DHS is the biggest current impediment to border enforcement” and will likely swallow the 2,500 per day limit established by the executive order. In a Wednesday op-ed for The New York Post, Arthur notes that between the southern border, the administration’s humanitarian parole programs, and the CBP One app, about 1.5 million migrants will be allowed to enter the country every year, even with the new restrictions.

→On Tuesday, federal prosecutors officially entered Hunter’s laptop into evidence as exhibit 16 in the trial—the same laptop that 51 senior intelligence officials dismissed as Russian disinformation when the New York Post reported on its contents weeks before the 2020 election. Then, on Wednesday, a pair of Hunter’s ex’s testified about his crack addiction around the time of the Oct. 2018 gun purchase, in response to claims from Hunter’s defense team that Hunter was too high-functioning to be a crack addict. Hunter’s ex-wife Kathleen Buhle testified to regularly discovering crack paraphernalia in their home and family car between 2015 and 2019, while one of Hunter’s ex-girlfriends, a stripper who went by the Twitter handle @weed_slut_420, testified that Hunter was smoking crack “every 20 minutes” when they first met in January 2018.

→Headline of the Day: 

Remote Amazon tribe connects to Elon Musk’s Starlink internet, become hooked on porn, social media

That’s from a New York Post article on the 2,000-member Marubo tribe, which connected to the internet last September after Allyson Reneau, an American “motivational speaker,” donated 20 satellite antennas. According to reporting from The New York Times, members of the tribe welcomed the ability to quickly contact emergency services but also complained that many young people now prefer to spend “the whole afternoon on their phones” rather than work. “Young people have gotten lazy because of the internet,” one elderly tribe member told the Times. “They’re learning the ways of the white people.”

---

TODAY IN TABLET: 

France’s Handsome Socialist Jewish Hamlet, by Marc Weitzmann

Raphaël Glucksmann sought to follow in the footsteps of his philosopher father, André, as an engaged intellectual. Now he’s the leader of the French Socialist list for the EU Parliament, whose bright political future may depend on abandoning everything his father stood for

---

SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

---

Histoire de Serge Gainsbourg

The surreal odyssey of the Jewish proto-rap star who invented the modern French song

by Jeff Weiss

Half-smoked Gitanes stick out of the glass ashtray like limbs trying to escape quicksand. The bottle of Château Pétrus is drained. Three Snickers bars idle in a translucent refrigerator—the half-eaten one has tooth marks that resemble a 33-year-old petroglyph. An eerie anatomical model, looking somewhere between Vesalius and a horror film, glowers from the gloomy shadows. On a nearby shelf, a lifeless tarantula is suspended in glass. In the kitchen, the spices and sauces, cans of tomato juice and cocktail mixers are embalmed in pristine order, patiently waiting for Serge Gainsbourg to return home for a final nightcap.

Gainsbourg’s home at 5 bis rue de Verneuil is now an official shrine. The outside has been covered in graffiti tributes since his heart stopped in March 1991. But starting last September, the inside became an open-to-the-public mausoleum. The singer once described the lavishly decorated entry room as “a music room, a brothel [or] a museum.” It’s where he conducted interviews, entertained guests, and played a grand piano with a photo of Chopin watching over him. A velvet sofa still bears the lasting imprint of his flesh.

“For a very long time after he died, the mark on the sofa was the most painful thing,” says Serge’s daughter, the actress and singer Charlotte Gainsbourg, whose soothing prerecorded voice takes visitors on a guided tour through the Maison Gainsbourg—a claustrophobic jewel box of low ceilings, narrow hallways, and spidery light. “There was the image of his body, but the absence of his physical presence.”

Charlotte’s narration offers echoes of sustained grief and enduring love. As you wander the property, she recalls the days after Serge’s death, where the primary women in his life—Charlotte, her half-sister Kate Berry, Jane Birkin, and Serge’s last partner, Caroline “Bambou” Paulus—lay next to the body and communally mourned.

“Time stopped for days. I remember his icy skin as he was finally taken away,” Charlotte says in the narration. “I remember people passing through the bedroom to say goodbye and people singing outside in the street.”

Shortly afterward, Charlotte purchased the remaining shares of the town house from her siblings, but the task of turning it into an actual museum became overwhelming. She’d often come here alone to contemplate the gravity of the loss. To once again live inside the bespoke universe of “a solitary man who didn’t like solitude.”

“I’d had enough. It felt like everyone was trying to grab pieces of him,” Charlotte told me when we met recently at a hotel in Paris. “I almost sold the place. I moved to New York … it felt like I could have a life somewhere else and not think about him or that time. But then I returned to Paris and started the project anew about four years ago. It took a lot of work—mainly because we wanted to have another space so that people wouldn’t just visit the house and never leave.”

The residence’s alluring combination of occult charm and art dealer-chic lands somewhere between Lord Byron’s haunted tomb and the French Graceland. But the specific touches are quintessentially Gainsbourgian. Interiors draped in dark felt so that no natural light may trespass. He once quipped that he’d decided on it “because in psychiatric hospitals the walls are all white.” The priceless works that Gainsbourg owned—The Man With the Head of a Cabbage statue by Claude Lalanne, the original manuscript of “La Marseillaise,” and Dali’s “La Chasse aux Papillons”—are located in the official museum down the street. In this space are ashtrays stolen from five-star Parisian hotels, art deco lamps, bronze monkeys, cherub paintings, a patch that reads “101% rebel,” and dozens of medals and police badges cajoled from members of the armed forces and law enforcement.

These are the possessions of someone preternaturally sensitive and privately nostalgic, attempting to keep the memories close—not merely to vainly grasp at immortality, but also because of the latent awareness that everything could be arbitrarily stolen at any time. In his book, Pensées, provocs et autres volutes, Gainsbourg wrote that “I receive the beauty of objects, subconsciously … On rue de Verneuil, in my museum, I have given them a soul. But the most precious object of all is me, because I’m destructible.”

In The Genius of Judaism, the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy highlights several historical examples that symbolize a Jewish essence of France. He evokes Rashi, the preeminent Talmudic scholar of the Middle Ages, whose Hebrew commentaries include thousands of French words drawn from the lexicon of 11th-century wine growers, lawyers, and members of the merchant class. In Lévy’s words, Rashi’s writing memorializes the language at its beginning: “the liquid nitrogen in which Old French was captured and saved from oblivion.”

Rashi presaged Chrétien de Troyes, the poet and trouvère who emerged from the same Jewish community of Troyes that the sage had led a century earlier. De Troyes invented the Arthurian romance and added the tales of Lancelot and the Holy Grail to its collective lore. His structural innovations in Yvain, the Knight of the Lion are considered an evolutionary step toward the modern novel. Then there’s Marcel Proust, the maternal descendent of Alsatian rabbis, whose sense of being outside the world helped him imagine the possibilities of 20th-century literature.

Gainsbourg belongs to this lineage: the alienated insider-outsider living in permanent self-exile, lacing cerebral allusions with a sordid frisson, outsmarting cliché with caustic wit, whose shocking scandals overshadowed his genius for combining the unpolluted sensitivities of a symbolist poet with the haunted nocturnes of a Romantic piano virtuoso. As François Mitterrand said at Gainsbourg’s funeral, he was our “Baudelaire, our Apollinaire.”

***

Born from the canonically photogenic union between Gainsbourg and the late English actress and singer Jane Birkin, Charlotte Gainsbourg is the figurative and literal heir of the Gainsbourg legacy. Revered in France as culture royalty, she’s been honored with the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the Ministry of Culture and achieved international renown for her spectral dreampop collaborations with Beck, Air, and Jarvis Cocker (Pulp)—all of whom were inspired in various ways by her father. As an actress, Charlotte has won multiple César awards (the French equivalent of the Oscars) and earned global avant-gardist acclaim for starring in Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier’s Depression trilogy.

We meet in the lobby bar of a luxury hotel in Saint-Germain-des-Prés on a cemetery gray Sunday. It’s a drizzling afternoon in late spring and Charlotte gracefully slips in through a side door, inconspicuous in a plain black Yves St. Laurent hat and a simple but stylish jacket. After several years in New York, she’s recently returned to Paris to live with her children and partner, the Israeli French director and actor Yvan Attal.

It’s a five-minute walk from the house where she lived with her older half-sister and parents until their separation in 1980. Throughout Charlotte’s adolescence, she spent most weekends with her father in this cozy two-story art salon—unless Serge felt like the wine dark walls were closing in and booked them a suite at the Ritz. Following his 1991 death, Charlotte purchased the home with the plan of turning it into a museum.

“Sometimes, people merely see him as a provocateur,” Charlotte Gainsbourg told me recently in Paris. “They know him for the big hits and drunken TV appearances—the boastful and shocking character at the end, rather than the subtle artist with finesse.”

Even before the consecration of the family home, memories of Gainsbourg and his daughter have always been intertwined. Charlotte made her musical debut on his 1984 single “Lemon Incest,” whose video featured Serge crooning about the “love we will never make together.” Most overlooked the delicate Chopin interpolation to recoil at the purposefully unsettling images of him lying shirtless in bed beside his 13-year-old daughter in her underwear.

“It was done to provoke and that was part of the fun,” Charlotte says, patiently explaining a question that she’s been routinely asked for the last four decades. “For me, it’s just a beautiful song about a father’s love for his daughter, and a daughter’s love for her father. It’s absolutely sincere and done with great beauty. Even the thing with Whitney Houston is just that: He’s very sincere.”

The “thing with Whitney Houston” references another viral video that often overshadows Gainsbourg’s discography in the post-YouTube, post-#MeToo era. During an appearance on the talk show Champs-Élysée, an aged and dissolute Serge told Whitney Houston that he wanted to fuck her on live TV. The desire wasn’t requited. And while he came off misogynistic and lecherous, Gainsbourg was nothing if not honest. New Puritans may blanche at his carnality, but he never attempted to disguise it.

Outside of the Francophone world, Gainsbourg’s music may be best known for the pornographic stunt of “Je t'aime ... moi non plus,” a 1969 duet with Birkin, which culminated in her simulating an orgasm (which later inspired Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You”). Condemned by the Vatican, banned in Spain, Sweden, Brazil, and Italy, it became the first foreign language song to top the charts in the United Kingdom. But even at the height of the Aquarian era, American radio stations still considered it too erotic for airplay.

Otherwise, Gainsbourg’s modest stateside notoriety largely stems from his 1971 masterpiece, Histoire de Melody Nelson, a midnight seduction of psychedelic lounge funk, proto trip-hop, and orchestral ballads—a concept album about a forbidden love between a 40-year-old man and the 15-year-old girl that he accidentally hits with his Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost. Another reminder of why Lolita could only have been first published in Paris.

***

Through my provincial Los Angeles lens, Gainsbourg exists as a pre-foundational European Jewish gangsta rapper, a cunning aesthete with a fistful of Gitanes and unshaven contradictions, a born rebel obsessed with sex, material spoils, and dismantling the hypocrisies of bourgeois society. It is easy for me to imagine him in the boudoir of his home, which meets my expectations of the most carnally minded musician this side of Too $hort: blackout curtains, a mirrored wall, hanging Chinese tapestries, and a black double bed with black pillows draped in black mink. At its foot, there’s a bronze mermaid bench with pearls wrapped around their necks. Framed pictures of his female collaborators line the upstairs hallway. They include all the aforementioned singers, plus his later collaborators, including Birkin, Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Adjani, Marianne Faithfull, and Vanessa Paradis.

At the same time, though, I find myself constantly transfixed by a 40-year-old video of the singer sobbing from French television. Even those unaware of its significance understand the semiotics. A chorus of pre-adolescent boys in sport coats—wearing painted beards, dark sunglasses, and powdered gray hair—serenades a weeping middle-aged man. Clutching chocolate cigarettes and glasses of apple juice, the children’s choir pays homage to this swarthy iconoclast clad in all denim, who furiously chain-smokes as if each puff could quell his tears. The symbolic shorthand is that these are the most definitively Gallic images ever captured: decadent and impassioned, louche but oddly vulnerable, absurdist yet weirdly sincere.

The children sing a song called “Je suis venu te dire que je m’en vais.” In English, it translates to “I came to tell you that I'm leaving.” Gainsbourg wrote it in 1973, shortly after suffering a near-fatal heart attack. Upon his release from the hospital, the 45-year-old confronted mortality by reinterpreting Verlaine’s poem “Chanson d’automne.” In this elegy of advance warning, Gainsbourg says “farewell forever” to the 26-year-old Birkin and their 2-year-old daughter (Charlotte). Birkin’s own tears add a foreboding doom to the track. His black tar baritone sounds like a last kiss goodnight. The melody sounds like the sun shining down on a funeral.

In their version, the children have “come to tell [Gainsbourg] that 'we like you.'" His “provocations change nothing.” They harmonize about his gray hair, the furrows in his brow, and his genius. “You will always remain in our hearts.” It’s rare to see someone’s entire life flashing before them like a maudlin cinematic montage. But the raw emotion overwhelms Gainsbourg’s aversion to oversentimentality. The pouches under his eyes droop. His retinas become bloodshot. Even the terminally cool sometimes lose the battle.

He squints painfully, smokes some more, rubs his nose, and finally hangs his head, in a haggard attempt to dam the tears of the French proto-Biggie Smalls—who was once a little boy who wore a yellow star and narrowly escaped the Nazis by disguising himself in a rural Catholic school, and after that, a cabaret pianist turned chanson singer, mocked for his ungainly ears and Ashkenazi beak, who was told that he was too ugly to succeed until fame and fortune arrived in the autumn of his life. It is the sight of a man assessing the ash heap of existence, suddenly made aware of the affection that he has engendered in spite of all the sins and sneers. A man just beginning to understand what it all means, but who is not yet ready for final salvation.

“People didn’t see the other side of his character,” Charlotte says. “He was very shy, very close to his childhood, and very innocent in a way. And people who are often sickly shy go over the top. I don’t see many men with his charisma, charm, passion, or morals today. And he was an incredible father.”

***

In the spring of 1944, Lucien Ginsberg found himself hiding from the Gestapo in the primeval forests outside of Limoges. In a little over a decade, the 15-year-old would assume the alias that becomes a household name across France. But for now, to conceal their Jewish origins, his family had obtained fake paperwork under the name of Guimbard. Despite the subterfuge, the young Lucien’s cup-handle ears, aquiline profile, sickly frame, and sad prophetic black eyes, make him a dead ringer for the antisemitic propaganda that has flooded the nation since the Nazis paraded through Paris in June 1940.

A few months after assuming power, Petain’s government embraced the Nuremberg Laws, stripping Jews of civil rights and forbidding them to work as teachers, journalists, lawyers, entertainers, and artists. Within a year, it’s estimated that 50% of the roughly 300,000 French Jews are unable to legally work in their previous professions. This includes Gainsbourg’s father, Joseph, a cabaret pianist, who plies his craft in stealth up through 1942.

Anti-Semitic graffiti slogans cover the walls of Gainsbourg’s neighborhood: “When you’re a Jew, best hightail it to Palestine and make yourself scarce”; the Jews will soon be reduced to rubble, so pack your bag,” “What’s the matter, kike? Don’t you understand French?” One two, three … Bang! Watch your store explode.” The bombs technically don’t go off until October of 1941, when six explosions destroy six synagogues in Paris. The head of the Sicherheitspolizei, the Nazi occupying force, orders the attack.

By next summer, the stitched yellow star becomes mandatory. Jews are barred from traveling or being outside after 8 p.m. Their radios are confiscated and telephone lines snipped. All restaurants, movie theaters, music venues, museums, and libraries, ban them.

"What marked me as a child was the Second World War,” Gainsbourg later recalled. “I had a yellow star next to my heart. I asked my mother to sew it on neatly."

Unable to support his wife and three children, Gainsbourg’s father hires a smuggler to sneak him into the zone libre. In the summer of 1942, the real raids began. Seventy-five thousand Jews are arrested and deported from France. Most of them are killed in concentration camps—including Gainsbourg’s maternal uncle Michel Besman, who died in Auschwitz. Serge’s sisters are stashed at a Catholic boarding school in Limoges, a small city in the center-west of France, about 250 miles from Paris, while the boy is hidden in a religious school about 10 miles outside of town. His parents attempt to blend in among the other 100,000 Limougeauds, while the French militias relentlessly hunt for “Israelites.”

The family quickly came under suspicion. Ten French Milice ransack the two-bedroom apartment of Joseph and Olia “Guimbard” searching for evidence. Their critical error is forgetting to ask Gainsbourg’s mother to stand up: She’s been sitting on the forged documents the entire time. But the investigation doesn’t appease the brownshirts. His parents are arrested and detained for two brutal days and nights. His mother swears that she’s the Ginsberg family’s maid. But her husband cracks under intense interrogation. After his boss intervenes, the couple are temporarily released on the condition that they remain in Limoges. The next morning, they flee to a safe house in the country near Versailles.

The schools aren’t safe either. One afternoon, Gainsbourg claims that the school headmaster warns him of an imminent visit from the Germans. They’re supposedly coming to verify whether the institution is protecting any Jews. He’s told to take an ax and hide out in the wilderness. If a stranger asks who he is, just tell them that he’s the son of a woodsman.

In Gainsbourg: The Biography, Serge describes his night hiding from the Storm Troopers.

I head off like Tom Thumb and build myself a little hut. It was a real adventure. Unfortunately, when night fell a storm broke out; in less than an hour I’m soaked to the bones. The next day, some of the smaller boys came and brought me some food. When all was clear, I made my way back.

He’s infinitely luckier than the inhabitants of the nearby village of Oradour-sur-Glane, which becomes the target of a Waffen-SS massacre that same summer. Four days after the D-Day landing in June 1944, the Nazis murder 643 civilians in retribution for the local activities of the French Resistance. Men and women are herded into churches and barns, doused with gasoline, and burned alive. Anyone who tries to jump out of the windows gets machine-gunned. All but six of the commune’s population are slain.

It’s impossible to ignore how profoundly these experiences marked him. Branded a literal enemy of the state as a child, he was forced to construct a web of disguises. From here, it’s a small step to become the artist-as-saboteur, the double agent raised on French soil, whose raison d’être is to strip away the false veneers of polite society.

“He was always talking about his experiences during the war, but not necessarily as something that traumatized him—even though he had family members killed,” Charlotte Gainsbourg says. “There was a sense of excitement that went along with that sense of being scared in the forest. It was one of his strongest memories.”

Read the rest of the article here.