Pierre Goldman was many things in his lifetime – and the polar opposite of most of those things, too. A fervent street-fighter from Lyon, who despised the French student protesters of May 1968 for getting bogged down in bourgeois debates, he was also a man of expensive tastes, whose quest for revolution got waylaid by flash cars, posh restaurants and crisp shirts. A great moraliser and a magnetic figure to the left in the 1960s and 70s, Goldman could also be a nihilistic provocateur. Feted by his country’s intelligentsia, he was a captivating writer, while also being a brute of a gangster who held up pharmacies and dairies for fistfuls of cash.
French director Cédric Kahn’s The Goldman Case, which is released next week, does not so much try to untangle this thicket of contradictions as lean straight into them. Set entirely inside the courtroom where, in 1976, Goldman was tried for a second time for the alleged double murder of two pharmacists, the film’s appeal – much like that of Oscar-winning Anatomy of a Fall – lies in its refusal to commit to one version of the truth over another.
Some former acquaintances and biographers, however, insist there is a real Goldman beyond the myths and paradoxes. Born in June 1944 to Polish Jewish parents who had played a part in the communist resistance to the Nazi occupation of France, Goldman entered a world overshadowed by the Holocaust. “I was scarcely alive before I was old enough to perish in the crematories of Poland,” he later wrote in his memoirs, Dim Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France.
When his parents separated shortly after the second world war ended, his father kidnapped him to stop his mother taking him to Poland. He was mostly raised by relatives and his father’s second wife. His half-brother was Jean-Jacques Goldman, later a pop-rock singer frequently voted France’s most admired celebrity.
Despite being expelled from several schools during his youth, in 1963 Goldman managed to get a place at the Sorbonne, where he became a member of the communist student union. Annette Lévy-Willard, who was studying law at the prestigious Paris university at the same time, remembers an incident in 1966 where rightwing thugs blocked the entrance of a university building and Goldman led the charge to chase them away, wielding a wooden club. “To us younger students,” she recalls, “he was a kind of Robin Hood figure.” He wanted to be the opposite of the Jews who were taken to Auschwitz without, he believed, putting up a fight. “For him, Jewishness meant resistance.”
But even as student politics swelled into something bigger, and university building occupations grew into nationwide strikes that prompted President Charles de Gaulle to briefly flee to Germany, Goldman felt ill at ease with his compatriots. “I was shocked that all they did was talk,” he wrote in his memoirs, “and that they found mere talk a cause for rejoicing.” He wanted to throw grenades, not just cobblestones.
In June 1968, as the protests in Paris were dying down, Goldman headed to Venezuela to join what he believed to be a real revolution. When he returned the following year, having spent 14 months in hiding with a guerrilla group and not firing a single shot, Paris had changed. “He missed the cultural revolution that happened in 1968,” says Lévy-Willard. “When he came back, we didn’t want to become communists any more and he was lost.”
Goldman’s biggest obstacle on the path to revolution, it turned out, was himself. Having hatched a plan to kidnap the renowned psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, he was overwhelmed with awe when he saw the white-haired thinker exiting his office and simply left. Plans to attack police stations with armed commandos also remained pipe dreams.
Although carrying a considerable amount of cash from a bank robbery in Venezuela, Goldman quickly squandered it. “I bought a lot of shirts,” his character, played by Arieh Worthalter, confesses to the judge in the film. “I sweat a lot and hate doing laundry.” When the money ran out, he started carrying out armed assaults and, on 8 April 1970, was arrested by Paris police over a hold-up on Boulevard Richard-Lenoir in which two female pharmacists were murdered and two other people were injured.
During the first trial, five witnesses identified Goldman as the perpetrator and the jury unanimously declared him guilty of both murders, which would have meant death by guillotine, because France did not abolish capital punishment until 1981. A second vote by the same jury, recognising extenuating circumstances, granted him a life sentence instead.
Francis Chouraqui, an Algeria-born law student, attended the trial as a spectator because he had known Goldman from karate classes. During breaks in proceedings, the old acquaintances talked. After the verdict, Goldman wrote to Chouraqui, asking for help with an appeal and to defend him in a retrial. “We were both only 29,” says Chouraqui. “There had never been a successful appeal against a life sentence in France before. It was an enormous challenge.”
Their success in what would make legal history had a lot to do with managing to recruit the services of the mercurial lawyer Georges Kiejman, a subsequent minister of justice. There was also the fact that Goldman was his own defence attorney in court, albeit with Kiejman leading. “The best lawyer in the whole case was Goldman himself,” Chouraqui says.
In an often tumultuous trial packed with Goldman supporters, they convinced the jury that the evidence against Goldman was circumstantial and the first trial had been riddled with procedural irregularities: the key witness, for example, had picked out Goldman in an identity parade, having spotted him in the police station’s corridor in handcuffs just before. Prejudice rather than proof had led to his framing, they argued.
Some unusual tactics also helped. A notoriously violent criminal, whom Goldman had befriended in prison, sent the judge a telegram claiming to know the identity of the real perpetrator of the murders. This obliged the court to call him as a witness. As the shackled criminal testified in court, Goldman confided to Chouraqui that this new alleged perpetrator would not be able to deny the allegations since he was dead – murdered by the selfsame cellmate.
Given the accused’s religion, newspapers drew comparisons to the Dreyfus affair, even though, as the Guardian wrote, the judicial system’s bias here was “anti-left and anti-black rather than anti-Jewish”.
In October 1976, Goldman was found not guilty. Did this mean he was innocent? “It’s not clear,” says Lévy-Willard, who worked with him at the newspaper Libération after his release. “I still can’t imagine that the guy I knew would have shot two women in cold blood. He may have been at the scene but not fired the gun, then tried to cover for the real shooter.”
For his 2005 biography, Pierre Goldman: The Shadow Brother, investigative journalist Michaël Prazan tracked down Joël Lautric, the man who had provided Goldman with an alibi. “Lautric told me Goldman was at his place on the day of the crime,” says Prazan, “but not at the time of actual hold-up.” He hadn’t lied in court, though: the prosecution simply hadn’t asked him the right questions. “I really like him as a character,” says Prazan, who worked on the film in the early stages but later fell out with its makers. “But the truth is the truth.”
Goldman himself provoked questions about his innocence in 1977 with the release of a novel, The Ordinary Misadventure of Archibald Rapoport. Described by Le Monde as “Kafka rewritten by Monty Python”, its Goldman-esque fictional hero murders four policemen, two magistrates and a lawyer, leaving dildos at each crime scene. Kiejman said he was disturbed by the book’s contents, calling its publication an act of monumental stupidity.
But there was little time for doubts to grow. Less than three years after his release from prison, Goldman was gunned down on the streets of Paris, two bullets piercing his heart, another his right lung. He was the first of three European counterculture icons whose lives were violently curtailed in quick succession: German student leader Rudi Dutschke would die a few months later from complications that stemmed from injuries sustained in an earlier assassination attempt, while John Lennon would be shot a year later.
“Goldman became a saint to the left,” says Lévy-Willard, who covered the funeral for Libération. About 15,000 people accompanied his coffin to Père Lachaise cemetery, including some of France’s most prominent artists and thinkers. The ageing Jean-Paul Sartre led but was taken ill and left in a taxi.
A terror group called Honour of the Police claimed Goldman’s killing, though it later turned out that no such group existed. In a memoir posthumously published in 2015, the former paratrooper René Resciniti de Says claimed to have been involved in Goldman’s assassination on behalf of the SAC, the militia tasked with doing the ruling Gaullist party’s dirty work.
But Prazan’s biography suggests the motivation behind the murder may have been less political, linking it to murky weapons deals. Goldman, he says, had tried to procure arms for Eta, the Basque separatists, and had been talking to a prominent member in Paris, who was also a police informant. These might be the final Goldman paradoxes: ultimately, he was a martyr not to the great cause of his generation, but to himself – a would-be terrorist who fell victim to the real thing. “Pierre Goldman did not live the life of a hero,” says Lévy-Willard. “We were enamoured of a myth.”
Contradicting yourself is not always a bad thing, especially for aspiring revolutionaries. In Germany and Italy, the militant groups who came out of the student protests were much more consistent – and their bombing campaigns claimed the lives of scores of people as a result. “The years around 1968 were a period of deep radicalisation for the European left,” says Philippe Marlière, professor of European politics at University College London. “But for some reason, in France it didn’t produce a militant moment. Only Goldman came close.”
Where would Goldman have ended up had he survived? “He would have been an excellent Nazi-hunter,” says Chouraqui. “He should have done that with his life.” Lévy-Willard, meanwhile, says: “I believe he would have become an important figure in French letters, but not in politics. A politician has to make compromises – and compromising was not in Goldman’s DNA.”
• The Goldman Case is out in UK and Irish cinemas on 20 September
