Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.

Interview with Tahar Ben Jelloun Le Monde November 1979
1980s
Interview with Antoine Bourseiller (1981) and with Bertrand Poirot-Delpech (1982) distributed as a videocassetts in the series Témoin. While he received excellent grades in school his childhood involved a series of attempts at running away and incidents of petty theft (although White also suggests that Genet's later claims of a dismal impoveriJean Genetd childhood were exaggerated to fit his outlaw image). He worked with Foucault and Sartre to protest police brutality against Algerians in Paris a problem persisting since the Algerian War of Independence when beaten bodies were to be found floating in the Seine.

Jean Genet (French: [ʒɑ̃ ʒənɛ]; (1910-12-19)December 19 1910 – April 15 1986(1986-04-15)) was a prominent and controversial French novelist playwright poet essayist and political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal but later took to writing.