Libération

Libération is a French newspaper that Edward Said cites in connection with legal proceedings against Bernard Lewis. Its role in the book is specific but consequential: alongside The Guardian, it is named as a source reporting that Armenian and human rights organizations had brought criminal and civil suits against Lewis in France over his denial that a genocide of Armenians had occurred under the Ottoman Empire.

Reported Legal Proceedings

Said’s note attributes the report to Libération on March 1, 1994, and to The Guardian on March 8, 1994. According to the account, Lewis faced both criminal and civil suits brought by Armenian and human rights organizations. The charge described was that he had denied, in French newspapers, that a genocide of Armenians had taken place under the Ottoman Empire. The passage establishes the newspaper as a source for the existence and stated basis of the proceedings; it does not describe their eventual outcome.

Place in Said’s Argument

The reference appears in a note about what Said calls Lewis’s tendency toward tendentious generalization. By adducing the reported suits, Said links a scholar’s statements about history to their possible legal and public consequences. Libération’s appearance is therefore evidentiary rather than biographical: it supplies a dated press reference for the controversy without making the newspaper itself a participant in the dispute or presenting further information about its reporting.