Review of Ch. Roulette, Jean-Paul II—Antonov—Agca: La filière. Paris: Editions du Sobier, 1984. 319 pp

Abstract

History has known its share of political provocations that reaction has organized in the hope of calumniating and denigrating democratic, progressive forces and arousing public opinion against socialism and communism. For example, at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, the "Dreyfus affair" was fabricated; and in 1933, after organizing the burning of the Reichstag, the Hitlerites accused Communists of the deed and set up the trial of Dimitrov. And so it is today that, in the aftermath of the "crime of the century," the attempt on the life of the Roman Pope on 13 May 1980, we are witness to the spectacle of the "Antonov affair." A considerable number of pages, mainly antisocialist and provocative, have already been written on this topic in the West. All the more important and timely, then, is the book by the French lawyer and publicist Ch. Roulette, in which he undertakes what is, in our view, a successful attempt to show the true state of affairs in the "Antonov affair" and its political aims on the basis of considerable factual material and a competent legal analysis of the evidence purportedly in the hands of the Italian authorities.