Since I’m in Chamonix – let’s evoke Maurice Herzog, who was the mayor of this beautiful village from 1968 to 1977.
Born in 1919, Maurice Herzog, a graduate of the prestigious French HEC school, is a director at Kléber-Colombes in the tire and rubber industry. He devotes himself to mountaineering whenever he can. During WWII, he joins the Resistance and becomes captain of a battalion of Alpine hunters.
His life changes when he conquers the summit of Annapurna on June 3, 1950 – at an altitude of 8,075 meters.
It is the first “8,000” conquered by a France which is recovering from a devastating Second World War, which needs great exploits and which – in terms of mountaineering – is experiencing a painful competition with the English and the Germans following the disaster of the 1936 French expedition to the Himalayas.
Having left for the Himalayas as expedition leader, Maurice Herzog returns as a national hero. The French magazine Paris Match reports the details of the ascent of Annapurna in real time or almost and publishes on the cover of its issue of August 19, 1950 a now historic photo of Maurice Herzog brandishing the French flag at the summit of Annapurna.
The following year, Maurice Herzog publishes his account of the ascent, “Annapurna” which has an international impact (between 11 and 20 million copies sold, depending on the sources) and which still arouses today many mountaineering vocations around the world. The financial benefits from the publication of “Annapurna” are so significant that they make it possible to finance French expeditions in the following decades.
“Annapurna” is intended to be the inspiring, transcendent and almost mythological epic of a few valiant, courageous men marching in unison towards an inassailable summit.
Also, Maurice Herzog lost his hands and feet during the ascent – they froze at the summit and had to be amputated – and he never hesitates since to give a Christ-like dimension to his life, be it his amputation which he experiences as the stigmata of Christ or the rebirth to a second life which he believes he owes to Annapurna.
Appointed High Commissioner for Youth and Sports in 1958, deputy for the French Rhône region in 1962, Secretary of State for Youth and Sports from 1963 to 1966, member of the Economic and Social Council from 1966 to 1971, deputy for the Haute-Savoie region from 1967 to 1978, mayor of Chamonix as it has been said from 1968 to 1977, director of the Mont-Blanc Tunnel Society from 1981 to 1984, honorary member of the International Olympic Committee from 1995 to 2012 then member of the International Olympic Committee from 1970 to 1994 (impressive for an anonymous director at Kléber-Colombes, isn’t it), Maurice Herzog will not stop in the decades following the ascent of Annapurna from using his aura of national hero to support the practice of sport in France – but also to support his career and his public persona.
He dies in 2012, three months after the publication of his daughter Félicité Herzog’s book, “A Hero” which undermines the heroic stature of her father, whom she describes as narcissistic, compulsive seducer and negligent father. Reading this family firefight, which is intended to be a novel and not a biography, has – in my eyes at least – no interest but rekindles a debate that has been going on in the world of mountaineering since June 3, 1950: what really happened during this 1950 expedition and was the summit of Annapurna really conquered?
One point is certain: the 1950 expedition has nothing to do with the national novel that is proposed by Maurice Herzog in “Annapurna”.
David Roberts, in his work published in 2000 “True Summit”, and Christian Greiling in his book published in 2022 “Annapurna 1950” attempt to disentangle what is mythology and what is reality. They do not agree on many points.
The merit of David Robert’s work is to highlight the existence and talent of three other members of the 1950 expedition.
Because, behind the tutelary and overwhelming figure that Maurice Herzog would take upon his return to France, three other mountaineers much more experienced than him – and thanks to whom the whole team returns alive – participate in the expedition.
Louis Lachenal, Lionel Terray and Gaston Rébuffat, all three members of the very prestigious Chamonix Guides Company, are genius mountaineers but their names are almost unknown to the general public of yesterday and today.
One may wonder why Maurice Herzog was appointed expedition leader. His great friendship with Lucien Devies – who dominated French mountaineering at the time since he was simultaneously president of the French Alpine Committee, president of the French Mountain Federation and president of the French High Mountain Group – is a clue.
Also, a class discrimination probably explains the appointment of an admittedly talented but non-professional mountaineer as the head of an expedition financed by a national subscription: the guides are then considered as technicians, but above all like somewhat rustic mountain boors and the interpersonal skills of an Parisian executive and a convinced Gaullist illustrate the political dimension of the expedition.
Before leaving for the Himalayas, the members of the expedition take an oath of obedience to the expedition leader – which is extraordinary when you consider that said expedition leader is not a professional, unlike the three Chamonix guides.
On May 13, after seven weeks of wandering – the Annapurna massif had never been explored before – the conquest of the summit begins.
Then starts what Lionel Terray calls the “fantastic ballet of ascents and descents” of the members of the expedition, who constantly go up and down in order to set up the different camps – Camp I at an altitude of 5,000 meters, Camp II at 6,500 meters, Camp III at 7,200 meters and Camp IV at 7,000 meters.
Herzog and Lachenal go alone to set up Camp V at 7,500 meters, and it is from there that they will leave to launch the final assault towards the summit.
The feat of the last 600 meters which makes it possible to reach the summit of Annapurna is in fact only accomplished by Louis Lachenal and Maurice Herzog. They leave Camp V at 6 am to reach the summit at 2 pm.
Maurice Herzog gives a legendary account of it:
Suddenly, Lachenal grabbed me: “If I go back, what do you do?” In a flash, a world of images flashes through my head: the days of walking in the torrid heat, the tough climbs, the exceptional efforts made by everyone to besiege the mountain, the daily heroism of my comrades to install, arrange the camps… Now we are nearing our goal! In an hour, maybe two… everything will be won! And we should give up? It’s impossible. My whole being refuses. I am convinced, absolutely convinced! Today we live an ideal. Nothing is big enough. The voice rings clear: “I will continue alone!” I will go alone. If he wants to come back down, I can’t hold him back. He must choose in complete freedom. My comrade needed this will to be affirmed. (…) Without hesitation, he chose: “So, I follow you!.”
Maurice Herzog, Annapurna, page 242
They arrive at the top:
So, shall we go back down?” Lachenal shakes me. What are his feelings? I don’t know. Does he think he has just completed a race like in the Alps? Does he think we should just go back down like that? “Wait a second, I have photos to take.”
Maurice Herzog, Annapurna, page 247
Herzog takes a photo of Lachenal (which will be blurry) and asks him to take photos of him.
He takes several photos, then gives me the camera back. I load the color film and we start the operation again to be sure to bring back memories that will one day be dear to us. “You’re not crazy ?” Lachenal tells me. “We have no time to waste!… We have to go back down immediately!”
Maurice Herzog, Annapurna, page 249
The summit may be conquered but the disaster begins.
Herzog, on his way back down to Camp V, loses his gloves and does not think to put the pair of socks he has in his bag on his hands. His hands will remain frozen.
(He will completely change this version in his second book “The Other Annapurna” published in 1998, where he attributes the loss of his hands to his frantic and sacrificial search for his teammates’ shoes in a crevasse full of snow).
Luckily, Herzog and Lachenal are awaited by Rébuffat and Terray at Camp V, which they had joined, hoping to attempt the summit themselves the next day.
But Rébuffat and Terray quickly understand that they must abandon all hopes of climbing to the top if they want to save their teammates. They spend the night making tea, massaging and whipping Herzog and Lachenal’s feet.
Better, Rébuffat gives his shoes to Lachenal whose feet are too swollen and takes the risk of making the descent with Lachenal’s shoes that are too small and of having frostbite which could cost him his feet (fortunately this will not happen).
The descent to Camp IV is a living hell: Herzog and Lachenal are disabled and Rébuffat and Terray, who suffer from ophthalmia, are blind and can no longer guide their teammates.
They are miraculously joined by the other members of the team but Herzog and Lachenal are no longer able to move and are carried by the Sherpas for a large part of the descent.
Successive amputations of phalanges accompany this descent which increasingly resembles a total disaster.
Lachenal and Herzog return to France in a pitiful state. Thin, unable to walk, they will become hospital companions for many months after having been mountaineering companions. Herzog has his hands and toes amputated. Lachenal has his feet amputated.
Herzog dictates on his hospital bed the text of his book “Annapurna”, imbued with lyricism and mysticism and would go on to experience the dazzling political career mentioned above.
A new and very beautiful life begins for me”
Maurice Herzog
It takes Lachenal two years to return to the mountains, even though it is his whole life. He climbes Ruwenzori in 1952 and is appointed controller of the mountain guide profession.
He dies in 1955 at just 34 years old, in a crevasse in the Vallée Blanche, 28 meters deep. At least he died instantly, his neck broken by the fall – and not from the cold.
The story could have ended there, France could have lived on the beautiful national novel written by Herzog, but…
…but before passing away, Lachenal was about to publish his own account of the ascent of Annapurna, which included, under the title “Carnets du Vertige”, his daily notes from the expedition.
The “Carnets du Vertige” book was to experience its own epic. The book was certainly published in 1956 but in a version stripped of any negative, critical or trivial tone by Lucien Devies and Maurice Herzog.
Finally published in its entirety in 1996, it allows us to compare Lachenal’s memories with the story given by Herzog in “Annapurna” and highlights the disagreements between the personalities involved, the strategic errors, the selfishness of each person and the absolute disarray that was the descent.
The Herzog family sues Guérin Editions for the publication of the book, considering that the added and modified passages infringe the moral rights of Gérard Herzog, the brother of Maurice Herzog who reformatted Lachenal’s manuscript after his death and affixed his signature, alongside that of the mountaineer, on the cover of the “Carnets du Vertige” in 1956 but the Bonneville court rules in favor of Guérin Editions, by judgment of April 21, 2006.
Well, let’s be honest, the tone of “Carnets du Vertige” is very different from that of “Annapurna”. Where Herzog presents himself as a charismatic leader who instills the necessary will in his teammate who is on the verge of giving up a few meters from the summit, Lachenal appears to be much more prosaic and realistic. His notebooks have the qualities of a real daily account, where the humble reality of everyday life is noted. The health problems of each person, the disappointments, the annoyances and the disagreements which appear within the team are recounted (and are dismissed by the laconic comments of Lucien Devies “to be deleted” in the 1956 version).
On the way to the summit, Lachenal feels that his feet are starting to freeze:
We were challenged by the altitude, I said it, it was normal. Herzog notes this to himself. Even more, he was illuminated. Walking towards the summit, he felt like he was fulfilling a mission and I would like to believe that he was thinking of Saint Teresa of Avila at the summit. Above all, I wanted to go back down and that’s precisely why I think I kept my head on my shoulders. In this regard, I would like to mention an incident which marked our last step towards the summit. Incident is not the word. These were just normal decisions to make, as is common in races in the Alps. I knew my feet were freezing, that the summit was going to cost me. For me, this race was a race like any other, higher than in the Alps, but nothing more. If I had to leave my feet there, Annapurna, I didn’t care. I didn’t owe my feet to French youth. For me, I wanted to go down. I asked Maurice what he would do in this case. He told me he would continue. I did not have to judge his reasons; mountaineering is too personal. But I felt that if he continued alone, he would not come back. It is for him and for him alone that I did not turn around. This summit march was not a matter of national prestige. It was une affaire de cordée.”
Louis Lachenal, Carnets du Vertige, page 299
Lachenal is a professional mountaineer but above all he is a guide for the Chamonix Guides Company and his concern is, during every race he can do, to protect the members of his team. On June 3, 1950, he knows that he is going to lose his toes and jeopardize the continuation of the passion that filled his life as a mountaineer, but his personal ethics as a guide prevents him from letting Herzog climb to the summit alone – because he would not come back.
Herzog is faced with a very different concern: in a euphoric state, with victory within reach, he knows that without Lachenal, there is no photo, no proof of the conquest of the summit, no national prestige. He asks Lachenal to take photos of him, brandishes the French flag, the flag of the French Alpine Committee, the flag of Kléber-Colombes – all in black and white and in color – while Lachenal orders him to go down.
Félicité Herzog explores in her 2012 novel “A Hero” the totally hypothetical idea of an unspeakable pact between her father and Louis Lachenal aimed at making people believe that they had reached the summit on that famous June 3, 1950.
The doubt is not new, other mountaineering specialists have long been surprised that Maurice Herzog or Louis Lachenal did not leave, as tradition dictates, a cairn at the summit and that the six photos taken by the mountaineers (five clear photos of Herzog, one blurry photo of Lachenal) do not show the surrounding peaks.
It must be said that the two men had neither eaten, drunk nor slept the previous night and that they were supported by doping drugs, which may explain their lack of discernment (especially that of Herzog, IMHO) at 8,075 meters – an altitude which in itself impairs one’s judgment, especially without oxygen bottles, although these had been used in expeditions since 1922.
In addition, Annapurna is not a summit with a clearly identifiable peak, but a long ridge made of small differences in altitude, so much so that the mountaineering world has always wondered where was the exact location of the photos.
The French High Mountain Group (GHM) invites itself to the debate in 2013, by comparing the photos taken by Louis Lachenal in 1950 with those taken subsequently by other mountaineers, such as those of Jean-Christophe Lafaille, in 2002. The conclusion of the GHM is that the 1950 expedition did reach the summit of Annapurna and that Herzog’s photo was taken just below the summit ridge.
It is true that the photos were taken below the summit but the idea of an unspeakable pact between the two men seems to me to be in total contradiction with the moral integrity of Louis Lachenal – which is, for me at least – the decisive element which leads me to believe that the two men have indeed reached the summit.
In his 2022 work, “Annapurna 1950, a French exploit under the fire of cancel culture”, Christian Greiling protests against what he thinks is a conspiracy against Herzog. He is presented, according to the author, by the mountaineering world as a colonialist, a racist and the ultimate plotter who manages to collect the laurels of the expedition.
That has never been my feeling – even though I have been reading everything I can get my hands on for 25 years on the subject. I quickly understood that the young, dynamic Parisian and Gaullist executive that Herzog was had capitalized better on his experience than his provincial teammates with no political network.
I recently asked my father, born in 1954, if he knew Herzog and Lachenal: he perfectly knew the first one as the conqueror of Annapurna, the name of the second one was completely unknown to him. Even if my father’s unique voice cannot in any way serve as a statistic, I found his response very telling. And heartbreaking.
What do we ultimately blame Maurice Herzog for?
Probably less a lack of technical qualities than a lack of human qualities.
“Annapurna” is, in the words of his friend Lucien Devies in the preface, “conceived like a novel, it is the truth itself”.
And indeed, for at least the five years following the 1950 expedition, Herzog’s account is the only truth of this crazy epic. A somewhat soothing truth, made of heroism and harmony where the figure of the leader who wants to be charismatic but suffers from obvious narcissism erases the very real talent of his teammates, not to mention their various sacrifices which will allow the conquest of the summit and the survival of every member of the team. Herzog’s book sometimes pays tribute to the technical prowess of the three Chamonix guides, rarely to their sense of honor and personal integrity.
The publication of the unexpurgated “Carnets du Vertige” in 1996 and the biography of Gaston Rébuffat by Yves Ballu the same year shatters this beautiful and monolithic myth and makes it possible to hear the voices of the other members of the expedition as well as their truth.
Gaston Rébuffat, the mountain poet, did not publish his own account of the expedition, although he thought about it. He returned disappointed with the expedition and reading the publications of Maurice Herzog filled him with contempt and disgust, faced with the egocentrism and self-satisfaction of the expedition leader.
Like him who scribbled his comments on a copy of Herzog’s texts, we want to ask: “What about Lachenal?”
Ah, if Herzog, instead of losing his gloves, had lost the flags, how happy I would have been!”
Gaston Rébuffat
Editor’s note. For this article, I’m wearing a Jacquard sweater that Gaston Rébuffat, who only wore that type of sweaters, would probably have loved. This article is a family matter: I harassed my father to retrace his memories of Herzog and Lachenal and it was my brother who took the photos which illustrate this article.
Editor’s note 2. I love mountains and mountaineering, but I hate skiing, which explains why you will never see me on the slopes. I’m also barefoot on the terrace of a sun-drenched chalet where it’s abnormally hot.
Monoprix jumper, shoes and trousers – Chanel, Vuarnet and Face À Face sunglasses – Loro Piana coat(s)
February 23, 2024
