Here's another of my favorite Genet lines from the interview: "One has the impression in the end that revolutions are carried out by family men."
http://www.ralphmag.org/CC/genet.html
At one point, Fichte refers to Genet's "beautiful brutality, elegant brutality." Genet responds that he was thirty years old when he wrote those books, and now he is sixty-five. Fichte says, "And this fascination, which was so bewildering to me, this admiration for assassins, for Hitler, for the concentration camps..."
Genet responds:
I remind you that I was an orphan. I was raised by Public Welfare. I found out very early on that I wasn't French and that I didn't belong to the village --- I was raised in the Massif Central. I found this out in a very stupid, silly way: the teacher asked us to write a little essay in which each student would describe his house. I described mine, it happened that the teacher thought my description was the prettiest. He read it out, and everyone made fun of me, saying, "That's not his house, he's a foundling!" and then there was such an emptiness, such a degradation...
With typical Genet logic jump --- and his jumps of logic are monumental --- he turns this memory of childhood mockery into a loathing for France:
I immediately became such a stranger ... oh! the word isn't too strong, to hate France is nothing, you have to do more than hate, more than puke France, finally I ... and ... the fact that the French army, the most prestigious thing in the world thirty years ago, that they surrendered to the troops of an Austrian corporal, well, to me, that was absolutely thrilling. I was avenged.
He concludes, "I could only love someone who had dealt such a serious blow to French society."