Gérard Lebovici

Gérard Lebovici (25 August 1932 – 5 March 1984) was a French film producer, editor and impresario.

His mother was executed in a Nazi concentration camp during the Second World War. While on the verge of embarking on a promising stage career at twenty years of age, Lebovici's father died, leaving him orphaned.

Out of the necessity to ensure a source of income for himself more secure than acting, he followed his father into a menial occupation. But passion for show-business caught up with him and in 1960, he founded a management agency with Michele Meritz through which he represented the interests of Jean-Pierre Cassel. Subsequently during the 1960s, he rapidly rose to prominence in show business by dint of his distinguished business acumen and an intuitive understanding of the film industry.

In 1965, he bought a management agency from Andre Bernheim which included among its clients the French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo. He gradually created an empire in the cinema industry which lasted until 1972, with his creation of Artmédia, the first pan-European agency managing a combination of writers, directors and actors. Clients included Bertrand de Labbey, Jean-Louis Livi and Serge Rousseau (who was to discover a new generation of French stars at the beginning of the 1970s, such as Patrick Dewaere, Coluche, Miou-Miou and Jacques Villeret).

Parallel to his activities in business, Gérard Lebovici acquired a sulfurous reputation through his political associations. Scarcely politicized in his youth, although of mildly Left-wing sympathies, his future wife Floriana Chiampo, as well as the events of May 1968, radicalised him. Lebovici was fascinated by the Paris uprisings and seems to have viewed them as the birth of a true revolution. He is said to have confided to his friend Gérard Guégan the idea of founding a radical publishing house which he intended to be the “Gallimard of the revolution”. This idea materialised in 1969 under the name of Editions Champ Libre.

Champ Libre published a broad range of texts which reflected the ideological confusion of the time, as well as the growing influence of the American counter-culture. The defining moment of Champ Libre's development came in 1971 when Guy Debord submitted "The Society of the Spectacle" for publication.

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