“SALAUD” was a good word. It hissed through the air and landed smack on the face, like a gob of mud. Plenty of people called Jacques Vergès a bastard, and he didn’t care. Perhaps he really was one, his date of birth obscured by his father to hide an adulterous affair. He wasn’t bothered. Nothing touched him, including the bullets he knew were sent his way by the French secret service. Teeth clamped round a Cuban cigar, he would lean back and give any questioner his cool, quizzical, oriental stare. The blinds in his book-stuffed office were kept drawn, and out of the dim light loomed a legion of carved figures given by the African dictators he had defended. A crystal snake on his desk opened its jaws to strike; it reminded him of the snake of Amazonian myth, studded with the eyes of the men it had swallowed.

All his clients, too, he said, were indelibly embedded in him. Klaus Barbie, “the butcher of Lyon”, an SS captain charged with 341 counts of killing or deportation; Carlos the Jackal, accused of multiple terrorist acts against France and Israel; Khieu Samphan, titular head of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, which killed perhaps 2m people; members of the Baader Meinhof gang. Anyone could apply. He offered his services to Slobodan Milosevic, the dictator of Serbia, and made ready to defend Saddam Hussein. Hitler? Sure. He would even—a dry smile—defend George W. Bush, as long as he pleaded guilty.

His method in the courtroom was simple, but explosive. He accused the accuser. “Rupture” was his word for this: a recognition that, like Antigone facing Creon, the judge and the defendants shared no common values. This was war. He had learned the technique in boyhood, when his father taught him to throw stones at boys who bullied him. In Algeria in the 1950s he refined it, as a brand-new lawyer imbued with communism and passionate anti-colonialism, when he represented FLN terrorists fighting for independence from France. They had planted bombs, but what was that compared with the injustices and discrimination daily meted out by the French? (He knew of those first-hand, having grown up mixed-race in the French colony of Réunion, and recalling his father’s disgrace for marrying a Vietnamese woman.) Equally, what were Carlos’s crimes, compared with Israel’s long oppression of the Palestinians? In Barbie’s case, hadn’t the Vichy government freely collaborated with the Nazis? In Saddam’s, hadn’t America given him the weapons with which he killed his own people?

His outrageous methods encouraged the thought that he might be a co-conspirator. As Barbie’s only lawyer, against 40 prosecutors on the other side, he called him mon capitaine, stressed how Christian he was, and sang “Lili Marlene” with him in his cell. He described Khieu Samphan as a gentle idealist, and mocked the idea of genocide in his country. There were so many meetings with Carlos that he was suspected of being part of his network. Nothing was pinned on him. From 1970 to 1978 he disappeared: the wind had whispered to him, “Leave!”, he said, and he had walked out on family, job and country, returning to Paris penniless and battle-hardened. Had he been helping some vile regime in Cambodia, Congo, Syria? He would never say. He had simply “crossed to the other side of the mirror”.

La chambre de Voltaire

From day to day he tried to do the same. To cross to the other side and enter his client’s world, whether pimp or mass-murderer, peasant or politician, brainbox or idiot. To empathise with someone—who, after all, had two eyes like himself, two hands, who listened to music, who loved—and ask whether he himself, given the circumstances, might have done the same. Why had it happened? How? Ce mec, c’est moi. His one principle was to have no principles, he said, though critics could find many of a Marxist and anti-Israeli kind. The only morality guiding him was his heart’s caprices. There was no such thing as absolute evil: the worst criminal, he wrote, had a secret garden in his heart, and the most honest man a nest of reptiles.

His no-holds-barred defences of famous villains seldom got them off, but they won him fame. He enjoyed it hugely. The unpredictable “magic” of each trial, the chase after truth (never found, in his experience), the exhilaration of his rage against “illegal” international tribunals and the hypocrisies of America, energised him as nothing else could. His life was a drama in which he was the ever-battling, questioning outsider, like Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov or Stendhal’s Julien Sorel. In 2008 he wrote a play about himself and starred in it at the Théâtre de la Madeleine in Paris. No one thought that odd. He died in Voltaire’s bedroom: that, too, suited his uncompromising defence of hateful things.

Much of his work was humdrum, in fact: defending bankrupts, thieves, petty criminals, usually for no fee. He had never seen the law as a vocation. History was his first love, and he still dreamed sometimes of deciphering Etruscan or Linear A, unfolding the secrets of mysterious civilisations. Yet the greatest mystery was man himself—where he had come from, where he was going, why he did what he did. And in so far as anything was sacred to godless Maître Vergès, it was man: un salaud, perhaps, but, like him, un salaud lumineux.