Marx & Murder

The philosopher who failed

"Come quickly. I've just killed my wife ." The scene, and the supplicant huddled against the chill of a Parisian dawn last week as he pounded on a colleague's door were equally bizarre. Close by the doorway towered the stone walls of the 186-year-old Ecole Normale Superieure, an elite graduate school for the best and the brightest students of France. The agitated man in robe and pajamas banging at the door with his dire tidings was no less prestigious: Louis Althusser, 62, among the diminishing survivors of the country's great postwar intellectual set and an academic star at the school. Althusser is a respected author, critic and interpreter of both Montesquieu and Marx. In fact, he is a devoted Marxist who has stirred up the party and Parisian salons alike in recent years with well-reasoned attacks on French Communists for stifling party discussion and rejecting Marx's basic teaching about class struggle.

Answering Althusser's cry for help, "Normale Sup's" school physician discovered Helene Althusser, 70, dead on their bedroom floor across the courtyard. An autopsy next day disclosed that she had indeed been murdered: her larynx was fractured and her thyroid gland damaged, common indications of strangulation. But before police could question Althusser, he was hustled off to a psychiatric hospital. During the past few years, he has suffered from increasingly serious bouts of depression, to the point that he was unable to teach this fall.

Althusser's intellectual credentials made the murder momentous news in France. As if the crime were another scholarly event, some Parisian newspapers, and the academic circles in which Althusser had moved, treated it with the same sort of erudition and emotion they had once directed toward his books and articles. The Communist newspaper L'Humanite's report reads like an obituary not so much for the murdered Mme. Althusser as for "our comrade," the Algerian-born, Catholic-reared philosopher who had switched from conservatism to Communism after five years as a German P.O.W. in World War II. Le Monde, which had published a series of Althusser's attacks on the French Communist party leadership, commented learnedly and protectively about "altruistic suicide," in which manic-depressives kill loved ones to shield them from torments they themselves suffer. But Le Quotidien cried "cover-up," calling it "a complicity of party and of class" that Althusser received such kid-glove treatment.

Beneath the psychopolitical analyses lay the tragic facts: a brilliant mind battered by a career of controversy, a wife who was expert in her own field (sociology) but also opinionated and argumentative, protective of her husband but known to contradict him publicly. "It was a passionate marriage in every sense of the word," said one friend last week. But if Althusser murdered her, it was as a man whose mental balance had disastrously deteriorated. Calling on the suspect in Paris' Sainte Anne hospital, a judge who had come to tell Althusser that he was being charged with voluntary homicide deemed him too far beyond the brink to be informed or questioned. The judge summoned a panel of psychiatrists to determine whether one of the great minds of France would ever be able to stand trial.

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