Régis Debray
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Jules Régis Debray (born 1940) is a French intellectual, journalist, government official and professor. He formally engaged in Che Guevara's activities, especially in Bolivia where he was arrested and jailed in 1967.
Regis Debray studied at the École Normale Supérieure and became "agrégé de philosophie" in 1965.
In the 1960s he was a professor of philosophy at the University of Havana, and a friend of Che Guevara as a young man in the 1960s. He later wrote a book entitled Revolution in the Revolution?. This book critiqued the tactical and strategic doctrines then prevailing among militant socialist movements in Latin America, and acted as a handbook for guerrilla warfare. When Guevara was captured in Bolivia, 1967, Debray (also in Bolivia at the time) was imprisoned, convicted of having been part of Guevara's guerrilla group and sentenced to 30 years in prison, but was released in 1970 after an international campaign for his release which included Jean-Paul Sartre, André Malraux, Général De Gaulle and Pope Paul VI.
He sought refuge in Chile, where he wrote The Chilean Revolution (1972) after interviews with Salvador Allende.
Debray returned to France in 1973. Following the election of Président François Mitterrand, in 1981, he became an adviser of the Président on foreign affairs. In this capacity he developed a policy that sought to increase France's freedom of action in the world, decrease dependence on the United States, and promote closeness with the former colonies. He was also involved in the development of the government's official ceremonies and recognition of the bicentennial of the French Revolution. Until the mid-1990s he held a number of official posts in France.
Founder of the discipline of médiologie or "mediology", which attempts to scientifically study mass media and power.
Debray was recently in the news for his support of the French ban on headscarves for female Muslim students in public schools. This was in defense of French laïcité which aims to maintain citizens' equality through the prohibition of proselytism within the school system.
He was rebuked, on behalf of then-French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, for his alleged involvement in the overthrow of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former President of Haiti, a charge that Debray strongly denied.
His recent work deals thoroughly with the religious paradigma as social nexus able to support collective orientation on a wide, time passing scale. This lead him to propose the project of an Institut Européen en Sciences des Religions, a French institute founded in 2005 aimed at monitoring sociological religious dynamics and informing the public on religion through conferences and publications.
