25 Facts About Roger Garaudy

Roger Garaudy was born in Marseille to working class Catholic parents.

Roger Garaudy fought during World War II and received the Croix de Guerre.

Roger Garaudy rose through the ranks and in 1945 he became a member of the party's leadership and its Central Executive Committee, where he occupied positions for 28 years.

Roger Garaudy remained a Christian and eventually re-converted to Catholicism during his political career.

Roger Garaudy was befriended by one of France's most prominent clerics of the time, the Abbe Pierre, who in later years supported Garaudy, even regarding the latter's most controversial views.

Roger Garaudy was expelled from the Communist Party in 1970, because he had criticized the party's position on the student movement and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Roger Garaudy had accepted the invasion of Hungary in 1956.

Roger Garaudy obtained a state doctorate in philosophy in 1953, with a dissertation discussing theory of knowledge and materialism, entitled La theorie materialiste de la connaissance.

In May 1954, Roger Garaudy defended another doctoral thesis, The Problem of Freedom and Necessity in the Light of Marxism, at the Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences.

Roger Garaudy lectured in the faculty of arts department of the University of Clermont-Ferrand from 1962 to 1965.

Roger Garaudy later taught in Poitiers from 1969 to 1972.

Roger Garaudy criticized Being and Nothingness for what he deemed not going beyond the domain of metaphysical pathology, and Sartre's novels for "depicting only degenerates and human wrecks" and describing his existentialism as "a sickness".

Roger Garaudy held that the Western culture was something of a coalition between the idealistic philosophy and the elite class, which is devoted to turning man away from the material world.

Around 1980, Roger Garaudy read The Green Book by Muammar Gaddafi and became interested in Libya and Islam, meeting the country's leader on several occasions in the desert.

Roger Garaudy converted formally at the Islamic Centre in Geneva, an organisation managed by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia at the time.

In 1996, Roger Garaudy published, with his editor Pierre Guillaume, the work Les Mythes fondateurs de la politique israelienne, later translated into English as The Founding Myths of Modern Israel.

Roger Garaudy was sentenced to a suspended jail sentence of several years.

Roger Garaudy appealed this decision to the European Court of Human Rights, stating that his book was a political work criticizing the policies of Israel that did not deny that the Nazis had committed crimes against humanity, and that his freedom of expression was interfered by the French courts.

At his hearing, Roger Garaudy stated that his book in no way condoned National Socialist methods, and that book was an attack on the mythologizing and use of "the holocaust" by Israeli government as policy.

Roger Garaudy argued that his book dealt with the Israeli government's use of "the holocaust" as a "justifying dogma" for its actions, mainly in Palestine and toward Palestinians.

The ECHR ruled that Roger Garaudy has denied historical facts in his book which is not a research work.

In December 2006, Roger Garaudy was unable to attend the International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust in Tehran, Iran owing to ill health.

Roger Garaudy reportedly sent a videotaped message supporting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's view that Israel should cease to exist.

Roger Garaudy died in Chennevieres-sur-Marne, Val-de-Marne, on Wednesday 13 June 2012, aged 98.

Roger Garaudy subsequently authored a treatise on women rights and on the status of women in the Islamic movement, partly influenced by Garaudy's work.