In the middle of a dragging Saturday morning, the telephone rang, an already well-known voice was heard speaking impeccable French with a delicious Germanic accent: "Mon lieutenant, do you think he's possible to invite a friend, François Lagarde, to the festivities? I replied that it was no problem and my interlocutor hung up the phone in a flash as he was used to. I had met Ernst Jünger for the first time three weeks before. He called me for some time to come and with a certain deference, my lieutenant. I had realized a dream when I met him in Wilflingen, he had received me with a kindness that again had almost upset me and he had assured me of his presence for the show that we were preparing at the rear base for the return of the troops from Operation Daguet in Iraq in Nîmes. But I did not know François Lagarde, of whom the German writer spoke to me, and I had felt from the sound of his voice that it was a wish that was close to his heart. He told me that he lived in Montpellier and that he would come by his own means… Shortly after, I received another call, this time from François Lagarde who came on the phone and told me he was a photographer.

Francois Lagarde had a soft voice and I never heard him raise it. At all times, in all circumstances, he remained master of himself and it did not seem like an effort. He had that soft, questioning voice whose questioning served as much to discover as to confirm. François had a real gentleness, which was not feigned, but he was also inhabited by a certain ferocity that I attributed to the double emancipation he was convinced he had achieved: emancipation from his environment and emancipation from all forms of limits like the people who turned twenty in 1968. François was Protestant to the very core of himself. He refused this condition and therefore boasted of having gotten rid of it, of no longer carrying the weight of his two pastor parents, but he continued to struggle, and in his heart of hearts, I always thought he was aware, even if he acted like someone who had won the bet, that the fight would still be with him. So he got rid of his Protestantism by dressing it up with a Fellini side, in search of the slightest bit of pure life, of Dionysian life, of an orgy of life… It was his agony. He never shied away from it. There is something terrible in seeing a man retain only gray, dull colors from childhood… No childish joy comes to counterbalance this feeling. If everything is a question of perspective in life, joy should always be the perspective of childhood, because the joy felt fully in a pure soul will always seem stronger than the vagaries of adult life. Time often accustoms us to our own hypocrisy. And we take that habit for a win. François Lagarde exalted an unfailing complexity. It was hard not to like him. He was impulsive, always curious and adorned with a genuinely Catholic joy. He wouldn't have liked me to give him a Catholic quality, but he would have been flattered, without admitting it of course.

It would take too long to recount our many visits to Ernst Jünger after he allowed us to get to know each other. Jünger had this sensitivity so particular that he knew people by their souls and no doubt he had first shaped this vision on the battlefields. One look was enough. A handshake. When Ernst Jünger shook your hand, it felt like a pact made as if he wanted to bury both hands in the ground to root a new oath. He knew people beyond themselves, beyond decorum, when the social layers were removed. And if we believe that the actions of each other can have the slightest meaning, we understand that a meeting initiated in this way could not fail to have a meaning, a deep meaning that would always escape its protagonists. But only here. Jünger had this infinite patience. François could take pictures of him, ask him to move, and he always allowed himself to be done and complied. Jünger showed as much ease and patience for the discussion, the questions that I asked him as for the photographs. One day, I understood that Jünger liked human contact, camaraderie, and in that he remained a soldier. And he liked the singularity. He didn't like anything that was anonymous and he pointedly showed me boxes of books sent by his publisher for signing, showing a distaste for a task that he wouldn't do anyway. He loved camaraderie, which binds and unites people and reveals them. He loved singularity, cultures and men, and this is what he was always looking for throughout the world through his travels in search of culture and singular men.

François experienced a major change: at one point the film took precedence over the photo in his mind. There were thousands and thousands of photos of rock artists, mad poets, illustrious strangers… I've never seen a bad photo of François. He always caught something that everyone missed. He was so fond of talking about this fleeting moment, he was so fond of saying that the eye was as much seen as he saw, resting his discourse then as much on Aristotle as on more recent thinkers. He called his film production company, Hors-Œil and, if at the beginning of this new adventure when he asked me what I thought of this name and of two or three others about which he hesitated, I told him that I didn't like the off-eye sound, but that it suited him well, he smiled that said it all. Another time I told him that he was doing Claudel, saying that the eye was listening, he pouted, not knowing very well whether to take it as a compliment. François was a character from Bergman, quite distant from Claudel. He had published Albert Hoffman in French and knew LSD like the back of his hand. He belonged to the 70s, but knew how to arrange them so that they are understood in our time. This is how he stirred up a number of diverse and varied and contradictory references which came together as if by magic. His eclecticism knew no bounds. He had taken LSD with William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg and introduced me to Gérard-Georges Lemaire and Bruno Roy! And so he jumped from one subject to another so easily that it was hilarious. You had to follow its swarming, its journey. And there was nothing superficial in this facility to marry new themes, there was an insatiable curiosity, an appetite for life... He liked to follow in the footsteps, to like what you liked to feel or at least try to feel. what you felt and that gave you so much joy. So many things about him had to do with travel. He would have liked to make all the trips possible in the world, all the crossings, all the journeys… To follow you to the end of the world if you also wanted to follow him. And it was so easy to follow each other… One New Year we spent almost the whole night talking, he in Montpellier, me in Paris, and banging our glasses of champagne from a distance. I had taken the liberty of sending him texts from John Paul II without telling him who they were from. He read them, but I couldn't ask him to do the impossible, and especially not to become a papist. I teased him however by showing him that he had more arguments after he had known the author of the lines. He still found certain things to oppose and it was also one of his first qualities, he was not satiated, he was stimulating. Once we were talking about religion over sparkling wine with Jünger and Liselotte — I had just returned from a delightful day spent with Banine and wanted to speak with Jünger about a statement he had made regarding Buddhism which he said he loved the philosophical aspect, always this singularity which invigorated him when he encountered it — François was struck by Jünger's sudden volubility in talking about religions. François, like any good Protestant, made it clear that he, as a Protestant, could not think so. I pointed out to him that negation was out of place in his sentence unless it was in the DNA of Protestantism. He looked gray for two minutes. He didn't want anyone. The discussion was animated and joyful, without any pretension… But I remember Jünger's dynamism in evoking Catholicism, we felt in him a deep respect in the face of mystery and if, at first glance, I wanted to have his intimate opinion on religion and on the Buddhism that he said he was ready to espouse rather than the Islam of Banine which seemed to him very distant from his concerns and to question him on Catholicism, I realized that Catholicism was not at all of this part, Catholicism was apart. As is often the case with Jünger, I learned as much from him in casual discussions as during one-on-one professional meetings. I reminded Francis of this episode when we learned of Jünger's conversion to Catholicism at the end of his life.

After Ernst Jünger passed away, we saw each other less. We had both changed our lives. But the magic always worked when we passed each other. I had spent a weekend at his house while I was on a mission in the region. We had still talked so much as we had been doing for more than a decade about his film project on Jünger, "Le Rouge et le Gris", he had still shown me hundreds of photos as he had been doing for a decade, photos of the Somme, he lived the First World War, he lived “Orages d'acier”, I think he wanted to discover the secret of this survival written and described by Jünger in his war writings in general and in Orages steel in particular. He sensed a secret there that he wanted to unlock. He dreamed that he appeared in one of the thousands of photos he had taken. He dreamed of an epiphany. And an apocalypse. With this film, “Le Rouge et le Gris”, François had found the work of his life which occupied him for more than twenty years. And the title summed up his life: the gray that had been chasing him since Le Havre and his childhood, which he thought he had exorcised by creating the magnificent Gris Banal editions, and which came back in a haunting tempo to devour him in the daily life of the Great War. His daily life. It was also the gray of technique, an obsession of a lifetime and so well embodied in trench warfare where technique took precedence over man and forced him to crawl without horizon, and red, that flamboyant red , this red of life, of the seasons, of hallucinogenic mushrooms, this red of blood which springs in a last cry, in an eternal cry. Thus, during this last weekend, we had also talked a lot about the disease that he knew I knew well, and that he had been facing with courage and determination, but also with anxiety for some time already. He became a Bergmanian again in the face of the loneliness of his illness. He didn't lose his enthusiasm even though feeding it took more effort, and he told me he was almost done with his life's work. And he was about to finish it. His life was his work. Passion and enthusiasm filled him regularly and it never seemed to cease. He liked signs more than meaning and this is perhaps what provoked a feeling in him mixed with bitterness and poetry. But the meaning fascinated him all the same, he had completely filmed Foreign Legion ceremonies where I had invited him, he had filmed a very traditional mass which was close to my heart and which he had attended regularly, and his comments did not never dried up, he felt in the tradition an exemplary strength, something impeccable that would never disappear, he was fascinated and voluble talking about it... I wouldn't be complete if I didn't say how much he loved forgiveness, without make it a sacrament, he loved people who knew how to forgive themselves. He urged me to read Desmond Tutu's book, “There's No Future Without Forgiveness”. Even if sometimes new adventures took him far away and prevented him from seeing what continued to exist, François dreamed of forgiveness. Of universal forgiveness. It would have been useless to remind him that universal calls himself Catholic in Greek. He died on Friday the 13th, in a last snub.