They were brothers and they couldn't be more different. They were the Goldmans, icons of a moment in French history and society, and today again topical thanks to a book and a film.
The eldest, Pierre, was a rebel, angry against everything and everyone. An adventurer, a revolutionary. Also an alpha male, a violent guy, a robber wrapped in a romantic aura who in the seventies became a cause célèbre for the left. Sartre, Beauvoir, Montand signed manifestos in favor of him. The singer-songwriter Maxime Le Forestier dedicated a protest song to him.
Jean-Jacques was seven years younger and was trying to make his way in the music business at the time. He became the king of French pop-rock, with millions of records sold and a mood opposite to Pierre's. Jean-Jacques was an artist integrated into the system, progressive but not revolutionary. And with a star image despite him, a humble and ordinary man who represented a tender and sensitive masculinity. He would now be called an “ally” of feminism.
Pierre was murdered in 1979. He was 35 years old. Thousands of people attended his burial at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
Jean-Jacques left at the beginning of this century. After being everything in French pop, surely the most celebrated (and, at the same time, little known outside the borders of the Francophonie and despised by the elite of good taste as a mass, easy and popular artist) of the later era At sixty and seventy, he retired. Twenty years of silence. And, although he no longer records albums and very rarely appears in public, he is, poll after poll, the French people's favorite public figure.
What was so special about those brothers, children of a different mother (Pierre's was a Polish Jew, Jean-Jacques's was a German) and of a Jew born in Poland and who participated in the French Resistance against the Nazi occupation? What does his legend explain about the France of his time, and today? The publication of an essay about the artist Jean-Jacques Goldman and the release of a film about the gangster-revolutionary Pierre Goldman demonstrates the strength of the ambivalent Goldman myth.
“The coincidence of the book and the film says something about the history of the Goldman family, which embodies almost a century of French history, if we go back to the father,” explains Ivan Jablonka, professor of History at the Sorbonne Paris Nord university and author of Goldman, one of the trials of the year in France. “He also says something about the fratricidal struggles on the French left. And about the way in which immigrants, and especially Jewish immigrants, integrated, and embody French history.”
The analytical and narrative scalpel that Jablonka applied to the murder of a woman in Laëtitia or the end of menand the feminist revolution and machismo in righteous men (both published in Spanish by Anagrama), now applies them to a pop star. Bridging the musical, sociological and ideological distances, it is as if someone wrote an essay about Mecano to understand Spain and the Spaniards of the eighties, and those of now. With the assumption that a relative of the group had been a mix of El Lute and a far-left revolutionary in the seventies.
The movie The Goldman process, directed by Cédric Kahn, focuses on the other protagonist. This is a reconstruction of the second and last trial, in 1976, of Pierre Goldman, for several robberies and for the death of two employees of a pharmacy near the Place de la Bastille, in Paris. He was acquitted of this last accusation and was released. The film is the story of a man possessed by uncontrollable rage and tormented by the Holocaust.
“I was born in the shadow, I was born in the shadow and for a long time my wish was that they would not tear me out of the shadow where I find myself,” he wrote in Dark memories of a Polish Jew born in Francia, a powerful book of memoirs written in prison, in which he states: “I dreamed of a civil war, an anti-fascist war, a true return of time, of history.”
There is a secondary character in the film, but from whom it is impossible to look away. Sitting in the front row of the courtroom, next to his parents, is a boy with a suit and tie and “long hair,” as Pierre describes him in his memoirs. This is Jean-Jacques.
“Jean-Jacques,” Jablonka points out, “defined himself in opposition to his half-brother, even though they were from the same family and with the same father, although I think there was a certain tenderness between them.”
Their father, Alter Moishé Goldman, was active in left-wing Jewish organizations as a young man. He was an athlete: he was caught by the start of the Spanish Civil War in Barcelona to participate in the Popular Olympiad. After World War II, he ran a sports clothing store in Montrouge, on the outskirts of Paris. Jean-Jacques worked there until his first great musical successes. While this had followed the classic trajectory of meritocracy (boy scout, obedient son of a father obsessed with integration in France), Pierre revolted against all this. He was expelled from school. He traveled to Cuba and Venezuela. He despised the revolutionaries of May '68 as lukewarm.
“They were both opposed on at least two points,” says Jablonka. “First, in its relationship with what is Jewish. Pierre's was very claimed. He would have liked to be a Jew in a ghetto and kill Nazis. Jean-Jacques's was much more discreet, faithful, within a biblical affiliation, with a reflection on uprooting, exile. If anything, he was much more humble.”
“The second point,” he continues, “is, obviously, the political positioning. Pierre Goldman is the star of the seventies, the shock left, who wanted to make revolution with a capital R, before devolving into gangsterism. On the other hand, Jean-Jacques was more of a social democrat, a liberal, pragmatic left.”
Goldman It can also be read as a self-portrait of Jablonka, born, like Jean-Jacques, in a family of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and, like him, identified with social democracy and attached to the “vulnerable, fragile character of masculinity.” It is the story of a generation: the teenagers of the eighties, for whom hits by Jean-Jacques (Eat everything, Elle a fait un bébé toute seule, Là-bas…) were an education, in the same way that Pierre's adventures fascinated during the years of the barricades. The historian says: “Jean-Jacques Goldman has become a national myth, almost an institution that is part of the collective heritage.”
A myth, or two. And two mysteries. That of Jean-Jacques's silence, which he has broken to express his disagreement with Jablonka's book. And that of Pierre's death, due to the shooting of three men in a square in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. An organization called Police Honor claimed responsibility for him. Also a former far-right mercenary, years later. And another hypothesis has circulated in the French press since the moment of the murder: the Spanish clue, perhaps related to the dirty war against ETA. Someone heard one of the gunmen say in Spanish as they fled: “This way, men!”
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