Henri Curiel

Henri Curiel, born September 13, 1914 in Cairo (Egypt) and murdered on May 4, 1978 in Paris, is a communist and anti-colonialist activist. Henri Curiel is the father of the journalist Alain Gresh and the cousin of the spy and double agent George Blake, who declared in 1991 to have been strongly influenced by his Egyptian communist cousin. Born in Cairo at the beginning of the last century into a wealthy Jewish family of Italian origin, Curiel grew up in a Francophile family environment keen on French culture. Destined to take over from his banker father, it is thanks to the woman who will become his wife that he discovers the harsh reality of the economic and social situation of the peasants who work on his family's land, in the Nile Delta: a shock, which, according to his comrade Joseph Hazan, led him to political involvement.