Here is a poignant and uncompromising testimony delivered by Stéphane Bern on TF1. In an interview with the magazine “7 à 8”, the host spoke about a part of his life on which he has rarely confided: his childhood.
The 58-year-old television man notably returned to the education given by his mother, an uncompromising woman in the extreme: “Yes, my mother was brought up by a Prussian father. I can tell you it had to be perfection. My mother was a translator and interpreter, she spoke English, German, Russian and Italian perfectly. So, you can imagine, when I repeated my English or German lessons, I was full of it“, he admitted. Refusing to set himself up as a victim, the host however admitted to having been frequently beaten: “I was not a child martyr. I was beaten, when it was necessary. At the time, corporal punishment existed. And I did not know a day without taking a slap, I admit it“, he confided.
Stéphane had already recently returned to Marc-Olivier Fogiel in a report on his ambiguous relationship with his mother: “She’s such a castrating mother that it cuts her off. Such a powerful mother, but who ate her children. My brother got away with it. Me, I was too subservient to her, I wanted her so badly to look at me, to talk to me, to love me …“, he had testified.