The Courage of Hélène Legotien
Originally published by Mediapart, 16 November 2022. Last updated March 2025.
Forty-two years to the day after her murder, one way of paying tribute to Hélène Rytmann-Althusser is to remember that she was also the author, under the name Hélène Legotien, of a diverse body of work, ranging from film reviews to a critical sociology of development.
To the regret expressed by Richard Seymour that ‘it is a shame that in discussions about [her] murder, Rytmann almost never emerges as a woman full of qualities’,[1] I would like to propose on this 16 November a response that is different in two ways. It requires us to turn our thoughts away from her murder and from the very surname of Rytmann.
It took courage for Hélène Rytmann to change her name in mid-life to Hélène Legotien, during the Second World War. Unlike her brother Moïse, Hélène never asked the registry office to officially sanction this change. It was not a question of Frenchifying a patronymic of Jewish origin, but of giving herself a new surname in order to sign texts, leave a full postal address for new friends and try to start living again after the violence of her experience as an activist and member of the Resistance.
Texts mentioning Hélène Legotien usually state that this name was given to her when she was active in the Lyon Resistance. Abbé Larue, a member of the Resistance who was shot a few days before the liberation of Lyon, is said to have named her after a Jesuit who wrote about China and the quarrel over rites in the 17th century. It is never acknowledged that this religious man was actually called Charles Le Gobien (1652 - 1708). One less space and a change of letter: it’s not much, but it may be enough to avoid reducing Legotien to a name that came from outside and was given by a man.
In his autobiography, Hélène’s husband also explains the name change as a result of his wife’s hatred of the surname (Rytmann) of a father (Benjamin) whom she nevertheless loved. At the same time, he asserts that what young Hélène had suffered first and foremost was her mother’s lack of love (her name was Mlotkine, not Rytmann, when her daughter Hélène was born in 1910) and the fact that, as an adolescent, she had been sexually abused by her parents’ doctor. Hélène Rytmann left no known text on the tragedies of her childhood and adolescence. It is a prudent choice, then, to focus on what actually exists: texts signed Legotien, the sum total of which forms a written body of work.
It is undeniable that from 1944 onwards, Legotien was for Hélène as much a nom de plume as a name of practical use, a possible reminder of the Resistance. It is printed at the bottom of the oldest text I know of by Legotien: a review of the film Florence est folle published in Combat on 15 November 1944. It was also under this name that Rytmann wrote in 1948 a novel about the Resistance, provisionally entitled Passé simple. While the manuscript submitted to Gallimard at that time has now been lost, Albert Camus’s rejection letter and Legotien’s reply are preserved in the Hélène Rytmann-Legotien archives, which can be consulted at the IMEC. The exchange of letters was largely reproduced in a biography written in 1992 by Yann Moulier-Boutang. Although Legotien admitted that her manuscript was only a draft and that it needed reworking, she was not ashamed to explain to her potential publisher that it was poverty that kept her from this literary work. Courageous or foolhardy, she declared to the man she had asked for help in her search for a job: ‘I would like our friendship to be not only a refuge but also sometimes an exchange’.
Hélène Legotien did not become a novelist. She didn’t convince her friend Jean Ballard to let her write a film column for Les Cahiers du Sud, the famous literary magazine he edited in Marseille. In Esprit, she managed to place three critical texts devoted to cinema in the course of 1955. While her review of Joris Ivens’s Le Chant des fleuves was so well received by the Dutch director that it was partly reproduced in a Seghers anthology, her review of L’Air de Paris has been the subject of a lasting misunderstanding in film literature. Because Legotien asserts that Marcel Carné, whether or not in association with the poet Jacques Prévert, did not always succeed in capturing the psychology of the working classes, two authors have turned Hélène Legotien into the archetype of critical Stalinism that, twenty years after the Popular Front, was still spread by Jean Renoir and, by his close friends from the French Communist Party. It should be remembered that, ten years before, Hélène Legotien-Rytmann had already been refused membership of the Communist Party, despite having been a militant between the wars. Moreover, neither Jean Renoir nor his collaborators had supported Legotien in her requests for reinstatement, even though Rytmann had taken part in the filming of La vie est à nous and La Marseillaise. Along with her short review of Le Chant des fleuves, Legotien’s June 1955 essay on Claude Autant-Lara’s film adaptation of Le Rouge et le noir was the last article she wrote in her own name and published in a widely read general-interest magazine. After a decade of to-ing and fro-ing between posts as sociological researcher and attempts to return to the world of film and live performance, Legotien chose in 1959 to work full-time in the field of economic and social development. Employed by SÉDÉS (Société d’études et de développement économique et social) until her retirement in 1975, she took part as a sociologist in the writing of studies mainly devoted to rural development in France and its former colonies in Black Africa. Some of these studies led to the publication of articles in the professional press devoted to development issues at the time (Développement et civilisations, Rythmes du Monde, Techniques & Développements).
These scholarly articles were co-authored with agronomists or professionals higher up the SÉDÉS hierarchy than herself. It is difficult to establish the exact proportion written by Legotien, and their nature does not lend itself well to the use of a personal or graphic style. It was rather in the more confidential reports that Legotien wrote for SÉDÉS clients or for the attention of her superiors that she adopted the vigorous tone characteristic of her correspondence and once again displayed an honesty that bordered on courage.
To the sponsors who paid her and the experts who supervised her, she often justified a refusal to deliver what they expected in the name of her high conception of sociology and her theoretical modesty. At the end of 1967, when developers asked her to provide them with communication materials that would make the new town of Mirail desirable, she advised them to pay more attention to the social and economic fears that were then troubling poorer households in Toulouse. To the European members of the International Development Association, who were concerned to improve education in the Third World in 1970, she suggested that they start by reading the work by the Nigerian physicist Abdou Moumouni Dioffo on education in Africa. In 1971, for the attention of her superiors, who deplored the repeated failures of the rural development operations undertaken abroad by post-colonial France, she wrote a learned draft report ‘on the internal and external structures of the traditional African agricultural economy’. Drawing on the most recent discoveries in the economic anthropology of her time, she urged her economist colleagues to flesh out her theoretical and methodological proposals in written texts.This appeal did not find an immediate echo with the experts at SÉDÉS. Neither at IMEC nor elsewhere have I come across any final collaborative report that followed up Legotien’s proposals internally. Outside SÉDÉS, however, the report was circulated widely enough to ensure its modest posterity in the history of the social sciences of development. Alongside the much more famous Claude Meillassoux, Maurice Godelier and Charles Bettelheim, Legotien is sometimes cited as one of the researchers who developed a critical Marxist approach to development in the 1960s and 1970s. Louis Althusser himself regretted not having been able to publish extracts from this text in his Théorie collection: legally, the text belonged to SÉDÉS rather than to Legotien.
Another proof of Legotien’s courage is that she continued to work and write after her retirement. This was not just to ensure her material independence from the man she had married in February 1976. In 1979 and 1980, she carried out a survey on the family life of French workers. By scrupulously gathering their views, she hoped to understand the persistence of their malaise and exploitation, despite the three decades of high growth that France had experienced since 1945. When her husband’s fragile mental health allowed her, Legotien set off to investigate in Port-de-Bouc with the support of the Communist town council and the help of a team of local researchers. In 1984, this group of researchers published a report entitled ‘Du chantier naval à l’usine: la mémoire ouvrière de Port-de-Bouc’. As well as dedicating it to the memory of Hélène Legotien, they borrowed the following quotation from Émile Ajar, another author with many names, to describe their colleague in the field, who died on 16 November 1980, strangled by Louis Althusser:
To the memory of Hélène Legotien
Yes, everyone remembers the illustrious, and no one bothers with people who have been nothing, but who have been loved, hoped for and suffered. Those who have humbly received our common heritage at their birth, and have borne it humbly to the end. And this very expression, ‘those who have been nothing’ is odious, true and intolerable. I cannot in any way bring myself to accept it. – Émile Ajar, L’angoisse du roi Salomon (Paris: Mercure de France, 1979), p. 31).
The choice of this epigraph should be enough to convince us all of the qualities of the woman we may call Hélène Legotien, Hélène Rytmann or Hélène Althusser. And for those still surprised that so much time can be devoted, as in my case, to the biography and study of the work of a woman who has so far been almost completely ignored in French intellectual history, I would like to say here what I have often repeated to comrades: the world would undoubtedly be changed and perhaps even revolutionised if we all possessed a courage as ordinary as that of Hélène Legotien.
Bibliography
1) Published texts
A) Film reviews
‘Florence est folle’, Combat, 15 November 1944, p. 2.
‘Camarade P’, Combat, 22 November 1944, p. 2.
‘L’Air de Paris de Marcel Carné’, Esprit, January 1955, pp. 135-8.
‘Du roman au film’, Esprit, July 1955, p. 1144-64.
‘Le Chant des fleuves de Joris Ivens’, Esprit, July 1955, pp. 1186-89.
‘Le Chant des fleuves de Joris Ivens’ (extracts), in Abraham Zalzman, Joris Ivens (Paris: Seghers, 1963), p. 166 et sq.
B) Sociological texts
Gilbert Ancian, Hélène Legotien and Bernard Manlhiot, ‘Propositions pour une réorganisation des actions de développement rural’, Développement et civilisations 38, June 1969, pp. 24-38.
Gilbert Ancian, Hélène Legotien and Bernard Manlhiot, ‘Cultures d’exportation ou cultures vivrières’, Rythmes du Monde 43/3-4 (‘Préalables au développement en Afrique noire’), 1969.
Henri Raymond and Hélène Legotien, ‘Les méthodes d’enquête par sondage en milieu rural africain’, Techniques et développement 8, July-August 1973, pp. 16-21.
‘Problèmes de développement rural en Afrique noire et à Madgascar’, Panorama, special issue, April 1979, pp. 38 - 43.
Henri Raymond and Hélène Legotien, ‘Les méthodes d’enquête par sondage en milieu rural africain’, Panorama, special issue, April 1979, pp. 218 - 224.
‘Le rapport des paysans à la terre. Note pour une étude sur les coopératives d'utilisation du matériel agricole (Paris, 1969)’, Nouvelles campagnes, n° 18, April 1982, pp. 31 - 35.
2) Unpublished sociological studies
‘Note de méthode sur une activité sociologique à la SÉDÉS’ (Paris, Secteur Recherche de la SÉDÉS, February 1964, 25 pp. mimeographed).
(with M. Moiroud), ‘Étude sociologique’, pp. 40-118 in .‘Industrie et emploi dans les vallées secondaires des basses Pyrénées’ (Pau/Paris, Conseil général des Basses Pyrénées/Société d’études pour le développement économique et social, February 1965. 257 pp. mimeographed).
‘Trois notes de travail sur le développement rural en Afrique noire’ (1966, 11, 14 and 18 pp. mimeographed).
‘Notes rapides sur les rapports entre économétrie et socio-économie’ (March 1967, 8 pp. mimeographed).
Sole author of the second volume of a study conducted with Jérôme Klatzmann and Henri Prugniaud, ‘La planification interrégionale dans l’agriculture: les obstacles à l’évolution des systèmes de production’ (Paris: SÉDÉS / Délégation générale à la recherche scientifique et technique, October 1967, 4 vols).
(With Édouard Kleinmann) ‘Représentation du Mirail auprès des ménages et des promoteurs toulousains’ (Société d’équipement de la Haute-Garonne et de l’Ariège / Centre d’études et de recherches sur l’aménagement urbain, 1968; 192 pp. mimeographed).
‘Les résultats qualitatifs de l’enseignement dans les Etats de l’Afrique Noire francophone’, in Problèmes de l’aide à l’éducation dans le Tiers Monde (Paris: Section française de l’Association internationale pour le développement, 1970), pp. 59-117.
‘Sur les structures internes et externes de l'économie agricole traditionnelle africaine’ (Paris: SÉDÉS, Oct-Nov 1971; 93 pp. mimeographed).
Involvement in editing ‘Le développement rural dans les pays d’Afrique Noire d’expression française’ (Paris: SÉDÉS/Secrétariat d'État aux Affaires étrangères chargé de la Coopération, December 1972, 5 vols).
(With G. Cancelier and Henri Raymond), ‘Étude méthodologique générale sur les structures propres au développement rural et régional. Enquête de base au niveau des villages (identification des villages, recherche des indicateurs, questionnaires, méthode de stratification et exemple d'application)’ (Paris: SÉDÉS/ Secrétariat d'État aux Affaires étrangères chargé de la Coopération, March 1974).
‘Les problèmes agricoles déclenchés par la création d’une autoroute en rase campagne’ (Scetauroute / SÉDÉS, September 1975; 116 pp. mimeographed).
(With M. Moiroud), ‘Étude sociologique’ [sur l’emploi et les salaires]; 156 pp. mimeographed.
Translated by David Fernbach
