- Paperback: 416 pages
- Publisher: Verso (2 April 2007)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1844671402
- ISBN-13: 978-1844671403
- Product Dimensions: 23.1 x 15.5 x 2.8 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 918,103 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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"Keeps breaking into well-informed sense and keen insight." - Guardian "God: An Itinerary is a stylistic tour de force, Nietzschean in its seductive rhetoric, lightly worn erudition, aphoristic insights and provocative asides." - London Review of Books"
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This is the fascinating autobiography of one of France's leading political activists and intellectuals. Regis Debray is one of France's leading contemporary intellectuals and commentators, whose life has intersected with some of the key moments of the twentieth century. In this elegantly crafted memoir, Debray traces his route from the Parisian lecture theatres of the Rue d'Ulm with Althusser and his students, to Cuba and his deep involvement with the revolution, to the Bolivian jungle where, in search of Che Guevara, Debray was captured, tortured, and imprisoned and only released after an international campaign, and finally to the state offices of the Elysee Palace where he served as an advisor to Francois Mitterrand in the early 1980s. More than simply a fascinating memoir, "Praised Be Our Lords" is also an exploration of the mechanisms of political passion - what leads a person towards and away from commitment and even treachery.
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1.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
15 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Usual 'God that failed' confession, 12 April 2007
By William Podmore - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Praised Be Our Lords: The Autobiography (Paperback)
Régis Debray's wrong-headed `foco' theory on guerrilla warfare was noted by Che Guevara, so Castro invited Debray to Cuba, and then sent him to Bolivia, to prepare the ground for Che. On his release from prison in 1971, Chilean President Salvador Allende greeted him as Che's former companion. Debray then took a message from Allende to François Mitterand in 1972, and in 1981 President Mitterand took him on at the Elysée Palace, as a putative expert on the Third World.
He recounts how for years he worked for Mitterand churning out `kilometres of pure Mitterand non-stop'. His book lists the celebrities he has met, in the same way that he procured intellectuals for exclusive, pointless interviews with Mitterand.
Verso notes that this book was `published with the aid of the French Ministry of Culture', and you can see why. It fits Verso's agenda by joining and celebrating the inglorious tradition of renegacy, including the likes of Ignazio Silone, the `great Italian anti-fascist' who spied on his comrades for Mussolini.
Who are the lords that he praises, even if ever so ironically? Certainly he had a servile relationship with his patron Mitterand. Is he plugging his recent book on God? Is he referring to Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, whom he ritually derides? Or to Fidel and Che? This would surely win him brownie points with the CIA and France's DGSE, since it fits so neatly with the current US/EU attacks on Cuba. He finishes with `A Brief Militant's Lexicon', a random list of sneers at people better than himself.
This dreary and virtually unreadable tome is a Catholic confession of disillusionment, just the latest instalment in the `God that failed' genre, the answer to which has always been - don't have a God in the first place!
Debray was never part of the French working class, always déclassé and déraciné. He is an accidental man, a cynical theorist, promoted, virtually by chance, well beyond his competence, `a marginal memorialist', as he calls himself. His book proves once again that real revolutionaries, rightly, don't produce autobiographies.
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