Régis Debray

Family background

Régis Debray was born in Paris on 2 September 1940 into an upper-class family. Both his parents were lawyers at the Court of Appeal of Paris. His mother, Janine Alexandre-Debray (1910–2000), served as vice-president of the Paris Municipal Council and later as a senator. His maternal grandfather was of Jewish descent ; during the Nazi occupation of France, his mother was required to obtain a certificate of "Aryan ancestry." .

He is the nephew of child psychiatrist Pierre Debray-Ritzen.

Childhood

Born shortly after the Fall of France, Debray was staying in the Poitou region with his grandmother at the time of the Liberation. He watched the SS Division Das Reich retreat while armed with a wooden sword.

He was raised a Catholic but abandoned his belief in God in the mid-1950s. His political awakening was shaped by the wars of decolonisation. He wept because of the French army's defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. At the age of sixteen, he became a communist and supported the Algerian independence.

Education

Debray ranked first in the entrance examination to the École normale supérieure in 1960, where he studied under the neo-Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser.

At the age of twenty, he appeared in the cinema verité movie Chronique d'un été by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, who filmed him denouncing French public opinion's acquiescence in the Algerian War. He developed a Third-Worldist outlook, influenced by his reading of Alejo Carpentier's Explosion in a Cathedral and Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth.

Debray became an agrégé de philosophie in 1965 and taught at a secondary school in Nancy for three months, before leaving to pursue revolutionary activity in Latin America.

Detention and trial

Following his arrest, Debray was imprisoned in Camiri. For two days, Bolivian soldiers beat him severely and threatened to kill him. CIA agents subsequently arrived to interrogate him. According to Jean Lartéguy, Debray narrowly escaped an extrajudicial execution.

He was held incommunicado for two months, without access to a lawyer or representatives of his country's embassy. Reports of his death circulated in the media. The French ambassador in La Paz obtained confirmation of his imprisonment on 26 April. In Paris, his mother appealed to Charles de Gaulle – the Debray family had connections to the Vendroux family, that of Yvonne de Gaulle – who sent a message to General René Barrientos Ortuño, president of Bolivia, asking him to spare the young man's life.

An international campaign was quickly organised to obtain information about the prisoner's situation and demand respect for his rights. Dozens of prominent figures, including writers, academics, politicians and religious leaders, joined the campaign. In Britain, Bertrand Russell accused the CIA of having ordered the detention of journalist Régis Debray and demanded either his immediate release or his appearance before an ordinary court. In the United States, academics at Harvard University and the MIT signed petitions calling for his rights to be respected C. L. Sulzberger of The New York Times described the Frenchman as "hippie" whom the Bolivians should release.

General Barrientos rejected these appeals. He declared that "Régis Debray's adventures will end here" and announced that he was considering reinstating the death penalty for insurgents. The Bolivian authorities denied that the Frenchman had been tortured and stated that a trial would be held in due course.

After two months in detention, Debray received his first outside visitor on 21 June: Andrés Kennedy, the American apostolic vicar of La Paz, who was related to Senator Robert F. Kennedy. The latter had reportedly conveyed to Bolivian leaders the concern that the case had generated on both sides of the Atlantic. A fortnight later, his mother was granted permission to visit him in Camiri. A press conference was authorised as the trial approached. His defence was handled by the court-appointed Bolivian lawyer Raúl Novillo, assisted by Debray’s father and three legal observers from the International League for Human Rights.

The trial opened in Camiri on 26 September 1967. Debray appeared alongside Ciro Bustos; the journalist George Roth had been released. The families of soldiers killed in the ambushes joined the proceedings as civil parties. Four Bolivians who had deserted the guerrillas were also tried. Before the case file had been read in full or witnesses heard, military prosecutor Colonel Remberto Iriarte delivered an impassioned indictment, describing Debray as "a cynical and cruel bandit" who had organised the guerrilla campaign theorised in his book Revolution in the Revolution?. Iriarte demanded the maximum sentence of thirty years' imprisonment.

The military court regarded Debray as an agent acting on behalf of Fidel Castro. The defence, by contrast, presented him as an observer and a writer working on a journalistic assignment. This account was supported by François Maspero, his Paris publisher, who had travelled to Bolivia and was eventually expelled from the country in July; Jean-Paul Sartre, editor of Les Temps modernes; and the Mexican weekly Sucesos.

As the trial proceeded, the hunt for Che Guevara reached its conclusion. The Bolivian army captured and executed him on 9 October 1967. Debray then sent a letter to the court. He wrote that the guerrilla leader's death "did not mark the end of the anti-imperialist struggle, but its beginning" and that Guevara was "immortal, because he will live in the heart of every revolutionary". The only reason he had not taken up arms, he added, was that Guevara had asked him to organise support from outside. "My greatest sorrow today is that I did not die by his side," he wrote. Debray later told AFP: "For me, Guevara's adventure was a mystical adventure, and the last months of his life were a passion, his revolutionary passion. He irresistibly evoked the image of Christ."

On 17 November 1967, the military court in Camiri delivered its verdict. It sentenced Debray and Ciro Bustos to thirty years' imprisonment for rebellion, murder, violence and theft. The four Bolivian co-defendants, who had testified against them, were acquitted. The defence challenged the ruling and filed an appeal for annulment, alleging several violations of the Bolivian Constitution and military penal code.

Controversy over Che Guevara's death

At the end of the trial, Colonel-prosecutor Remberto Iriarte claimed that the Frenchman had "rendered the Bolivians a great service" by revealing Che Guevara's presence in the jungle. Indignant at what he called this "outrageous" accusation, Debray told journalists after his conviction that the army had known of Guevara's presence since March, having obtained the information from several sources. These included the acquitted deserters Choque, Barrera and Rocavado, followed by Jorge Masquez, a guerrilla fighter captured by the army who was executed after being tortured. Masquez had reportedly confided information to a CIA agent while in hospital. Ciro Bustos allegedly spoke afterward. According to Debray, he had merely acknowledged Guevara's presence, saying, he "was the sixth to do so."

A declassified CIA cable dated 10 May 1967 partially corroborates this account, although it does not specify that Debray was the sixth person to provide such information.

On 30 June 1967, upon hearing on the radio that General Ovando had publicly disclosed his presence in Bolivia, Che Guevara wrote in his Bolivian Diary: "He bases this on Debray's statements, who seems to have spoken more than he should have, although we cannot know exactly what this amounts to, or under what circumstances he said what he appears to have said." On 10 July, Guevara reproached Bustos and Debray for revealing the guerrilla campaign's continental objectives.

In the preface to the 1968 edition of the Bolivian Diary, Fidel Castro nevertheless praised Debray's "firm and courageous attitude" in the face of his captors.

According to Debray, CIA public-relations advisers had suggested to the Bolivian military that they portray him as the betrayor of Che Guevara, in order to discredit him in the eyes of international public opinion. In 1989, former CIA officer Félix Rodríguez claimed that "it was Debray's testimony, in fact, that helped convince the Agency to lay on a concentrated effort to capture the elusive revolutionary".

In August 1996, Che Guevara's daughter, Aleida Guevara, accused Debray of having been responsible for her father's capture. The accusation came after the French writer had broken with Fidel Castro. He had condemned the excesses of the Cuban regime in 1989, following the executions of his friend Antonio de la Guardia and General Arnaldo Ochoa. He had also published Loués soient nos seigneurs, in which Guevara is portrayed as a sectarian and authoritarian figure whose conduct in Bolivia was, at the very least, imprudent. Aleida Guevara rejected Debray's suggestion that her father had deliberately rushed towards martyrdom.

The accusation was not officially endorsed by the Castro government. In 1998, Manuel Piñeiro, the former head of Cuban intelligence, stated that it would be wrong to hold Debray responsible for the guerrillas' location, let alone for Guevara's death. Piñeiro instead accused Ciro Bustos, who had produced drawings while in detention, including a portrait of Guevara. Jorge Castañeda Gutman, Mexican Secretary of Foreign Affairs, and Harry Villegas, a fellow guerrilla fighter of Guevara, likewise believed that Bustos had betrayed the group.

In 2001, a Swedish documentary by Erik Gandini and Tarik Saleh suggested that Bustos had been blamed in order to exonerate Debray. Gary Prado, the commander of the Bolivian unit that captured Guevara, stated: "For us, it was never important to know who spoke first. But among the military, it is well known that it was Debray. I read all the interrogation records myself. From the beginning, he confirmed that Che Guevara was in Bolivia and said that he had come only as a journalist to interview him."

In 2003, Pacho O'Donnell wrote in his biography of Che Guevara that the guerrillas had been forced to divide their forces to allow Debray and Bustos to leave, and that they were unable to regroup effectively. Convinced that the Debray had reached an understanding with his interrogators, O'Donnell brought renewed attention to a letter the Frenchman had written to his lawyer, previously published by a Bolivian newspaper in 1968. The letter referred to a promise made to the military not to disclose Guevara's presence to the press. Other witnesses confirmed that Debray had cooperated, including a CIA agent who described him as "loquacious".

In 2006, Fidel Castro reiterated in his Biografía a dos voces that he had sent Debray on a mission to Bolivia and held nothing against him.

As long as the Bolivian archives remain closed, it is impossible to establish precisely what was said to the interrogators or to assess the value of any information supplied for counterinsurgency operations. The affair cannot be reduced to a simple story of betrayal. The failure of the Ñancahuazú Guerrilla and Guevara's capture resulted primarily from his misjudgements on the ground, his poor relations with the Bolivian Communist Party, communication difficulties with Cuba, and his persistence after the situation had become desperate.

It is possible that the international campaign in support of Régis Debray indirectly contributed to the Bolivian army's decision not to spare Che Guevara's life, in order to avoid a trial that would attract widespread international attention.

Imprisonment and release

A few weeks after the verdict, in January 1968, General Barrientos raised the possibility of exchanging Régis Debray for Huber Matos, a political prisoner in Cuba, before withdrawing the proposal. The idea was also rejected by Fidel Castro.

In February 1968, Debray married Elizabeth Burgos in a civil ceremony in Camiri. He was permitted to see his wife for ten days every three months, for half an hour each day. A French consular official could visit him once a month in the presence of a Bolivian officer. His correspondence was censored, and Marxist literature was prohibited. Having decided not to appeal his conviction before a military court, Debray attempted a hunger strike in the summer of 1968 to protest against his conditions of detention. His visitors became concerned about his health.

In the autumn of 1969, following General Barrientos's death and General Ovando's seizure of power, writers André Malraux, François Mauriac and Jean-Paul Sartre published a letter to the new Bolivian president, asking him to grant Debray an amnesty. They described him as "a thinker of great worth, one of the most gifted of his generation". An international campaign in his support followed, with hundreds of prominent figures joining the appeal, from Pablo Picasso and Charlie Chaplin to Igor Stravinsky and Laurence Olivier.

In Bolivia, Debray received support from trade unions and students. The revolutionary council of the University of La Paz appointed him "professor of the chair of Marxist philosophy".

In October 1970, General Ovando was overthrown in a coup and General Torres took power. The new president announced that he was considering an amnesty for the two prisoners held in Camiri, although the military's more right-wing factions opposed the measure. Following lengthy diplomatic efforts by France under President Georges Pompidou, Debray was released on 23 December 1970, after three years and eight months in captivity. He was expelled to Chile with Ciro Bustos aboard a Bolivian military aircraft.

Chile

Debray spent some time recovering at Pablo Neruda's home. He befriended President Salvador Allende; in Miguel Littín’s film Compañero Presidente, the two men discuss the experience of the Popular Unity government and contrast the Guevarist conception of revolution with Allende's "Chilean way to socialism", based on gaining power through institutional means.

Debray returned to Cuba in 1971, where he briefly resumed military training. However, he now criticised the foco strategy he had helped theorise. He acknowledged that he was wrong to believe that an armed vanguard could, by itself, set a revolutionary process in motion. He first drafted a text in Havana in 1971 drawing lessons from the activities of the Tupamaros in Uruguay. He then published in 1974 a detailed analysis of armed-struggle campaigns in Venezuela, Bolivia, Uruguay and Guatemala

Klaus Barbie

In 1972, Debray joined Serge and Beate Klarsfeld in their efforts to bring to justice Klaus Barbie, a former head of the Gestapo in France who had taken refuge in Bolivia. Faced with difficulties in securing his extradition, they considered abducting him, taking him to Chile and then handing him over to the French authorities. The clandestine operation involved Monika Ertl and other opponents of Bolivian president Hugo Banzer. It failed: Ertl was captured, tortured and executed in May 1973. The possibility of using Chile as a transit point for Barbie's removal disappeared after the Pinochet coup, while the request for Barbie's extradition was rejected.

Debray left Chile shortly before the coup d'état of 11 September 1973 orchestrated by the CIA. He met Allende in August and published an account of their final conversation in Le Nouvel Observateur. He portrayed the president as aware of the gravity of the situation and pursuing a strategy intended to buy time in the face of the military threat.

At the Élysée Palace

After François Mitterrand was elected president of France in May 1981, he appointed Debray as a special adviser responsible for relations with the Third World. According to Hubert Védrine, Debray worked "feverishly" to revive the Latin American policy pursued by Charles de Gaulle. Together with his friend Jorge Castañeda, Mexico's Secretary of Foreign Affairs, he helped initiate a Franco-Mexican declaration recognising the political legitimacy of the FMLN and calling for non-interference in the internal affairs of El Salvador. The initiative irritated Washington. Richard V. Allen, national security adviser to Ronald Reagan, telephoned Jacques Attali at the Élysée Palace and, half-jokingly, asked whether France intended to send troops.

In September 1981, Debray was received discreetly at the White House by Richard V. Allen, who remarked that the Americans could also fight imperialism, namely French imperialism in Africa.

Debray's appointment at the Élysée attracted controversy in the United States. He was on the American intelligence services' blacklist because of his links to the Cuban regime and his role as an ideologue of guerrilla movements. He was also in contact with Philip Agee, a former CIA officer who had publicly disclosed the names of former colleagues and was collaborating with the Cubans.

According to Pierre Joxe, Debray was highly influential with Mitterrand during the early months of his presidency. He pressed for covert aid to be provided to Latin America's far left. At his request, the French intelligence agency reportedly helped members of the MIR escape from Chile.

In early autumn 1982, the fall of Bolivia's dictatorship made the extradition of Klaus Barbie to France possible. Debray, whose plan to abduct the nazi war criminal had failed a decade earlier, immediately contacted Gustavo Sánchez, the new interior minister. On 5 February 1983, Barbie was extradited to France in exchange for an arms shipment to Bolivia.

NATO

In Empires against Europe (1985), Debray analysed the decline of the Soviet Union compared to the more attractive and less overtly coercive American power. He criticised the intellectual influence exercised over Western European elites by the Atlantic alliance through the networks it had established. In his view, Washington was the principal obstacle to European strategic autonomy.

Debray argued that the collapse of the Soviet bloc risked making the old continent more dangerous by reviving national and identity-based conflicts in Eastern Europe. He anticipated, in particular, the resurgence of "Holy Russia".

Since the end of the Cold War, Debray has systematically opposed NATO's military operations, including the Gulf War, the intervention in Bosnia, the bombing of Yugoslavia and the war in Afghanistan.

He has been on the American intelligence services' blacklist since his involvement in Che Guevara's Bolivian guerrilla campaign. His diplomatic passport temporarily allowed him to circumvent the restriction under François Mitterrand, but in the spring of 2001, while travelling to Boston for a series of lectures, he was stopped at the airport and deported from the United States.

Following the September 11 attacks, Debray published The Edict of Caracalla. Xavier de C***, a fictional former senior French civil servant who became an American citizen, argues for incorporating the European imperial province into the "United States of the West", to better counter Islamists and China.

Debray challenged the conclusions of a report commissioned by President François Hollande on France's return to NATO's integrated military command, a decision announced by President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007. Whereas Hubert Védrine argued that reversing the decision would not give France any new levers of influence, Debray advocated complete withdrawal from the Atlantic alliance, while remaining “non-aligned allies” of the United States. He argued that NATO, whose command structure and strategic priorities are dominated by the United States, perpetuates European military weakness rather than compensating for it. In his view, the alliance complicates relations with Russia, undermines the UN and limits France's diplomatic freedom of action towards countries in the Global South. He maintained that NATO membership risks drawing France into conflicts that do not serve its national interests.

European Union

Dissatisfied with France's integration into a supranational Europe, Debray opposed the Maastricht Treaty. He instead advocated selective cooperation among European nations in the fields of industry, diplomacy, and defence, with French nuclear deterrence playing a major role, in keeping with the Gaullist tradition. He considered it dangerous to place "the fiction of Europe above the fiction of France".

In 2019, in a pamphlet entitled The Panthom Europe, Debray offered a scathing assessment of the European Union's political state, describing it as a "gloomy bureaucratic maze" without a historical horizon. He recalled the spiritual foundations of the European project: the blue flag bearing twelve stars, associated with the Virgin Mary, draws on the Book of Revelation, giving the project an eschatological dimension. The "founding fathers of Europe" were steeped in Christian—and predominantly Catholic—culture. These original references, he argued, have been forgotten, leaving behind a desacralised financial and legal structure incapable of fostering a sense of belonging to a community sharing a common destiny.

French Republic

In Long Live the Republic (1989), Debray criticised the consensual tone of the commemorations of the French Revolution bicentenary. In his view, presenting the Revolution as a completed process, definitively incorporated into the national heritage, effectively neutralised its political significance. The Republic, he argued, requires a commitment to social transformation and a continuing struggle for equality in order to survive. He urged the left to recover a revolutionary and militant ethos rather than indulge in what he described as self-satisfied moralising.

He argued that the left in power had not only abandoned socialism but also relinquished the very idea of the Republic; that it had become excessively liberal and managerial, increasingly influenced by political communications advisers and show business. He denounced the dominance of money, opinion polls and statistics, arguing that "the obsession with figures turns government into an airline pilot who mistakes a weather report for a flight plan".

Memory conflicts

During Jacques Chirac’s second presidential term, Régis Debray was entrusted with two missions abroad.

Reflections on the sacred

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In Critique of Political Reason (1981) and many of his ulterior essays, Debray examines the symbolic beliefs that underpin social cohesion. His starting premise is that, in order to create a sense of collective belonging that endure over time and across space, a human group must refer to an abstract principle external to itself. He compares this "incompleteness" to that of arithmetic systems, as demonstrated by Kurt Gödel.

This need for a social "keystone" was long fulfilled by God and later by principles such as the Nation, the Republic, the People and the Revolution. These enable individuals to form a collective "we" by providing coherent narratives through which they can situate their lives. Both a church and a nation-state have founding figures, "exemplary dead", symbols, rituals and promises for the future.

In nation-states, the material forms of secular sacredness may be places—such as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the Panthéon or the crypt at Mont Valérien for the French Republic, and Lenin's Mausoleum for the Soviet Union—or objects, such as the dollar bill and the manuscripts of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution.

Sacred places are surrounded by reverence and ritual; entering in them produces a "change of state". To varying degrees, this phenomenon may apply to landscapes (Mount Sinai), places of worship (Western Wall), sites of remembrance (Yad Vashem) or places of power, such as courthouses.

Literary awards

• Prix Femina for his novel La neige brûle (1977)
• Prix Novembre for his autobiographical account Loués soient nos seigneurs (1996)
• Prix du livre politique for his autobiographical account Par l'amour de l'art (1998)
• Prix Montaigne de Bordeaux for his essay Un candide à sa fenêtre (2015)
• Grand Prix de Littérature de l'Académie française for his entire body of work (2019)

Books

In French:

• Révolution dans la révolution ? : Lutte armée et lutte politique en Amérique latine [essai](Paris, Maspero, 1967, series: Cahiers libres)
• La Frontière, suivi de Un jeune homme à la page [littérature] (Paris, Le Seuil, 1967, series: Écrire)
• Nous les Tupamaros, suivi d'apprendre d'eux (Paris, Maspero, 1974, series: Cahiers libres)
• La guérilla du Che (Paris, Le Seuil, 1974, series: Histoire immédiate)
• L'Indésirable [littérature](Paris, Le Seuil, 1975)
• Les rendez-vous manqués (pour Pierre Goldman) [littérature] (Paris, Le Seuil, 1975, series: Combats)
• Journal d'un petit bourgeois entre deux feux et quatre murs [littérature] (Paris, Le Seuil, 1976)
• La neige brûle [littérature] (Paris, Grasset, 1977) Prix Femina
• Le pouvoir intellectuel en France (Paris, Ramsay, 1979)
• Critique de la raison politique (Paris, Gallimard, 1981, series: Bibliothèque des idées)
• La Puissance et les Rêves (Paris, Gallimard, 1984)
• Comète ma comète [littérature] (Paris, Gallimard, 1986)
• Christophe Colomb, le visiteur de l'aube, suivi des Traités de Tordesillas [littérature] (Paris, La Différence, 1991, series: Les voies du Sud: histoire)
• Contretemps : Eloge des idéaux perdus (Paris, Gallimard, 1992, series: Folio actuel)
• Trilogie "Le temps d'apprendre à vivre" I: Les Masques, une éducation amoureuse [littérature] (1992)
• Vie et mort de l'image : une histoire du regard en Occident (Paris, Gallimard, 1992, series: Folio actuel)
• L'État séducteur: les révolutions médiologiques du pouvoir (Paris, Gallimard, 1993)
• L'œil naïf (Paris, Le Seuil, 1994)
• Manifestes medialogiques (Editions Gallimard, 1994)
• Contre Venise [littérature](Paris, Gallimard, 1995, series: Folio)
• A demain de Gaulle (Paris, Gallimard, 1996)
• La République expliquée à ma fille (Paris, Le 1998)
• L'abus monumental (Paris, Fayard, 1999, series: L'abus monumental)
• Shangaï, dernières nouvelles [littérature] (Paris, Arléa, 1999)
• Trilogie "Le temps d'apprendre à vivre" II: Loués soient nos seigneurs, une éducation politique [littérature] (2000)
• Trilogie "Le temps d'apprendre à vivre" III: Par amour de l'art, une éducation intellectuelle [littérature] (2000)
• Dieu, un itinéraire : matériaux pour l'histoire de l'éternel en occident (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2001, series: Champ médiologique; Paris, Odile Jacob, 2003, series: Poches Odile Jacob; Prix Combourg 2003)
• L'Enseignement du fait religieux dans l'école laïque: rapport au ministre de l'Education nationale (Paris, Ministère de l'éducation nationale, 2002)
• L'édit de Caracalla ou plaidoyer pour des Etats-Unis d'occident (Paris, Fayard, 2002). Written by Debray under pseudonym of "Xavier de C...".
• Le Feu sacré : Fonction du religieux (Paris, Fayard, 2003)
• L'Ancien et le Nouveau Testament à travers 200 chefs-d'œuvre de la peinture (Paris, Presses de la Renaissance, 2003), 2 volumes: Tome I: L’Ancien testament à travers 100 chefs-d’œuvre de la peinture (2003); Tome II: Le Nouveau testament à travers 100 chefs-d’œuvre de la peinture (2003)
• À l'ombre des lumières : Débat entre un philosophe et un scientifique (2003) (Entretien avec Jean Bricmont).
• Ce que nous voile le voile (Paris, Gallimard, 2004)
• Le plan vermeil: modeste proposition [littérature](Paris, Gallimard, 2004)
• Le siècle et la règle. Une correspondance avec le frère Gilles-Dominique o. p. (Paris, Fayard, 2004)
• Julien le Fidèle ou Le banquet des démons [théâtre] (Paris, Gallimard, 2005, series: NRF)
• Sur le pont d'Avignon (Paris, Flammarion, 2005, series: Café Voltaire)
• Les communions humaines (Paris, Fayard, 2005, series: Les dieux dans la Cité - Bibliothèque de culture religieuse)
• Supplique aux nouveaux progressistes du XXIe siècle (Paris, Gallimard, 2006)
• Aveuglantes Lumières : journal en clair-obscur (Paris, Gallimard, 2006, series: NRF)
• Un candide en Terre sainte (Paris, Gallimard, 2008)
• Dégagements (Paris, Gallimard, 2010)
• Que reste-t-il de l'occident ? (Paris, Grasset, 2014). Written by Debray and Renaud Girard.
• Civilisation. Comment nous sommes devenus américains (Paris, Gallimard, 2017).

In English:

• Revolution in the Revolution? Armed Struggle and Political Struggle in Latin America (London and New York, M.R. Press, 1967)
• The Border & A Young Man in the Know (New York, Grove Press, 1968).
• Media Manifestos: On the Technological Transmission of Cultural Forms (London, Verso, 1996).
• Against Venice (Berkeley, Calif., North Atlantic Books, 1999; New York, Pushkin Press, 2001).
• God: An Itinerary (New York, Verso, 2004).
• Transmitting Culture (New York, Columbia University Press, 2004).
• Empire 2.0: A Modest Proposal for a United States of the West by Xavier de C*** (Berkeley, California, North Atlantic Books, 2004).
• Civilization: How We All Became American (London, Verso, 2019).

Articles

• La Puissance et les Rêves: 3 Intermezzos, translated into English by Sian Reynolds, in Parker, Geoff (ed.), Cencrastus No. 19, Winter 1984, pp. 17 – 22, ISSN 0264-0856
• "This Was an Intellectual". TELOS 44 (Summer 1980). New York: Telos Press

Reports

• Rapport au Ministre des affaires étrangères M. Dominique de Villepin du Comité indépendant de réflexion et de propositions sur les relations Franco-Haïtiennes - Janvier 2004

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