The writer Serge Livrozet, a figure in anarchist and anti-carceral circles, from Michel Foucault's Prisoners' Action Committee through the beginnings of
Liberation
, has died, his relatives announced to AFP on Wednesday.
The intellectual died on Tuesday at the age of 83 at his home in the Nice region,
"following a long illness"
, they said, recalling that he was
"one of the leaders of the revolts which shook French prisons in the 1970s”
.
Coming from a modest background, Serge Livrozet said he started working as a plumber at the age of 13, before drilling safes.
“The only way out of my social condition was (to) take money where I considered there was too much,”
he said in a documentary devoted to him in 2017,
La death is deserved
, by Nicolas Drolc.
Among his fights, he participated in May 1968 and co-founded with the philosopher Michel Foucault the Prisoners' Action Committee, campaigning for the abolition of prisons.
He was one of the very first founders of the newspaper
Liberation
, which he left very quickly.
He is the author of about fifteen novels and essays, including
From prison to revolt
and
Letter of love to the child that I will not have
(republished in 2022 by L'Esprit rapper) and is appeared in the cinema with Laurent Cantet in
L'emploi du temps,
in 2001.
In the 1980s, he had hit the headlines, being suspected of having managed a Paris printing press for counterfeit banknotes, in what then seemed to be the biggest counterfeiting case in history.
He had been preventively imprisoned for ten months in this case, the time to write
L'empreinte
, denouncing the relentlessness against him, before finally being acquitted.
“Each time I found myself confronted with any power whatsoever, prison, judicial, economic, hospital or even religious, I found myself confronted with people who wanted to take over my mind
, he confided in
Death is deserved
.
Society needs to have control over brains... A guy like me, I'm embarrassing because I don't fit into any mold.
