Roger Peyrefitte
Roger Peyrefitte was a French diplomat, writer of bestseller novels and non-fiction, and a defender of gay rights and pederasty.
Life and work
Born in Castres, Tarn, to a middle class bourgeois family, Peyrefitte went to Jesuit and Lazarist boarding schools and then studied language and literature in the University of Toulouse. After graduating first of his year from Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris in 1930, he worked as an embassy secretary in Athens between 1933 and 1938. Back in Paris, he had to resign in 1940 for personal reasons before being reintegrated in 1943 and finally ending his diplomatic career in 1945. In his novels, he often treated controversial themes and his work put him at odds with the Roman Catholic church.He wrote openly about his homoerotic experiences in boarding school in his 1943 first novel Les amitiés particulières, which won the coveted prix Renaudot in 1944. The book was made into a film of the same name which was released in 1964. On the set, Peyrefitte met the 12-year-old Alain-Philippe Malagnac d'Argens de Villèle; and both fell in love. Peyrefitte tells the story of their relationship in Notre amour and L'Enfant de cœur. Malagnac later married performer Amanda Lear.
A cultivator of scandal, Peyrefitte attacked the Vatican and Pope Pius XII in his book Les Clés de saint Pierre, which earned him the nickname of "Pope of the Homosexuals". The publication of the book started a bitter quarrel with François Mauriac. Mauriac threatened to resign from the paper he was working with at the time, L'Express, if it did not stop carrying advertisements for the book. The quarrel was exacerbated by Mauriac's articles attacking the memory of Jean Cocteau because of his homosexuality and the release of the film adaptation of Les amitiés particulières. This culminated in a virulent open letter by Peyrefitte in which he accused Mauriac of being a hypocrite, a fake heterosexual who maligned his own children and a closeted homosexual with a past. It is said Mauriac was badly shaken with this letter, unable to get out of bed for a whole week.
In April 1976, after Pope Paul VI had condemned pre-marital sex, masturbation and homosexuality in the encyclical , in a series of interviews Peyrefitte accused him of being a closet homosexual that chose his papal name after his lover's first name. Although his statements were published in a few discrete magazines, Peyrefitte was surprised and overjoyed when one day he watched in television the Pope addressing the issue in the heart of St. Peter's Square, complaining about the "horrible and slanderous insinuations" that were being said about the Holy Father and appealing for prayers on his behalf.
In Les Ambassades, he revealed the ins and outs of diplomacy. Peyrefitte also wrote a book full of gossip about Baron Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen's exile in Capri and translated Greek gay love poetry.
In his memoirs, Propos Secrets, he wrote extensively about his youth, his sex life, his years as a diplomat, his travels to Greece and Italy and his troubles with the police for sexually harassing male teenagers. He also gave vent to his fierce love of snobbish genealogizing and vitriolic well-documented gossip, writing about famous people of his time such as André Gide, Henry de Montherlant, François Mauriac, André Malraux, Jean Cocteau, Jean Genet, Marcel Jouhandeau, Marie-Laure de Noailles, Gaston Gallimard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Charles de Gaulle, Giscard d'Estaing, Georges Pompidou, among many others. Claiming he had reliable sources within the Vatican's "black aristocracy", once again he stated that three recent popes of the 20th century were homosexuals: Pius XII, John XXIII and Paul VI. He particularly loved to expose the hypocrisy and vanity of prominent people, to denounce fake aristocrats and to out closeted homosexuals.
Roger Peyrefitte wrote popular historical biographies about Alexander the Great and Voltaire. In Voltaire et Frédéric II he claimed that Voltaire had been the passive lover of Frederick the Great.
In spite of his libertarian views on sexuality, politically Peyrefitte was a conservative bourgeois and in his later years he supported right-winger Jean-Marie Le Pen.
He died of Parkinson's disease at age 93 after receiving the last rites from the Catholic Church he had attacked so constantly.
Legacy
After his death, the city of Capri dedicated a plaque to him which is mounted near Villa Lysis and the inscription of which reads: A Roger Peyrefitte autore de L'esule di Capri per aver esaltato e diffuso il mito, la cultura e la bellezza dell'isola nel mondo. — "For Roger Peyrefitte, author of L'Exile de Capri, for having exalted and diffused the myth, the culture, and the beauty of this island in the world."In a 2012 essay about the importance of public libraries, English actor and writer Stephen Fry mentions that Peyrefitte's novels The Exile of Capri and Special Friendships were "unforgettable, transformative books" for him.
Press cuttings
- Obituary in The Times, 7 November 2000, page 25. "In the minds of many, Roger Peyrefitte's reputation as a genuinely literary novelist is based on one novel - Les Amitiés Particulières, which was also his first. He wrote many others, but none really matched the merit of the first, and the author seemed increasingly to seek a succès de scandale rather than any serious critical consideration."
- Obituary by James Kirkup in The Independent: The Tuesday Review, 7 November 2000, page 6. "Peyrefitte was a skilled manipulator of the media. He was charismatic to the point of absurdity, with his dramatic gestures and outrageous behaviour, so that in the end no one took any notice of his often ludicrous fabrications, though they were always delivered with great style and conviction, and with an effrontery that was amusingly malicious. Peyrefitte acknowledges the courage of his great predecessors André Gide, Marcel Proust, Jean Cocteau and Oscar Wilde, while regretting the timidity of Marcel Jouhandeau and many of the contemporary French writers, whether gay or straight, in pursuing the cause of homosexual rights."
- Obituary by Douglas Johnson in The Guardian, 15 November 2000, page 24. "André Gide, who had attempted to defend homosexuality in a much earlier work, was prophetic in his congratulations to Peyrefitte. He did not think that Les Amitiés Particulières would win the Goncourt prize, but he did believe it would still be read a century later."