Instant cover for a murderer
On the morning of Sunday, November 16, 1980, Hélène Rytmann, a member of the French resistance under German occupation and sociologist, is strangled by her husband in their apartment at the prestigious Ecole normale supérieure (ENS) in Paris. On the evening of 17 November 1980, the autopsy of the body of Hélène Rytmann reveals that death is not natural: it is indisputably a murder.
But Hélène Rytmann was not killed by anyone. She was killed by the secretary of the Ecole normale supérieure, Louis Althusser, the most famous philosopher of his generation, who revolutionized the interpretations of Karl Marx’s work and trained generations of students. The public is stunned. There’s a lot of talk about the crime, above all about the one who committed it.
In Inter Actualités, on 17 November, a few hours before the publication of the results of the autopsy, the presenter Alain Bedouet announces the death of Althusser’s wife and explains that the philosopher accuses himself of murder. He states that this news must be taken with the greatest precautions because Althusser, diagnosed as manic-depressive in 1947, suffers from a “psychiatric phenomenon of self-accusation”. “So, the animator resumes, from there to think that Hélène, his wife, died naturally, at the age of 70, it is only a step”. However, it is he who killed her.
Louis Althusser was admitted to the Sainte-Anne’s hospital just after he warned of his wife’s death. He spent the day in a deep state of prostration and declared not to remember the murder, only the “message” that he had started to give her on her neck. Guy Joly, the investigating judge who went to Sainte-Anne the evening of the murder, resigned to charge the philosopher with homicide. The case was closed on 23 January 1981 by a dismissal of charges, the judge recognizing that Althusser had “diminished responsibility” for psychological reasons. The murder will never have been fully investigated. Article 64 of the Criminal Code, repealed in 1994, actually states that “there is no crime or offense when the accused was insane at the time of the action or when he was coerced by force to which he could not resist”.
It is then the birth of a myth, that of the cursed philosopher, reinforced by the diagnosis of his mental state but also the autobiography he will publish five years after the murder and the positions taken by his idolatrous students. Some “friends of the couple” describe Hélène Rytmann as particularly difficult to live with. Philippe Sollers testified that she “sucked air”. Régis Debray goes so far as to explain that Althusser “asphyxiated her under a pillow to save her from the anxiety that was suffocating him”.
Francis Dupuis-Déri, a French-Canadian researcher, explained in 2015 that “the theory of madness is immediately needed in public space to explain this case. Any sociological or political analysis, not to say feminist, is being discarded”. Louis Althusser will not even be placed in custody and his psychological state will allow him to be exonerated both in the trial and in the media. The researcher continues: “Althusser has expended a lot of energy to present himself as mentally insane, and therefore irresponsible for murder, while he was recognized as a rational scholar,” adding that “within minutes and hours of the murder, Althusser enjoyed unwavering support from the leadership of the École Normale Supérieure, his therapists, friends, and disciples, who provided a line of defense before the judicial authorities seized the case”.
Finally, Althusser is not satisfied with having been exonerated and pushes the vice to claim that Hélène Rytmann was suicidal. His audacity allows him to say that his act can be seen as “an altruistic murder”. An old doctor friend of his would have asked him, “Did Hélène have such a desire to end her life […] that she passively accepted the death she had begged you to give her? Or did you have, as in your whole life, such a desire to come to her rescue that you unconsciously realized her desire to end her life?”
How a femicide becomes a funny anecdote in intellectual circles
“To understand this story, one must understand the extraordinary hold that Louis Althusser had on the French intellectual world,” explains philosopher Robert Maggiori, who wrote about the murder in 1880. Althusser was “a guru”, a “statue of the commander”. This fascination for the assassin philosopher and the fact that the murder took place in one of the greatest French schools allows macabre hoaxes, jokes of insiders, and students of preparatory classes on the act of Althusser: femicide.
Because it was one, of the typical mechanisms of femicide being identifiable. Althusser sought to control his wife’s activities but also showed great cruelty, especially by exposing his mistresses and abuse of women.
The philosopher relates for example in his autobiography L’Avenir dure longtemps (“The Future lasts long”) a summer with his wife in Saint-Tropez, where a friend introduces him to a young woman “on whom I threw myself”, writes Althusser. He tells how he abused her – “I draw the girl next to me and caress her breasts, belly and sex. She lets herself be made, a little confused, but prepared by my speeches. Then I propose to go on the beach” – and how he traumatized Hélène with his actions – “Always in front of Hélène, who did not know how to swim, I invite the young woman to undress, and we enter naked into the raging waves. Hélène is already screaming in fear. We’re swimming a little bit out, and we are almost making love in the open sea. I see Hélène, completely freaked out, running away on the beach screaming. [… ] When we are on the beach, Hélène has disappeared. I end up discovering her, unrecognizable, completely curled up on herself, trembling with a quasi-hysterical crisis, and the face of a very old woman ravaged by tears. [… ] At the end of I don’t know how long, she opens her mouth to violently chase me away: ‘You are despicable! You are dead for me! I don’t want to see you anymore! I can’t live with you anymore!’”.
Althusser himself writes “I do not know what regime of life I imposed on Hélène (and I know that I could be capable of the worst), but she declared with a resolution which terrified me that she could no longer live with me, that I was for her a ‘monster’ and that she wanted to leave me forever.” He does not accept the consequences of his actions: “She then made practical arrangements that were unbearable to me: she abandoned me in my presence, in our apartment. [… ] This abandonment seemed more unbearable than anything.” It is Hélène Rytmann who will say to the sociologist Roger Cornu, a few days before her return to Paris and her murder: “He’s bad, he’s violent, I fear the return.” For the writer Bernard-Henri Lévy, this case is even “a school case of femicide.”
Despite the large number of articles and books published since 1980 on the murder, it was not until autumn 2023 that Francis Dupuis-Déri, in his book Althusser Assassin subtitled “La Banalité du mâle” (“Althusser Assassin, The Banality of the Male”), was the first to describe Hélène Rytmann’s death as femicide.
Althusser’s statements that his wife was suicidal remain. Yet, in 1980, Hélène Rytmann was full of plans. In February, after long research, she met Jo Ros, whose project to revalue the workers’ memory of the city of Port-de-Bouc on the radio had come to her attention. Retired, she offered to help out as a volunteer on the project, which Rod accepted. He later declared: “I saw her take back colors”, Hélène flourishing far from Paris. He says “Althusser called often. It’s like he was tracking her, and he wanted to know where she was, what she was doing. Hélène often slept at my place and my wife, Alice, so he called home.”
Thus, contrary to what has been conveyed by the media and Althusser’s admirers, Hélène Rytmann was not the collateral and unpredictable victim of the crises of a mad genius. Jo Ros regrets: “It was the chronicle of a death announced, but I did not see it coming”.
A victim erased by her killer’s notoriety
French writer Bernard-Henri Lévy describes Hélène Rytmann as “in the shadows during her lifetime and in her death”.
As is often the case, it is the murderer we are talking about: we want to know everything. Who is he? Did he show signs of violence before? Does he have a psychiatric history? How did he kill her? How to explain his act? What will happen to him?
This is even more true for this case in that Althusser already enjoyed a very high reputation. The murder aroused even more curiosity, and the philosopher himself surfed the wave, publishing his autobiography L’Avenir dure longtemps (“The future lasts a long time”) in 1885, five years after the murder. But for the victim, little was said.
On 17 November 1980, the French TV news discussed the case and the presenter Patrick Poivre d’Arvor expressed himself with visible embarrassment: “The weather… Before I tell you about the weather, I must tell you about an extremely painful matter: the death of the wife of the philosopher Louis Althusser. The philosopher, who had been suffering from a deep depression for several months, accuses himself of murder. [… ] The secretary of the ENS is currently hospitalized in Sainte-Anne. Dominique Laury reminds us of his philosophical and political itinerary.”
Hélène Rytmann is thus reduced to “the wife of the philosopher Louis Althusser”. It is not a portrait of the victim that follows, recalling her role as a Resistant during WWII’s German occupation or her sociological contributions, no, it is a nostalgic portrait of the great Althusser, who, apparently more than he killed his wife, killed his career. In the London Sunday Times, the British journalist Graham Tearse regrets that the affair marks “the end of the career of one of the most prominent French intellectuals of the post-war period”. It is not the murder of a woman, it is the end of a man’s career.
We read his portrait much later, on November 29. Before that, Libération, a leading French newspaper, reports on the affair in an article published on November 18, 1980, entitled “Louis Althusser: le meurtre au bout de la déraison” (“Louis Althusser: murder at the end of folly”). The title so dismisses the victim that it no longer even refers to “the wife of”. It’s all about Althusser as if he were the only human being in this affair, and Hélène’s first name isn’t mentioned until late in the article.
Light of hope: this indifference towards Hélène Rytmann eventually came as a shock. It was first a woman, Claude Sarraute, who, on March 14, 1985, in Le Monde (at a time when the “Japanese cannibal” Issei Sagawa was also publishing his memoirs) protested: “We in the media, as soon as we see a prestigious name involved in a juicy trial, Althusser, […] we make a big deal of it. The victim? She doesn’t deserve three lines. The star is the culprit.”
However, it’s not just a question of the times, there’s still much to be done. In an article published in Le Monde on May 26, 2011, entitled “Althusser, le lyrisme et la déraison” (“Althusser, lyricism and folly”) – using the title of a book of letters written by Louis Althusser to Hélène Rytmann – journalist Jean Birnbaum writes that “a friend calls to testify to her delight”. She had just finished reading the letters: “It’s simple,” she confided over the phone, “ if a man sends me letters like these for thirty years, I don’t mind if he strangles me in the end!” At the end of the day, it looks like Hélène’s murder was as romantic as Althusser’s letters cruelly evoking his mistresses. Lucky girl.
More recently, on March 8, 2023, students of the Ecole normale supérieure renamed the Aron room as the “Hélène-Legotien-Rytmann” room with posters paying tribute to her memory – Legotien being her pseudonym in the French Resistance network. Frédéric Worms, the director, is opposed to renaming a room but promises to open a dedicated room in 2024, which is still waiting. A few days later, the student’s home is ransacked with tags “Down with feminists”. On the night of 28 to 29 March, the room in tribute to Hélène is ransacked, the signs are covered with paintings, and the same tags “Down with feminists” are present.
Hélène Rytmann, thus, died twice: the first from her husband’s hands, the second from the press. The Resistance and the sociologist were erased by the overwhelming notoriety of Louis Althusser and his protection by the French intellectual milieu.
A more complex debate than the separation of artist and artwork
Whatever one may say, it is always the murderer who is most talked about and it is difficult to do anything about it: they are the perpetrators of the crime and, if only for the judgment, it is important to gather information about them. What can be done for the victim is to allow one to remember her name and who she was before being “the wife of”.
In the case of the murder of Hélène Rytmann, a difficulty is added to the usual debate “Must we separate the artist from the artwork?”. Althusser was an intellectual. If one considers that one can boycott an artwork or another, it is difficult to boycott a contribution to political theory, just like a scientific discovery.
The contributions of Althusser should continue to be studied. However, the importance of his work never justified the fact that he became the victim in the murder of Hélène Rytmann in the eyes of public opinion.
Althusser died of a heart attack in 1990. Ten years earlier, after he killed Hélène Rytmann, powerful tributes were paid to him.