At that point, what were you doing? What direction did you give to your life?
At that point, I got my high school diploma, I went to college. I studied history. I kept at it until the first year of a Ph.D. After that time [with the Red Warriors], we had gotten some experience and we had started to politicize ourselves, but in the etymological sense of the term, meaning getting involved with organizations, etc. That hadn’t been the case before. Myself, to give you a bit of an idea, in ‘94 I was involved with the CNT [Confédération Nationale du Travail], a far-left union, anarcho-syndicalist. I did activist work like crazy for fifteen years in that libertarian communist union. I was even confederal secretary for two years. I devoted myself to a militant struggle, politics, pure politics. After the Red Warriors, I realized that if there were fash, it was because there was fertile ground for them to appear in. What is that fertile ground? Etc., etc., etc. I got political, I grew, I read, I met people…the years that followed the Red Warriors, those were years of pure militant activism.
Today, antifa still exists. Young people claim the label antifa. Who, what are they fighting against? There aren’t skinheads in the streets anymore.
There aren’t skinheads in the streets anymore, or at least skinheads the way we knew them twenty years ago. Of course they’re not around anymore, but there’s a new generation of street activists who are super-fascist all the same, clearly identified as the “identitarians”, Gabriac’s crews, the jeunesse nationaliste1. . . I could go on and on. They’re out there. They don’t have the same look, but they still exist. They’re younger, they’ve adapted to their times, they’re mastering multimedia, they’re mastering communications, programming, social media…Today’s antifa do a lot of fighting on that terrain. In my opinion, they’re losing sight of the streets a bit, but it’s not at all comparable. I know that today’s antifascists, they look at guys like me, not fondly, but in a particular way. I’ll be forty-seven in November. I could be the father of most of the antifascists I know today. They have a certain respect for what we did, but in no way do they feel dependent on it. And I’m not claiming they should…. I don’t know them, they don’t know me, we’re no longer speaking about the same thing. In our day, there was no internet, no cellphones…. I don’t claim to have any power to direct them. I’m a guy they respect in relation to what he was, but at the same time they know that today, we have nothing in common anymore. And it’s just fine like that. More than anything, I have no desire to cast a shadow over them. I make it a point of pride to distinguish myself from them, in the sense that the times are different. They master better some things that we never mastered because they didn’t exist. So Godspeed! Now, I can have my judgments in relation to what’s happening. Me, personally, maybe I wouldn’t do certain things like them, but I don’t allow myself to say it. And by the way, that was one of the reasons that I left Paris. I preferred to go into retirement.
You left Paris. Before that, you knew a Paris that a lot of people had no idea about. As you said, people who don’t want to see, don’t see. It simply wasn’t their reality. Today, how do you see the evolution of Paris?
I’ve lived for five years in the countryside, in the South of France. It’s pretty strange. When I left, I couldn’t take Paris anymore. Seriously, if you had told me that that would happen to me one day, I wouldn’t have believed it. But five years ago, I just couldn’t anymore. I wanted something else. I had kids, too. Ironically, the Paris of today, I appreciate it more, but because I don’t live there anymore. I go up there, I find myself doing things I didn’t do when I lived here, like wandering around neighborhoods where I never used to set a fucking foot. And then, Paris is still the city where I was born, where I lived forty-two years of my life, but to tell you the truth, I don’t feel like coming back here to live.
You come back into Paris regularly to manage your bars, like TDTF. What’s your life like these days? Running your two bars, TDTF and le Saint-Saveur?
My life isn’t only that. I’ve had le Saint-Saveur [11 Rue des Panoyaux, 75020, Paris] for about ten years, and TDTF [43 Rue Cavendish, 75019 Paris] for about ten days. In the South of France, I have a big motorcycle repair shop. I have two little boys, Sacha and Vadim. Actually, more than anything, that’s what my life’s about, taking care of my kids. In the South, adjacent to the repair shop, we have a concert hall. I do a whole lot of things. The two bars in Paris are mostly bars that are managed by the people who work there. That’s what makes me happy. It’s in line with my convictions, I’m not gonna say anarcho-syndicalist because that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but what I mean is I’ve managed to get two businesses up and running that are practically self-run by the people who work there. I come in, I don’t worry about anything, the people are there. Legally, in France, things are done in such a way so that there must be someone who’s legally responsible…that’s me. On the other hand, things are practically self-run by the people who work there. That’s one of the things I’m most proud of, to have gotten two things up and running in Paris that give a lot of work to people. It’s pretty gratifying. In the South I do plenty of other things, but they’re more related to my lifestyle today.
In the days when you created the Red Warriors, fascism was embodied by the skinheads present in the street. They’re no longer around, but does that fascism still exist in France?
I think you know the answer to your question. Of course what they call the “Le Pen-ization” of opinion is undeniable. The talking points that the National Front had twenty years ago, now it’s Sarkozy who has them.2 That’s the Le Pen-ization of opinion. What bothers me today is that maybe there aren’t skinheads like you might have seen twenty-five years ago in the streets, but those guys’ ideas have gained a lot of ground. There are a ton of political organizations and politicians who have given up in the face of that. The speeches that, say, Sarkozy has given, or even recently Nadine Morano, when she says that France is a country of “the white race”.3 If Le Pen had said that twenty years ago, there would’ve been protests with 100,000 people in the streets. That’s what I mean. At a certain point, the fash won the battle of ideas. Their talking points became normalized. […] The fascists are gaining ground because we’re moving backwards. If we move backwards, they move forward, end of story. This type of speech of the “republican” right [center-right] which is no longer running behind the National Front but starting to run in front of it, it’s criminal. They’re hoping to swallow them, while they’re the ones who are gonna end up getting eaten. I won’t even touch the reformist left, as it’s totally paralyzed.
To end, if you had to send a message to the youth…?
I’m not too much in the habit of sending messages…. I’ve already said it several times, the only message that I have to send is this: we’ll all get out of this together, or we won’t get out of it at all. We’re all in the same boat….
Which sums up nicely your adventures, when you and your group were facing off against the skinheads.
That’s it. Black, white, yellow, green, Muslim, Jew, what-have-you, but at a given moment, either we all get outta this together, or we don’t get out at all.
Thank you.
translator’s note: This interview, originally carried out on September 29, 2015, and published at storynextdoor.com on January 20, 2016, exists within the context of rising far-right activity and its entrance into mainstream electoral politics in France, a context that will doubtless sound familiar to many US readers. The year of 2015 is generally identified as the peak of the European migrant crisis, which profoundly changed the political landscape in significant ways, including an upsurge in xenophobia and support for far-right policies. A year and a half after the interview was conducted, the far-right Marine Le Pen narrowly lost to centrist Emmanuel Macron in the French presidential elections, revealing just how far the “Le Pen-ization” of public opinion, the normalization of far-right talking points, had come.
Though this interview dates from late 2015, it is very timely for a contemporary US readership after four years of Trumpism and resistance to it. Many who know a bit about the history of antifascist action or punk music in the United States know that it started with anti-racist skinheads confronting Nazi skinheads at punk venues and in the streets. What most don’t know is that a similar dynamic played out in France at roughly the same time. In the mid-80s, parts of Paris were overrun with Nazi skinheads whose word was law. Julien Terzics and a multi-racial band of punks fought back, part of a broad street-level movement that ultimately caused the fascist skinheads to disappear from public view.4
I find this interview particularly engaging because many of the antifascist activists I know, myself included, start with theory and then arrive at action. Terzics and his friends, like many of the antifascist punks and skinheads of the 80s and 90s, started with action. They “had no idea about anything” in terms of politics, he says. They became radicalized over the years as they drew attention and praise for their antifascist work. His story reminds us that the slogan “antifascism is self-defense” is viscerally, personally, literally true for some, and that in those cases, action necessarily takes priority over theory. It is strangely refreshing, too, to read an account that cuts through the heated discussion of antifa’s more controversial tactics and shows unequivocally that sometimes, it really is as simple as punching Nazis.
Often, of course, it is not. Terzics started with action, but he finished with theory: he went on to get a master’s degree and work as an organizer in the anarcho-syndicalist CNT union. As he explains, he knows that the world has changed much since his days fighting boneheads in the streets, and both fascism and antifascism with it. His candor, lucidity, and humility should serve as a reminder to all of us that while “bashing the fash” is important, effective, and for some, essential, there is much more to antifascism than that.
a note on the translation: More than anything, I hate to cut things out of a translation, but sometimes it becomes necessary. I was tempted to cut “green” from Terzics’ last line, as it may seem to tokenize or relativize the identities of people of color, but then, it’s not my job to interpret, only to translate, and if an antifascist from another time, place, and generation says one or two things that strike us as a little off-color, that’s OK. I cut one short passage where Terzics is essentially repeating himself and listing more and more far-right figures and organizations, which I felt would be overwhelming to an American audience. Other than that, I have left the original text intact, adding (I hope) enough footnotes and bracketed explanations to make it accessible to an American audience, but not so many as to make it overwhelming.
DAVID CAMPBELL is a writer, translator, funeral director, and antifascist. He served twelve months on Rikers Island for his participation in a brawl with a group of alt-right goons in Manhattan in 2018 and will be beginning a master’s in translation in Paris in September 2021. You can contact him at freedavidcampbell.com.
- Alexandre Gabriac, a public figure in far-right French politics, was the head of the Jeunesse Nationaliste [Nationalist Youth], a now-defunct white nationalist organization.
- Nicolas Sarkozy is a conservative politician who served as president of France from 2007 to 2012. Marine Le Pen is the head of the National Front (since 2018 rebranded the National Rally), a far-right nationalist party founded by her father. Le Pen has successfully moved the party away from its openly neo-Nazi roots and mainstreamed many of its ideas.
- Nadine Morano, a conservative elected official.
- More information about Julien Terzics, the Red Warriors, and the 80s Paris skinhead scene can be found in the 2008 documentary Antifa: Chasseurs de Skins, available with English subtitles from several online sources. For further reading, see Kemi Alemoru, “I Spent the 80s Having Streetfights with Skinheads in Paris.” Dazed, October 13, 2016, https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/33333/1/we-led-a-gang-war-against-racist-skinheads-in-80s-paris; and “A Skinhead in Paris, 1979-83.” Creases Like Knives, August 3, 2016, https://creaseslikeknives.wordpress.com/2016/08/03/a-skinhead-in-paris-1979-83/