Francis Jeanson, itinéraire d’un intellectuel engagé
Catherine de Grissac, Bernard Vrignon
2011 - 52 min - HDCam - Couleur - France

French writer-philosopher, born 7th July 1922, is best known as the man who was one of the first to support the Algerian independence movement against French colonial rule. And the film draws the parallel between the life-long commitment of this eternel rebell and the events of the Arab Spring or the Indignents and protest movements triggered by the economic crisis ? although Jeanson has not lived to see any of these.
He was close to Jean-Paul Sartre whose ideas he shared and in 1951, Sartre appointed him editor-in-chief of Les Temps modernes (Modern Times), the most important cultural review of the period after World War II which he had founded. At the same time, Jeanson also set up and ran French book publisher Editions du Seuil.
In 1957, at the height of the Algerian war, he organised a clandestine militant movement, the ?réseau Jeanson? (Jeanson network), for which he was tried in absentia and condemned to ten years imprisonment. He returned to France only in 1966 on the occasion of his amnesty. The film, based on interviews before his death in 2009, retraces the causes he defended and, above all, his conviction that citizens should not resign themselves to accepting the order of things, but strive for civic engagement.