Debray's mysterious ways

EVER SINCE THE French intellectual Régis Debray was jailed in Bolivia in 1967 for buddying up with Che Guevara, the US government has regarded him as “the most anti-American of anti-Americans.” Osama bin Laden might not agree, but that at least is the verdict of Jeffrey Mehlman, a distinguished professor of French at BU. After all, when Mehlman invited his friend Debray to lecture on campus in 2001, Representative Barney Frank had to pull strings to get Debray into the country (as the Globe’s Alex Beam noted at the time). Despite having spent the 1980s as an adviser to France’s president François Mitterrand, Debray was somehow still on the State Department’s “terrorist watch list.” Since

then, Debray hasn’t done much to repair his reputation on these shores: In February, in a New York Times op-ed on the Franco- American dispute over Iraq, he castigated “Puritan America” for its “biblical self-assurance in its transcendent destiny.”

Given that swipe, Debray’s fellow soixante-huitards (’68ers) may be surprised by his latest French bestseller, which has just arrived in the United States in a translation by Mehlman. “God: An Itinerary” (Verso) is a mostly respectful history of the notion of God in the West. Although Debray doesn’t believe in God, in the book’s introduction he claims to be fascinated by “the meandering advance of His complications,” andberates his supposedly cultivated peers for their biblical illiteracy. He wrote the book, he adds, in order to counter the “suicidal” secularist policy banning the teaching of religions in French public schools. (Debray recently authored an official government report on that topic, in which he argued that the history of Western civilization is largely incomprehensible unless one also studies the history of religion.)

When asked how it’s possible that a former theorist of Marxist revolution has ended up defending religious education, Mehlman joked, “Debray is a virtuoso of shifting out of gear – or, to use the French term for that action, débrayage.”