Alain Robert: A Punk’s Revenge
- Matthieu Amaré
- 15 hours ago
- 8 min read
In the previous installment, we left the French Spider-Man at the top of his game, still nursing a deep need for recognition. Now we’re back in Paris, at the Salon de l’Escalade, where Alain Robert finally explains why he feels such a need to keep talking about his past—even if it gets on everyone’s nerves. The final chapter of our XXL series moves through rock, legacy, and Wall-E.
A crowd has formed behind the temporary structures at Porte de Versailles. In the middle of the booths, Alain Robert is posing for a photo with Oriane Bertone, a four-time French champion and World Championship silver medalist in bouldering. From up there, the image looks like 40 years of climbing history staring back at us. While the old climber throws up rock-and-roll hand signs, the great hope of French climbing hides a laugh behind her hand. A kind word, a quick hug, and Bertone is gone, leaving Alain Robert surrounded by about 20 young fans who have shown up to get their fingerboards signed.
Legacy
Past 60, the French Spider-Man still seems wildly popular—even with people in the 18-to-25 crowd. Part of the reason is his closeness to the new generation of urban climbing. When Alain Robert ropes up to climb the Burj Khalifa with Alexis Landot, it’s not just to prove he can still hang. It’s also a way to reach the 1.5 million followers of the 23-year-old solo climber. The godfather of urban climbing also makes sure to appear alongside Leo Urban, the “French Tarzan,” another building climber with more than 2 million followers on Instagram and 300,000 on YouTube. Each of those appearances serves the same purpose: making sure his legend still lands with a young audience drawn to dangerous climbs and high-stakes suspense.
Robert knows exactly what he’s doing. He runs his own social media and uses the same codes as the people who came after him: 30-second reels that open on slips, exposure, and titles like, “All of the sudden, I slipped and nearly fell… What the fuck.” The formula works. Alain Robert is now one of the very few climbers with more than a million Instagram followers, far ahead of current French stars like the Mawem brothers, Oriane Bertone, or Mejdi Schalck.
“ He can’t sell his rock solos anymore. That was 30 years ago. Nobody cares ”
Philippe Poulet
But that constant digital presence comes at a cost. At times it feels scattered—at times just chaotic. Thrown into the social media machine, the French Spider-Man seems determined to latch onto anything that moves, spinning his web everywhere and nowhere at once. In interviews, Robert still complains. This time it’s about drones, which didn’t exist when he made his earliest ascents and which, in his view, can never do justice to those climbs when they’re compared with the videos of Alexis Landot or Leo Urban.
Before long, he is back on one of his favorite themes: people won’t remember his real legacy—what he calls, in English, “my legacy.” That hunger for recognition is everywhere. It slips between questions and answers, fills every pause in the conversation, colors every digression. Online, it shows up in his Instagram Lives too. Alain Robert repeats his keywords and greatest hits like an alphabet lesson: Pol Pot, La Nuit du Lézard, first 5.13d (8b) free solo—free solo meaning climbing without a rope—and so on.
For Philippe Poulet, editor in chief of Vertical, that media sprawl “builds hype.” “It feeds his notoriety. It’s also his business model,” the journalist says. “He needs to keep talking about himself so he can keep landing contracts.”
So from Bali, Robert posts constantly. Since moving to the island with his second wife and fourth son, it’s not easy for the climber to live on fresh air and affection alone. And a small partnership with the local Sofitel is not exactly enough to fund a champagne lifestyle. “His ascents still bring in a little money, but far less than before,” Poulet says. “His main income now comes from speaking engagements.”
Those talks can bring Robert between €10,000 and €12,000 from major companies that love pumping up their executives with adventure stories.
“I’m not in control anymore. Stop.”
To sell himself well, Alain Robert doesn’t really have a choice. Even if he doesn’t love it, the French Spider-Man nickname is what gives him most of his marketing power. The spider is everywhere: his official site, his YouTube channel, his Instagram account. “He can’t sell his rock solos anymore,” Philippe Poulet says. “That was 30 years ago. Nobody cares.”
Even if he still works a few stories about climbing on real rock into his masterclasses, Robert always ends up back at the buildings. “That speaks to people more,” says his brother Thierry. “Buildings are the city. They’re the backdrop of everyday life. And Spider-Man sticks in people’s heads a lot more than route grades do.”
That also explains why the harder Robert tries to restore the prestige of his rock climbing, the more disconnect he creates. “At the same time, Alain doesn’t really do much anymore besides communicating,” says Laurent Belluard, his biographer. “He has to fill the void, because he’s never going to do anything major on rock again.”
“ My strength has always been climbing right on my limit. Back then I was a Ferrari in the red. Now I’m a diesel hatchback in the red ”
Alain Robert
For his 60th birthday, the iguana still tried one more media move: a comeback in the Verdon Gorge, where he hoped to get some footage and show the world he could still make people dizzy on real stone, barefoot and wearing snakeskin. It did not go as planned. Philippe Poulet was there.
“He realized he was completely out of his depth,” Poulet says flatly. “He started on a 5.10c/d (6a+) and struggled like crazy. He was maxed out the whole time.” Robert was onsighting it—trying to lead it on his first go, with no prior beta—250 meters above the ground.
A friend who had come to take photos got rattled too. “When he wanted to launch into a free solo, I yelled at him and threw him a rope. Honestly, he showed up from Bali with no prep, thinking he could just do the Verdon cold. But come on, man—you’ve gotten older.”
The cameras from the TV show Riding Zone, invited for the event, were rolling too. They captured an Alain Robert feeling his way through the climb and admitting on camera that he wasn’t the climber he used to be. “I’m completely out of my depth,” he says in one of the documentary’s most moving moments. Then he ends with: “I’m not in control anymore. Stop.”
Three years later, Robert says the episode shook him a little. But looking back, he doesn’t regret any of it. Climbing at his limit has always been one of his rules for living. “My strength has always been climbing right on my limit. Back then I was a Ferrari in the red. Now I’m a diesel hatchback in the red,” he likes to say.
And behind the wheel of that little car, Alain Robert has no intention of stopping. In 2023, he decided he would climb the Total tower at La Défense every year until the French government’s official retirement age—64, maybe 67. Last time around, he brought along what many consider the best sport climber in the world, Sébastien Bouin. A fun day, with a few slips mixed in. First mud on the climbing shoes. Then a full-blown controversy, as members of the climbing community criticized both men for appearing on the tower of one of the world’s biggest polluting companies.
The Last Flower on Earth
That is part of the Robert enigma too. Beneath the rambling and the verbal floods, it’s hard to know where the citizen ends and the character begins. At times, Robert has used his ascents to support political causes—at the Cheung Kong Center in China in 2019, for example, when he unfurled a banner backing peace protests between Hong Kong and Beijing. Ten years earlier, in London, he climbed to warn about global warming. Then, just as quickly, he gets on a first-class flight to go speak at private banks.
In a recent profile published by the American magazine The Summit Journal, he is even portrayed as a conspiracy-minded figure who questions whether humans really landed on the moon. “That’s bullshit from the journalist,” Robert says, brushing it off.
Part of that image also comes from his public, repeated comments on the war in Ukraine. His analysis often challenges the dominant line in mainstream media, which can easily feed the narrative of “Alain the reptilian outsider versus the deep state.” To defend himself, he points to the work of well-known American academics like Jeffrey Sachs and John Mearsheimer—people he can quote and discuss for hours.
“ Alain is Wall-E ”
Laurent Jacob
Just like his reckless soloing, his positions, his persona, and his projects will probably always carry some element of controversy. It seems stuck to his skin. Maybe those are the marks left by a man who has spent most of his life trying to get his revenge.
“In my view, it goes much deeper than that,” says Laurent Jacob, who appears with his friend in a strange documentary about the keys to self-healing. “What matters most with Alain now isn’t what he is. It’s what he represents: a permanent middle finger. He’s been true to himself his whole life by telling us, ‘I’m small, I’m physically messed up, I’m broken all over, and screw you.’”
For the former engine of French free climbing, now a doctor, Robert may not even grasp the scale—immense, in Jacob’s view—of the message he carries. But what message, exactly?
“Alain is warning us,” Jacob says, slipping into a more poetic mode. “He’s warning us that we’re at a tipping point, and we need to wake up if we don’t want to end up like the frog slowly boiling in a pot. He makes me think of that little robot who falls in love with the last flower on Earth in a world turned into a dump. Alain is Wall-E.”
For now, though, Robert says he sees his art as a way to contest “a society that is increasingly sanitized, protected, and obsessed with security.” In interview after interview, the daredevil urges people to “live their dreams instead of dreaming their lives.” He is convinced that his own battered story proves one thing above all else: it is possible to be “the master of your own destiny.”
“A CIA study [sic] showed that 80% of people in the United States didn’t like their jobs,” he says. “I decided pretty early on that I was going to choose what I wanted to do with my life. And I’ve always stayed free.”
The facts of Alain Robert’s life can be read as one long series of escapes from control: first from the rope, then from the climbing world, and finally from society itself. That leaves his obsession with controlling his “legacy.” But after four hours of conversation, the French Spider-Man finally seems a little more at peace.
“I don’t want to come off as bitter,” he says. “A lot of people dragged my name through the mud, but since then Alex Honnold and a few journalists have given me back my legitimacy.”
So what revenge is left to take?
Ever since little Alain Robert decided to free solo the apartment building where he lived, he has known shame and redemption, coma and rehab, disgrace and glory, prison cells and the Élysée Palace, Valence and Bali. At the end of the meal, the two Robert brothers return to an old idea: fixing up a barn in La Palud-sur-Verdon and spending happy days there as a family.
But not yet. There is a biopic still to shoot—scheduled for 2027—and besides, it would be madness.
“I’m good in Bali. There’s no temptation there,” Alain Robert says. “If I moved to the Verdon, I’d go free solo every day, and that wouldn’t be reasonable anymore. I could die there. And the ultimate goal—the one that matters more than all the others—is to stay alive.”
