Gabrielle Russier

Gabrielle Russier, (Born April 29, 1937, in Paris - Died September 1, 1969, in Marseille), was an associate professor of literature. At 31-years-old, following the stigmatization of a consensual romantic / sexual relationship with Christian Rossi - one of her sixteen-year-old students - Gabrielle and her romantic life became the subject of nationwide controversy and debate.

A New York Times article describes Christian as "a big, bearded, militant Maoist who looked at least 25", whereas "Mrs. Russier was tiny and frail, like a child with an unusually grave face." Christian's parents were professors and friends with Gabrielle, who gave her permission to take their son abroad to Italy but objected to and criminalized their relationship after Gabrielle formally requested their permission to live together. After sending Christian away to a boarding school which failed to keep the couple apart, the parents "went to court because they were afraid that Mrs. Russier would take Christian away from them." The publicity following her arrest, likened to the Dreyfus affair, led to her prison letters being read and performed on the radio, songs such as Gabrielle by Serge Reggiani and Flowers for Gabrielle by Anne Sylvestre, and multiple films under the name Mourir d'aimer (Dying to Love). After months of controversy and preventive detention, Gabrielle Russier was tried, fined and given a suspended sentence of 12 months. However, within 30 minutes of the verdict, the public prosecutor moved for a retrial and stiffer sentence. Before the retrial could take place, Gabrielle committed suicide.

These events were of such national importance that the newly-elected president Georges Pompidou, when asked about the affair on a televised Presidential press conference, recited a poem about a girl martyred by society because she loved the wrong person. Before her death, she Gabrielle reportedly wrote to Christian: "You were the only man I ever knew."

The scholarly article "The Policing of Desire in the Gabrielle Russier Affair" (2005) recounts the event and gives historical perspective on a "now largely forgotten but still important part of the history of 1968 and its aftermath": "Would a new affaire Russier be possible today? How would it be differently treated in Britain or the US"? The 1971 book "The Affair of Gabrielle Russier" provides important historical context. The book contains English-translated letters from Gabrielle to Christian, a preface by a professor who knew Gabrielle (Raymond Jean), and an introduction which reproduces an article from The New Yorker by popular author Mavis Gallant. Available online, Gallant explains:

She was not at all like other teachers. When she walked into the Lycée Saint-Exupéry in Marseille in October, 1967, to take over three classes in French literature, the students thought she was a new girl. She was thirty, but looked eighteen. She was tiny, just over five feet tall, and weighed about a hundred pounds. Her hair was cropped short, as boys’ hair used to be. [...] Her students worshipped her. They called her Gatito, which is Spanish for “little cat,” and they used the familiar “tu” in addressing her.

This is so unusual from pupil to teacher in France that it just touches the implausible. Relations are formal in a lycée. [...] One of the complaints students have is that their teachers are remote as planets and that they can never discuss anything with them, not even their work. Gabrielle, on the contrary, wanted to be one of them. She based much of her social life on their movies, their outings, their songs. She invited them to her apartment to talk and listen to records. The students loved this, but their parents were bothered; because she gave her students books by Jean-Paul Sartre and Boris Vian, some parents started a rumor that she was organizing a Communist cell. [...] Even her car might have belonged to an adolescent.

See also

• Alain Robbe-Grillet - One of the authors whose writing Russier had written on as part of her doctoral degree.