A new documentary on the enigmatic French lawyer Jacques Verges takes a neutral tone on a 50-year career that went from fighting colonialism to the "exhilaration" of defending Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie.
It is no mean feat given the passions aroused by a man for whom the word "controversial" appears pitifully inadequate but Barbet Schroeder, director of "Terror's Advocate", deliberately avoids taking an overt position.
"My whole idea is to allow the characters to speak," he says in the programme notes to the film, a compilation of interviews and historical footage being shown at the Cannes film festival. And the story of Verges, who has always carefully cultivated his sulphurous image and general air of mystery, is certainly extraordinary enough.
Verges, who came to prominence in the 1950s defending Djamila Bouhired, one of the figureheads of the Algerian revolution against colonial France, was involved in some of the most murky episodes in post-war history.
He was linked to Palestinian militants, far-left guerrillas like Carlos "the Jackal", mastermind of a series of bombings and hijackings in the 1970s, leaders of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge and a Swiss Nazi named Francois Genoud.
He disappeared with no explanation between the years 1970-78 and on his return, defended left-wing activists and a Holocaust denier and even offered to take on the defence of deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
And he based his defence of Klaus Barbie, the World War Two "Butcher of Lyon", by accusing the French state of practising torture as severe as that conducted by the Nazi Gestapo.
Sitting in an opulent study, Verges, a cultivated, jovial figure who smokes a large cigar throughout most of the film, chuckles at the memory of provoking his courtroom rivals and describes his "exhilaration" as he faced 39 prosecution lawyers alone at the Barbie trial. "It meant each one of them was only worth one fortieth of me," he says.
The film lays out the paradox of a lawyer who defended both Barbie, one of the most senior Gestapo officials in wartime France and young German radicals who railed at the Nazi past of their parents' generation. As the film opens, he speaks calmly of "deplorable" instances of torture by the Khmer Rouge but says accounts of genocide contain a lot of exaggeration and inaccuracy. Later it shows him close to tears revisiting the death row cells of Algerian revolutionaries he defended.
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