Jacques Vergès, devil's advocate: a psychohistory of Vergès' judicial strategy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study undertakes a psychohistory of French criminal defence lawyer Jacques Vergès' judicial strategy. His initial articulation of his judicial strategy in his book De la stratégie judiciaire in 1968 continues to inform his legal career, in which he has defended a number of controversial clients, most notably that of Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie in the 1987 trial. Vergès distinguished two types of judicial strategy in his 1968 book: rupture and connivence. Both strategies should be understood out of Vergès' Marxist influences. This study looks into the coherence of his career in light of his initial articulation of judicial strategy and explores the shift in emphasis of his strategy from the defence of a cause to that of a person. The study adopts a three-level approach. It considers, first, Vergès' discourse of his strategy, second, the world politics that shaped his discourse, and third, Vergès' biography. First, Vergès' strategy grew out of the duality of rupture and connivence and transformed into what we call devil's advocacy, in which Vergès pits an accused (as an individual) against the justice system. Devil's advocacy culminated in his defence of Barbie. After his defence of Barbie, Vergès pitted himself against the justice system so that his own notoriety was reflected to his clients rather than the other way around. Second, Vergès' major intellectual and political influence was Communism. Although he left the Communist Party of France in 1957, at the time when he began his legal defence of Algerian militants during the Algerian War of Independence, the ongoing political reorientations and resulting splits in the communist movement did not allow him to disavow communism altogether. The split that took place between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China in the early-1960's allowed him to align his political views with the Chinese interpretation of communism and he has not relinquished his affinity to Chinese communism since the 1960's. On the contrary, he has conformed to the dramatic changes that Chinese communism underwent since Mao's rule. The study argues that those changes shaped Vergès' psychological outlook, which entailed the development of a so-called African personality. It in turn provided the impetus for the further development of his judicial strategy beyond the initial duality of rupture and connivence. Third, this study focuses on his childhood and youth in the French colonies, first in Indochina and then in the Island of Réunion. Vergès colonial background has informed his political choices, which in turn have informed his legal practice. His overarching commitment is anticolonialism, which has manifested itself in various forms since his childhood. In his youth, it took the form of Stalinism, and communism in general. His Stalinism intermingled with his loyalty to De Gaulle during the Second World War. After Stalin's death in 1953, he aligned himself with the Maoist objective of perpetuating revolutions in colonies. In the course of his defence of Barbie, his anticolonialism revolved around his comparison of the French colonial regime to Nazism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".