Television presenter and writer Bernard Pivot, who got millions of French people reading thanks to his show Apostrophesdied Monday in the Paris region at the age of 89.
His death was announced to AFP by his daughter Cécile Pivot.
Remembered with a book in one hand and his glasses in the other, Bernard Pivot also presented the show Culture broth and organized from 1985 the Dicos d’or, a spelling championship which quickly became international.
Joining the Goncourt Academy in 2004, he became its president in 2014 and withdrew at the end of 2019.
Literary intimacy
The first issue of its flagship show, Apostrophes, was broadcast on public television on January 10, 1975. This program that he hosted live was unbeatable on Friday evenings. We laugh a lot, we compete in wit, we smoke and drink, we insult each other, we kiss… The public loves it, the book sales follow.
The giants of letters follow one another in this new kind of salon where Pivot knows how to create intimacy and bring together improbable duos.
The comedian François Cavanna tries to silence the American writer Charles Bukowski, dead drunk, with a famous “Bukowski, I’m going to punch you in the face!” », to which Pivot adds: “Shut up…”
The writer and dissident of the Soviet regime Alexander Solzhenitsyn defends The Gulag Archipelago and his memoirs. Marguerite Duras admits to him: “We drink because God does not exist”.
Sagan, Barthes, Nabokov, Bourdieu, Eco, Le Clézio, Modiano, Levi-Strauss and even President Mitterrand will be his guests. In 1987, he clandestinely interviewed Lech Walesa in Poland. Facetious and meticulous reader, he submits his guests to the “Pivot questionnaire”, inspired by that of Proust.
Apostrophes lasted fifteen years, from 1975 to 1990, followed by millions of viewers. And certain extracts still have great success on the Internet.
Matzneff affair
Thus, when the case arose in January 2020 affecting the writer Gabriel Matzneff, a French author who benefited from great complacency while he had sexual relations with minors, we rewatched a lot of a broadcast from March 1990 in to which he was invited.
“If there is a real sex education teacher, it’s Gabriel Matzneff, he willingly gives lessons,” says Bernard Pivot playfully, presenting the author as a “collector of girls”.
Also on the set, the Quebec novelist Denise Bombardier then opposed Gabriel Matzneff.
“Mr. Matzneff seems pitiful to me,” replies Denise Bombardier, the only one on the set to worry about the writer’s minor conquests and judging that he would have been “accountable to the courts” if he did not did not have “a literary aura”.
“There are limits even to literature,” she still declares.
With 30 years of hindsight, the sequence is shocking. “Today, morality comes before literature. Morally, it’s progress,” Bernard Pivot will defend.
The popularity of the literary journalist, who had nearly a million subscribers on
In 2004, he became the first “non-writer” co-opted into the Académie Goncourt.
Wine and football
Bernard Pivot has written three novels and several essays, on the French language, but also on his two other great passions: wine and football.
Born in Lyon on May 5, 1935 into a family of small traders, he spent his childhood in Beaujolais and was known to be an enlightened lover of wines from this region.
We owe him a Wine lovers dictionary (Plon, 2006). In football, he was a loyal supporter of the AS Saint-Etienne club and the French team.
He defined himself above all as a journalist, a profession of which he experienced all facets. After starting as an intern at Progress from Lyon, he entered the Literary Figaro in 1958.
Head of department at Figaro in 1971, he resigned in 1974 after a disagreement with the writer Jean d’Ormesson (who would become his most frequent TV guest). It will then go through Read, Point, The Sunday Journal.