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Can we still live out adventures in the present day? Is it still possible to experience a journey like Joseph Kessel’s? These questions set out the theme of Olivier Weber’s conference held at the Mediterranean University Center in Nice. Weber, a writer-traveler and acclaimed reporter, has covered numerous conflicts from which he has drawn the material for his novels. He has produced an array of richly enlightening books and documentaries. From Afghanistan to the Amazon, from the Kurdish hinterlands to the Himalayas or even the platform of the United Nations, Olivier Weber is a testament to an extraordinary path, one that is also a journey to freedom.
War correspondent, writer, director, and diplomat, Olivier Weber has won several awards for his work, including the Joseph Kessel Prize, the Albert Londres Prize, and the European and Mediterranean Book Prize. Having recently gotten back from the Caucasus, particularly from Armenia, he finds himself in a packed room in Nice because, he says, “For me, the adventure begins here. On one side there is the Mercantour where I grew up, before studying in Nice and then San Francisco. The mountains, the Valley of Wonders and the Roya Valley were like a springboard to the rest of the world. And on the other side, there’s the sea, the French Riviera, where I was a rapid response boat pilot, a lifeguard, a diver from the age of 20 to 24, where I worked with the firefighters of Nice. I dreamed, wide-eyed, between sea and mountains. This characteristic symbiosis of the Maritime Alps contributed to my definition of adventure. That is where my taste for elsewhere and for travel comes from.”
Weber discusses the dual historical-geographical correspondence of his novel which transports the reader from reality to fiction while presenting his latest work, In the Eye of the Archangel, just released by Calmann Lévy. The story dates back to 1937, during the Spanish Civil War. The author pays tribute to a fascinating profession, that of the war reporter, and to a courageous and passionate woman, Gerda Taro, companion of Robert Capa and the first female war photographer to have died in the line of duty, crushed by a republican tank at twenty-six years old, for whom commitment was paramount. It features adventurers, travel writers like Kessel, Hemingway, and Albert Londres.
He talks about those he refers to as “elder brothers,” whether they are mythological figures like Ulysses, poets, adventurers like Rimbaud, explorers, or war correspondents like Ernest Hemingway, who was a writer, adventurer, and Nobel laureate in Literature. Hemingway’s works written between 1920 and 1950 were very popular with the public because of their truthfulness: Hemingway, who participated in the First World War, said, “I have bombs in my head.” Reporting on news wasn’t enough to express his feelings. It was after covering the Spanish Civil War that he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Olivier Weber also refers to Albert Londres, a 1914 war correspondent who followed the battles in France and Belgium. His reports appeared in the columns of Le Matin and Le Petit Journal, and as of 1923, they started to be published in the form of books. Weber also speaks of Ella Maillart, a Swiss explorer and writer who traveled through Soviet Central Asia in 1932, and then through China.
The writer-traveler took flight for California in the footsteps of Jack London, another “elder brother,” adventurer, novelist, and war correspondent. Weber wrote a biography tracing London’s journey, Jack London: The Call of the Great Beyond, which was published in 2016. Of him, Weber says, “Father of all adventurers, Jack London lived a thousand lives. There’s a beautiful thing he used to say: “I would rather be a shooting star than a fixed star.” He’d written 40 novels before he died at 40.”
For Olivier Weber, “The first thing is to bear witness, then to tell the story through narrative or novel, and finally to live the adventure.” Joseph Kessel was first and foremost a writer and great reporter, an adoptive “Niçois” like Romain Gary, Weber says, as he completed his secondary studies in Nice, at the Masséna High School. Kessel’s novels are nourished by human adventure, but he also penned major reports. He voluntarily enlisted as a pilot during the Great War, drawing from this experience to write his novel The Crew. When World War II broke out, Kessel was a war correspondent. He joined the Resistance, hiding in Nice in 1942 where he was discovered: “Before leaving for London, he hid a manuscript in the well of a house in the Var, that of his mistress’s friend. It was a major work that he had spent ten years writing, a four-volume fictional autobiography, The Wheel of Misfortune.” Then he joined General de Gaulle in London and wrote Army of Shadows in tribute to the fighters. After liberation, Kessel made trips to Africa, Burma, and Afghanistan, which inspired him to write The Horsemen and The Lion.
The writer-traveler projects old black-and-white photos of Kessel:
“Here he is in 1930, near Djibouti. He is returning from a crossing of the Red Sea with a smuggler, another adventurer that Kessel will convince to become a writer: Henri de Monfreid. To the question, can we live à la Kessel today? I would say yes, we can live a Kessel-like life, even if conditions are not the same. The newspaper Le Matin gave him a carte blanche to go on an adventure wherever he wanted. He chose Abyssinia – present-day Ethiopia, which was also the destination of one of my first adventures when I was a student in Nice. His report on slaves in Ethiopia allowed increased sales for Le Matin. Everyone was reading the press and advertising was flowing into the pages of the newspaper. At the time, they had offered him, as an expense note, the sum of 250,000 euros for four months. Today, to go to Afghanistan, the sum does not exceed 4,000 euros. When Kessel crossed the Red Sea, he did not use good syntactic constructions.”
Weber unveils the portrait of another “elder brother” who, he says, “died in Nice. I saw him very young and then I saw him again in the Balkans at 20 years old. His name was Fernand Fournier-Aubry, a great adventurer, a humanitarian ahead of his time, a gold prospector in the Amazon. His works were translated into several languages. He was one of the mythical figures who inspired many of us to embark on adventures.” This traveler had a love for the vast expanses of the world. He explored Africa, the Amazonian jungle, the Pacific islands, and Asia.
“What is the spirit of adventure if not the acceptance of risk, stepping out of your comfort zone, commitment, and the human adventure that pushes us to go towards the other?” Weber asks. He makes reference to the French Society of Explorers (SEF) and the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), which bring together extraordinary women and men who share the idea that existence is an adventure. Weber affirms, “At the beginning of the 20th century, when we opened atlases, there were still virgin zones. Today, there are no more unknown zones. The idea that we develop with the SEF is to go towards the other, to prioritize the encounter, to grasp the human dimension of adventure.”
Through his narrative and projection of photos, Weber then takes us on a mythical journey to Armenia. We learn of his and other writers’ commitment to demanding the lifting of the blockade on the only road that connects the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh to the rest of the world. “This is a photo of an Armenian monastery and behind it, you can see Mount Ararat. I was in Armenia,” he explains, “for a film in preparation with friends of Sylvain Tesson, who advocates greatly for Armenia. The film is titled If I Forget You, Armenia. I would like to screen it in Nice.”
He relates his fabulous expeditions in the High Himalayas, especially in Mustang, which was closed to foreigners until 1992. He pairs this with the projection of images. “This is an ancient mythical kingdom attached to Nepal and preserved from Chinese rule. I experienced the intoxication of the mountains there due to lack of oxygen at 6,000 meters of altitude, and I wrote a lot of poetry in the winter of 2022. The penultimate expedition in 2021 was with my friend Gérard, whom we call “the blind adventurer” because he has lost his sight. This journey is very dear to me,” he insists. “I dreamed of going there to erase the memory of wars and post-traumatic stress disorder, and it was Gérard who showed me the landscapes that he dreamed of with his heightened sense of touch. We ventured into lost valleys, isolated mountains, or deserted monasteries. I found, while journeying, a place of recollection. Several weeks of walking, in search of purity, led to a series of reflections on travel, globalization, and empathy, published as In the Kingdom of Light, which received the Pierre Loti Prize. This journey is a demonstration of what adventure can be. Magic happened that resulted from companionship and walking for a month.”
To be continued…
