He was born in France in 1931, in Paris, and at just eight years the Second World War broke out. "There is not such an intensive course to cultivate political consciousness," he told ARGIA in an interview by Amets Arzallus in 2008. "It gathers the sense of the enemy and the need to fight, a terrible adversary, hateful, oppressive, gunshot, torturer... and you don't have to let him take steps in the neighborhood. I thought so for ten years." These words define Gilles Perrault.

Before World War II, Perrault thought that the French army was the "strongest in the world" and lived in France in the "joy of the next day" of World War I. And the supposed half: "But that conviction of strength became a deactivation and the French army fell flat. I went down the road and saw the French officers with their wives taking their bags and fleeing, and I saw the French soldiers throwing their rifle into the ravine and saying that they defect us and flee. I felt terrible despair (...) The unexpected failure of France surprised the whole world."

He was a victim of Nazism when he was a teenager, fearing Gestapo's threats, and is a terror, as his family was resilient, a member of the British network SOE. "It was a very strange feeling for me to see that my parents, the two lawyers, the bourgeois, the Catholics, called them terrorists in the newspapers, in the German posters. Then I realized that the person doesn't have to look like his social image." Gestapo knocked on them the door of his house at the age of 10 to bring his father, who was then released.

Committed writer

In addition to the anti-fascist of thought, militant, he fought since the job of writer and journalist. He was a historian of the Red Orchestra, the book L' orchestre rouge, about the Russian spies who knew the cavities of Nazism in 1967, and in the same 1960s he has also been informed in the United States about the defense of the civil rights of African-Americans, in India and in Japan, and before in Algeria: He was part of the French army and reported his visions in the essay book Les Parachutistes, published in 1961, which created chaos in France.

Perrault was a committed writer. That the word can be bullet, he told ARGIA: "I feel the need to give testimonies. If I do an investigation and I know something that people do not know, if I know an injustice, I feel like a soldier who receives the mobilisation order, I have to go to the trench, there is a moral obligation. The pen can be a weapon, so you have to use it. If it's not desertion."

The bustle of Morocco

In 1991 he published the book Notre ami le roi or Célagun erregea, the fascist and totalitarian regime of King Hassan II, reported by torture, censorship, disappearances of hundreds of citizens and shooting. In France, until then, there was a very positive image of Morocco as an expression of the strategic alliance between the two governments, with the interests of the large media, corporations and companies.

Morocco made its own and two to completely cut off the circulation of the book, until it opened judicial avenues against the writer, but what the book counted went through the back door to the houses of the people, and the pride it created was not just any. It internationalized and Morocco, after giving explanations, liberated many detained citizens.

For the liberation of the Basque Country: "Win"

"The road will be shorter or longer, but [Euskal Herria] will win," Perrault told ARGIA. Addressed to the French and Spanish Governments, he said that "The glare against the Basque Country is a lost struggle beforehand", and that when a people struggles for their freedom they will achieve it sooner or later, "exceptions are very rare".

The interview with the writer Perrault took place in 2008 and was very critical because ETA used weapons. He asked for an attitude of abandonment because he was not productive.

"Every attack makes Madrid and Paris happy, I am not going to say that violence has never been justified, I am not saying that at Franco's time we should not throw away the civil guards and that the bombs explode when Carrero Blanco's car passed, everything was well done, but violence must be effective, if it is counterproductive, it must be left and at this moment it is not resolved. You have to leave it. (...) I am not saying that violence is allowed and that happy and peaceful solutions appear. But at least the letter giving the right of veto to the enemy will be taken from his hands. And now I am convinced that violence is the best weapon in Paris and Madrid to block any progress. Madrid can give life to ten civil guards every year without problems, they will die more in traffic accidents".

The world, "passive accomplice."

Gilles Perrault was a committed writer, yes, who felt that he began to become increasingly weird and isolated. He said it was a sort of world trend that people didn't commit to certain issues, that they "accept things as they are." He understood old age, in essence, as a "failure."

The reflection that made ARGIA on the direction of society was:

"There is a kind of inertia that is dominating, a passive complicity, accepting things as they are, even injustices. I always give the same example: we know that the police station in the Spaniards was tortured, and yet France handed over to the Basques the Spanish State. And we leave it to make that happen, the intellectuals don't mobilize. Thirty or forty years ago there was going to be a great wave. Then there were high-level intellectuals, Francois Mauriac, Andre Malraux, Jean Paul Sartre, or Simone de Beauvoir, but that race has turned off and no news has been turned on. It is an attitude born of despair and makes resignation even more resigned. And it is a pity, precisely because the category that can make your voice heard is a socio-profession, and I believe that whoever has the means sometimes also has an obligation."