Yverdon, Kesselring, 389 pages.
A book started following the death of Ulrike Meinhof in prison, On vous appelait terroristes offers a partial biography, fictionalized and polyphonic, of the protagonists of the German Red Army Faction. Each chapter focuses on the experience that each of them has (at the death of Katrina, Ulrike Meinhof) about the movement, its creation and the first attacks. It is the fatal spiral of counter-violence that Françoise d’Eaubonne describes. She shows how these young people, militants close to non-violence at the beginning of the novel, gradually come to the conviction that armed violence is the only effective recourse left to them to fight against State crimes.
On vous appelait terroristes em is a denunciatory title: the “urban guerrillas” are not, according to d’Eaubonne, “terrorists”, but militants of “counter-violence”. (Aurore)