"Il me faisait peur, ce monsieur." Michel Piccoli's Political Conscience

Jacques Daniel Michel Piccoli was born in Paris in 1925. Experiencing the war when he was very young shaped him. Perhaps the moment he heard Hitler when he was listening to the radio in the late 1930s was the beginning of him developing a political conscience: "Il me faisait peur, ce monsieur."
Piccoli has always been outspoken. Whether his political activism might have harmed his career as an actor is a question he does not think about. "It may have closed some doors but I have never thought about it." (via)



In 1999, when the Freedom Party of Austria scored its biggest political victory and formed a coalition government - "the first time a party with Nazi origins had become part of a European government since the end of World War II" - an "unprecedented response" from the European Union followed since there was a serious breach of the principles of "liberty, democracy, respect for human rights, fundamental freedoms and the rule of law" (via). In Austria, people protested. One large-scale demonstration took place in Vienna on 19 February 2000 and one of the participants was Michel Piccoli who had gone to Vienna to demonstrate with the Austrians against the far-right coalition (via).

In an interview, Simone Signoret recalled that she, together with Michel Piccoli and Serge Reggiani, once mistakenly arrived two days early for a political demonstration and commented that had they been great scholars they probably would not have attracted "embarrrassing attention and received sympathetic hearing". Her conclusion was: "Moralité, faites donc du cinéma!" (Moores, 1991). Thank you, Monsieur Piccoli, for lending your name to the cause.

- - - - - - - - -
- Moores, P. M. (1991). Celebrities in Politics: Simone Signoret and Yves Montand. In J. Gaffney & E. Kolinsky (eds.) Political Culture in France and Germany (130-154). London & New York: Routledge
- photograph by Jean Ber (1988) via