Jean Beaufret

• 1. Introduction

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  Jean Beaufret was born on the 22nd of May 1907 in Auzances, a small town in central France, and he would spend his life building a bridge between French philosophy and one of Germany's most contested thinkers. He died on the 7th of August 1982 in Paris. In between, he shaped how an entire generation of French philosophers read Martin Heidegger. But that legacy came at a cost. The same man described as a legendary professor who trained generations of students and future professors was also the man who wrote a letter expressing sympathy for a Holocaust denier. How does a philosopher become the conduit for an idea, and what happens when the person carrying that idea turns out to carry darker things too?

• 2. From Lyon to the Letter

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  Beaufret passed his agrégation de philosophie in 1933, the qualifying examination for French philosophy teachers, and went on to teach at the lycée level. His early intellectual passions ran toward nineteenth-century German philosophy, particularly Hegel, Fichte, and Marx. Before the Second World War, he moved in distinguished circles, coming to know Paul Eluard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Andre Breton, and Paul Valery. The war interrupted everything. Beaufret was captured and held as a prisoner before escaping. He then joined the Resistance near Lyon, working within a unit called the Service Périclès.

  The encounter that would define his career came in 1946. That year, Heidegger's continued teaching privileges were under scrutiny from the denazification committees working in postwar Germany. It was at this moment that Beaufret and Heidegger first made each other's acquaintance. Beaufret engaged the German philosopher on the question of French existentialism, and Heidegger's response was the text now known as the Letter on Humanism, or in German, the Brief über den Humanismus. That single letter, addressed to Beaufret, became one of the key documents in postwar European philosophy.

• 3. The Trip to Todtnauberg

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  In 1947, following a month-long Franco-German academic exchange at Freiburg im Breisgau, Beaufret brought a group of his students to visit Heidegger at Todtnauberg. Baden-Württemberg was still under French occupation at the time, which gave the visit an additional political texture. One of the students selected for the trip was Jean-François Lyotard, who later recorded his impressions in a piece titled Heidegger and 'the Jews': a Conference in Vienna and Freiburg, published in his Political Writings.

  Lyotard's account is blunt. He described remembering "a sly peasant in his Hütte, dressed in traditional costume, of sententious speech and shifty eye, apparently lacking in shame and anxiety, protected by his knowledge and flattered by his discipline." He added that this picture was enough to prevent him from becoming a Heideggerian, though he acknowledged these were fugitive impressions due to the prejudices of a young Parisian, and said he continued to read Heidegger's work regardless. The trip did nothing to cool Beaufret's own devotion. He remained a close associate of Heidegger's for decades, and it was through Beaufret that Heidegger first became aware of Jacques Derrida's work.

• 4. Orthodox French Heideggerianism

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  Beaufret is considered the wellspring of what scholars call orthodox French Heideggerianism, the tendency within French philosophy most resistant to confronting Heidegger's involvement with National Socialism. That tendency was tested in 1987, when Victor Farías published Heidegger and Nazism in French translation. The book forced a public reckoning with Heidegger's political commitments, and it caught the orthodox camp off guard.

  D. Pettigrew and F. Raffoul, writing in French Interpretations of Heidegger, described Beaufret as "a legendary professor of philosophy, having trained generations of students and future professors." That reputation gave his dismissals of the Farías book considerable weight among his followers. But the book also contained a revelation that complicated Beaufret's position: Farías disclosed that Beaufret had written things in support of Robert Faurisson, a Holocaust denier. The disclosure reframed Beaufret's resistance to criticism of Heidegger not as principled philosophical loyalty, but as something potentially darker.

• 5. The Faurisson Letter

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  The letter Beaufret sent to Faurisson dates to 1978. In it, Beaufret wrote: "I believe that for my part I have traveled approximately the same path as you and have been considered suspect for having expressed the same doubts concerning the existence of the gas chambers. Fortunately for me, this was done orally." Those words, once made public, were devastating.

  Francois Fedier, a defender of Beaufret, argued that the letter was written before Faurisson had publicly declared himself a negationist, and therefore that Beaufret cannot be considered a Holocaust denier. The source notes this defense is demonstrably untrue: by 1978, Faurisson had already published two Holocaust-denying articles, and had that same year claimed that The Diary of Anne Frank was a forgery. Beaufret's defenders also offered another explanation for the letter, arguing that Beaufret wrote it because Faurisson, who had been a former student of his, had been violently attacked in the street.

  A separate accusation involved an anti-Semitic tirade Beaufret allegedly directed at Emmanuel Levinas, which shocked Jacques Derrida. Derrida, however, had not witnessed the incident directly; it was reported to him by a friend named Roger Laporte. Beaufret denied the incident completely. The two accusations together, the Faurisson letter and the Levinas episode, left a permanent shadow over his legacy.