Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
the French Communist Party. Debord was very happy to finally
meet the theorist whose books he’d read and much respected. “I
remember marvelous moments with Guy,” Lefebvre recalls in Le
Temps des Méprises, “warm friendship, free of all mistrust and
ambition.” 26 He and Debord met and drank together, often talked
all night, and engaged in “more than communication,” Lefebvre
admits, “a communion—which remains an extremely vivid memory.”
27 Lefebvre was probably Debord’s only living influence.
Meanwhile, the young man steeped in Hegel and the early Marx,
Cardinal de Retz and Lautréamont, charmed Lefebvre. “I remember
very sharp, pointed discussions,” Lefebvre says, “when Guy
said that urbanism was becoming an ideology. He was absolutely
right.” Debord and the Situationists would stay a subject close to
Lefebvre’s heart. “One I care deeply about,” he mused, years later.
“It touches me in some ways very intimately because I knew them
very well. I was close friends with them. The friendship lasted
from 1957 to 1961 or ’62, which is to say about five years. … In
the end, it was a love story that ended very, very badly.” 28
If Lefebvre’s womanizing brought him and Debord together,
it was the former’s libido that eventually helped drive the two men
apart. Debord held Lefebvre’s Don Juan antics in low esteem, thought
them comical and reprehensible, especially because the old prof–
charmer dated women young enough to be his granddaughters, often
getting them pregnant. One tale is recounted by Bernstein, whose
friend Nicole Beaurain, a young student, was bearing Lefebvre’s kid
(after he’d split with Évelyne), a man “so old,” Bernstein said, “and
already several times a father.” Bernstein, unsurprisingly, was dead
against the pairing, and, according to Lefebvre, she and Debord
sent an envoy, another of Bernstein’s friends, Denise Cheyre, down
to Navarrenx to persuade Nicole to abort. Lefebvre accused Debord
of meddling; Debord apparently insulted Lefebvre on the phone. “I
didn’t see Guy mixing himself up in this affair,” Bernstein remembered,
years later. “It wasn’t his style.” 29
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