Régis Debray
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Jules Régis Debray is a French intellectual, journalist, government official and professor. He formally engaged in Che Guevara's activities, specially in Bolivia where he was arrested and enjailed in 1967.
Regis Debray studied at the École Normale Supérieure and became "agrégé de philosophie" in 1965.
In the 1960s he was a professor of philosophy at the University of Havana, and a friend of Che Guevara as a young man in the 1960s. He later wrote a book entitled Revolution in the Revolution?. This book critiqued the tactical and strategic doctrines then prevailing among militant socialist movements in Latin America, and acted as a handbook for guerrilla warfare. When Guevara was captured in Bolivia, 1967, Debray (also in Bolivia at the time) was imprisoned, convicted of having been part of Guevara's guerilla group and sentenced to 30 years in prison, but was released in 1970 after an international campaign for his release which included Jean-Paul Sartre and André Malraux.
He sought refuge in Chile, where he wrote The Chilean Revolution (1972) after interviews with Salvador Allende.
Debray returned to France in 1973. Following the election of Président François Mitterrand, in 1981, he became an adviser of the Président on foreign affairs. In this capacity he developed a policy that sought to increase France's freedom of action in the world, decrease dependence on the United States, and promote closeness with the former colonies. He was also involved in the development of the government's official ceremonies and recognition of the bicentennial of the French Revolution. Until the mid-1990s he held a number of official posts in France.
Founder of the discipline of médiologie or "mediology", which attempts to scientifically study mass media and power.
Debray was recently in the news for having come out in favor of the French ban on headscarves for female Muslim students in the public schools, in defense of french laïcism wich tends to maintain citizens equality through the prohibition of all sort of proselytism within the school area. Debray wich studies the concept of religious conviction for years revealed also the complexity of his own options.
He was also evoked, on behalf of then-French Foreign Minister [[Dominique de Villepin], for his alleged involvement in the ouster of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former President of Haiti, allegation that Debray toughly refuted.
His recent work deals thoroughly with the religious paradigma as social nexus able to support collective orientation on a wide, time passing scale. This lead him to putforth the project of an Institut Européen en Sciences des Religions, a french institute founded in 2005 aimed at watching the sociological religious dynamics and inform public about religions through conferences and publications.