WEEKEND HISTORY. The Catalan-Aude writer Henry de Monfreid, solitary adventurer and trafficker

Henry de Monfreid et ses matelots dans la baie de Djibouti, en 1933. ARCHIVES MONFREID/ARCHIVES DEPARTEMENTALES DE L'AUDE

Le navigateur, trafiquant de drogue et écrivain à succès, mort il y a cinquante ans tout juste, avait quitté ses racines du côté de La Franqui pour Djibouti et l’Éthiopie. Récit d’une vie de misanthrope.

Henry de Monfreid, who loved cats like his father, George Daniel, had several lives like them. Like them, he had the art of landing on his feet. Like them, he cherished his independence.

Young Henri de Monfreid and his mother (right) and his father George Daniel at the far left, in front of the Hôtel de La Franqui. MONFREID ARCHIVES/DEPARTMENTAL ARCHIVES OF L'AUDE

In turn peddler, milkman, coffee buyer, drug trafficker, sailor, adventurer, writer: that’s his seven lives. At the end of a long and fulfilling life, he died at the age of 95, on December 13, 1974, exactly fifty years ago. He is buried in Leucate, in the Aude, next to his mother. Where he had lived until he was 7, in La Franqui.

He regularly returned to where he grew up, in La Franqui. Independant – J CANCE

He then leaves the South for Paris. A real heartbreak for him, who loves the sea and silence. On the fifth floor of rue Saint-Placide, in the 6th arrondissement, he watches a sparrow scampering on the balustrade. He decides to do the same, balancing on the balcony railing, like a tightrope walker on his father's boat. His mother is on the verge of fainting.

He could have cultivated the inheritance of the family's bourgeois world. But he narrowly misses admission to Centrale, marries a young seamstress, Lucie, and adopts the child she was carrying. A second child is born.

The couple lives penniless. After ten years, Monfreid takes the children away and separates them from their mother. They will not see each other again. Henri, in the meantime, had set up his first business: instead of butter made from cow's milk, he sold vegetable butter made from coconut oil, which was much cheaper.

Not the attitude of a colonist

Henry the misanthrope wants to “leave the herd“, as he says. He places his children with Armgart Freudenfeld, a friend who will become his wife, and leaves for Ethiopia in 1911, at the age of 33. He works there for a leather, coffee and weapons counter, on the edge of the Red Sea, on the coast of Somalia, a French colony.

He writes to his father, about one of his purchased companions: “My monkey, the young girl I tame, is closer to the animal than to the man. When I give her nothing to do, she crouches in a corner like a sleeping dog.”

However, he does not have the attitude of the colonials: he does not mix with them, does not wear a helmet, makes friends with the nomadic tribes, goes where no one ventures, in the mountains.

At anchor time. MONFREID ARCHIVES/AUDE DEPARTMENTAL ARCHIVES

He became the first European to transport weapons with his own boats, and became exasperated by his missions in Djibouti, where he said he rubbed shoulders with “the scum of society, stinking, posers, gossipy people“. Misanthrope, always.

The free electron annoys those in high places. “The French authorities were furious but I replied that (my genitals), which the Dankali cut off from Europeans who bother them, belonged to me and that I was free to risk them.”

About slavery

Slavery is less reprehensible in his eyes than the exploitation in Europe of workers, miners or soldiers “for the good of the capital of the potentates of finance”.

Was he a slave trader?? His grandson Guillaume puts this version in the category of legends. His adopted eldest son, Lucien, treated more than harshly by his father, dies crushed by a shark after a capsize, in 1920. He started working in shipyards, in a flour mill to produce flour and make pasta, in the pearl trade and in drug trafficking (read next page).

In the 1930s, his literary successes, which recount his adventures and slavery, upset the Ethiopian Negus, Haile Selassie. He was expelled. A hard blow for the power station he had set up. Mussolini and Italy wanted to get their hands on Ethiopia: a godsend for Monfreid, if they swept away the Negus. But the adventurer did not see only personal interest in it.

He was fascinated by the Duce. In 1940, at the age of 62, Monfreid was put in solitary confinement, suspected of espionage, of Vichy and Italian sympathies, then interned in Kenya by the English. He was not released until May 1943. His new wife, Madeleine, had joined him.

At the foot of Mount Kenya

He would stay there for four more years, as manager of a hotel complex at the foot of Mount Kenya, where he started making… Camemberts. Then in two isolated houses in the woods, “in the middle of wild animals“, says his biographer Daniel Grandclément (L’ incroyable Henry de Monfreid, Grasset, 1998). He sold watercolors and his wife made fur coats. Monfreid is afraid, in France, of being thrown into the big bag of purification.

A fan of dedications, here with his daughter-in-law Laure at his side. Independant – ROBERT COHEN

He only returned in 1947, at the age of 68, his jackal installed in a compartment outside the plane. His country had forgotten its fascist sympathies and continued to celebrate the writer-adventurer. He bought a fisherman's house in La Franqui and another in Berry, in Ingrandes, far from the crowds. “A hole to have peace“, sums up his grandson Guillaume. Misanthrope, again and again.

200% Deposit Bonus up to €3,000 180% First Deposit Bonus up to $20,000

Gold bars gone

He remained an opium addict all his life and made a small business out of it by supplying former settlers or writers. “Monfreid has the worst opium in Paris“, laughed Joseph Kessel. He died of a heart attack, in his sleep.

His fortune had vanished. The gold bars he had melted down? Gone, stolen. Gauguin's paintings that he had from his father ? Sold at a low price. And copied to deceive. His heirs call in a digger to dig up the cache he had set up at the bottom of the garden. The chest is empty.

In a Yemeni café. Henry de Monfreid had himself worked on this photo with watercolor. MONFREID ARCHIVES/AUDE DEPARTMENTAL ARCHIVES

Drug trafficking on the Red Sea

The captain of the dhow who saves Tintin from certain death on the Red Sea, in The Cigars of the Pharaoh? Hergé was openly inspired by Henry de Monfreid. Later, another cartoonist, Hugo Pratt, who lived like Monfreid in Ethiopia, would draw inspiration from him for his Corto Maltese.

A sea wolf with the air of an “old pirate”, as his friend Joseph Kessel nicknamed him, the adventurer had a taste for trafficking. Arms, first, a trade he would later regret, realizing that he had contributed to local instability, against a backdrop of tribal wars. Then hashish, on the eve of the First World War, with the support of a Greek priest for deliveries to Egypt!

The beginnings are laborious: during a storm, his cook, thrown overboard, drowns; a shark breaks the rudder; they are fired upon from the shore. Turban and tanned skin With a dhow, he goes to forbidden territory, in the heart of Dankali country, the place where slaves embark for the harems of Arabia.

He blends into the background, in turban and tanned skin, converts to Islam under the name of Abd el-Haï (slave of the living). Imprisoned in Djibouti, he obtained from his Freemason networks (including the Minister of Colonies at the time, Gaston Doumergue from Nîmes) to be released and reformed.

He convinces his father, who lives in Corneilla, in the Pyrénées-Orientales, to grow poppies on the family estate in Saint-Clément. It is a failure. In 1921, he starts trafficking cannabis via India, at the foot of the Himalayas. This time, he sees big: six tons! But he is fooled by an accomplice who grabs everything and even embarks with double the merchandise, twelve tons.

Monfreid is green with rage. He sets off to attack like a privateer, embarks a cannon on his boat, the Altaïr, and makes shells himself. He ends up recovering the twelve tons. Twelve tons of hashish Monfreid organizes his business: he hides his merchandise in the basement of his house, by digging a cavity covered with a slab of cement and sand. He makes a point of fooling customs by passing off his hashish as a pharmaceutical product, as one would transport rice or potatoes.

Six tons in 120 bales. The bigger it is, the easier it gets through. Customs seize the goods and store them in Addis Ababa, before returning them to him thanks to the intervention of the French authorities. He will sell the twelve tons in four years. But the cannabis trade is running out of steam and Monfreid must find other outlets for the Egyptian market: morphine and cocaine. Hard drugs that he will also regret having traded.

In 1926, he was afraid that an attaché of the governor, who had helped him with his trafficking, would denounce him. He killed him or had him killed… Between novels and truth, fiction and reality, it was sometimes hard, with the Aude native, to untangle the threads! He was imprisoned in 1928 in Djibouti. The governor of the Somalis, Chapon-Baissac, wanted his head. He owed his release to his political contacts in Metropolitan France. The local Freemasonry had excluded him because of his trafficking. He continued until the Second World War, before being arrested.

Monfreid spent thirty years of his life in Africa but returned to France regularly. MONFREID ARCHIVES/AUDE DEPARTMENTAL ARCHIVES

He dreamed of becoming an academician

Author of more than seventy works, some of which were best-sellers, starting with the first, in 1931, The Secrets of the Red Sea, Henri de Monfreid had swapped the i for a y in his first name, to better mark his literary debut. So go for Henry.

Literary fame was not a given. “You should write a book about your life“, Ida, the wife of his friend Paul Vaillant-Couturier, had told him. “I will never write, he replied, but you, if you want to do it, do it!”

She had done it. The book, The Secret Cruise, was published by Gallimard. Encouraged by his friends, the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the writer Joseph Kessel, he finally launched a literary career and recounted his adventures in fiction. He was also a journalist, for Le matin, Gringoire, Paris-Soir, Le Petit Parisien, Le Figaro, etc. A film with Harry Baur, Les secrets de la mer Rouge, an adaptation of his novel, was released in 1937. Thirty years later, a thirteen-part series was broadcast on television, based on the same book. Monfreid wrote a number of books, gave conferences, gave book signings, put on a song show, and recorded book-discs. “He was a master of public relations,” emphasizes Daniel Grandclément in his biography. A writer and journalist, he knew the world of the media and knew how to play it; finally, his personality was revealed by television. His wrinkled and mobile face, his abrupt and noble gestures, the tone of his voice to which he knows how to give the necessary emphasis, all combine to make him an extraordinary and inexhaustible storyteller. Even if “society cocktails overwhelm him”, he begins to dream of glory and literary recognition. Encouraged by the academics Kessel, Cocteau and Pagnol, he has his eye on the green coat and the sword. He fails the first time but hangs on, he who did not like being in a closed circle. He will start again, in vain. Academician Jean-François Deniau claimed that hard drug trafficking had “cost him a seat at the Académie française”.

Three generations: Henry, his son Daniel and his grandson Guillaume, now the legatee of his work. L'Indépendant – –

Exhibition, works and documentary

The memory of Henry de Monfreid is kept alive in Ingrandes, in Berry, through a small museum. She is more punctually at the departmental archives of Aude, in Carcassonne, for an exhibition called D’ici et d’aventures, until January 3.

Next spring, three events: Guillaume de Monfreid publishes a biography centered on the view that his wives had of his grandfather (he has already published, in particular, Henry de Monfreid, impossible grand-père, at Glénat); Grasset republishes Les Secrets de la mer rouge; finally, a 52-minute documentary is in preparation for France Télévisions.

I subscribe to read the rest