Jean-Edern Hallier

Jean-Edern Hallier (1 March 193612 January 1997) was a French writer, critic and publisher.

After his exclusion from the literary review Tel Quel, which he co-founded with Philippe Sollers, Hallier went on to publish novels and satirical pamphlets, and created the controversial newspaper L'Idiot International.

Overview The son of World War I French General André Hallier, Jean Hallier was born in 1936. While the Hallier family has ancient Breton roots on his father's side, he later claimed in his novel L'évangile du fou (1986) that his mother had Alsatian and Jewish heritage. He was baptised in the village of Edern, whose name he later added to his first name Jean.

Hallier, returning to France after World War II, first studied at the Abbey of Pierre-Qui-Vire and then at a Paris lycée and at the University of Oxford. He travelled extensively, even getting shipwrecked in the Persian Gulf, and in 1960 founded the literary review Tel Quel along with Philippe Sollers and Jean-René Hughenin. Three years later he published his first novel, Les Aventures d'une jeune fille ("The Adventures of a Young Girl"). He then worked as an editor for publishing house Plon and completed a second novel, Le Grand écrivain ("The Great Author"), in 1967.

Deeply stirred by the 1968 student riots in Paris, Hallier disclosed left-wing political views in the partly autobiographical La Cause des peuples (1972). He engaged into politics full-time and started the first, leftist version of his paper, L'Idiot international, partly funded at first by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

Hallier traveled to Chile after Pinochet's 1973 coup, carrying funds gathered by Régis Debray. Hallier was supposed to hand the money out to the Chilean resistance. However, he returned to Paris without the money and without having delivered it to the resistance, claiming he had bought 400,000 hectares in the Amazon Basin to provide shelter for the future Chilean exiles. He progressively broke up with the left-wing after this event. He also broke with the literary style of the nouveau roman with Chagrins d'amour, which was shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt in 1974. He and any potential publisher were hounded by tax inspectors dispatched to instil the fear of "God" (Mitterrand's nickname) into them. His apartment was also burned down in an arson attack.

In 1991, L'Idiot international was one of the French newspapers which opposed participation to the Gulf War, and Jean-Edern Hallier went to Iraq to cover the events. Earlier, he had published Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1988), and personally delivered a copy of the book to the Iranian embassy in Paris.