This September 29, Jean-Pierre Foucault was the guest of Frédéric Lopez in “A Sunday in the Country” on France 2 in the company of the singer Anggun and the comedian Arnaud Tsamère. The opportunity for the host to make rare confidences about his childhood in Marseille, before his debut on the airwaves of what was still called Radio Monte-Carlo (RMC). Born in 1947 in the Marseille city, the star presenter is the son of a survivor of Nazi atrocities during the Second World War, Paula, and of a resistance fighter, Marcel Foucault, who saved his mother by hiding her with his nephew and his niece. “Misfortune and distress created their happiness“, he summarizes.
“At 14, I became an adult. My heart hardened”
But later, another misfortune hits his family. “My father was an importer/exporter of fruits and vegetables. One day, on February 19 or 20, he left for Algeria to, my mother told me, check the company’s accounts. And on February 22, 1962, he was shot in the back and once in the neck in the street. We don’t know why, I never knew why“, he says, very moved. Marcel Foucault was in fact murdered with two bullets in the back by unknown persons in Algiers on February 22, 1962, when his son was only 14 years old. The family will never know the reasons. of this murder, because the investigation stopped when the independence of Algeria was proclaimed.
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“They tell me ‘your father had a car accident’. I imagined that he was going to come back, on crutches, I don’t know. I waited for the door to open and my father to come limping in. And he didn’t come back“, confides the host again. “This is how, at 14, I suddenly became an adult. My heart has hardened“, he admits. “I became someone else, including at school. That’s why I started clowning, to avoid people asking me the eternal question: ‘why was your father taken down in the street?'” It was like that all the time. , he further details. “In fact he helped me do my job“, he explains. Puremédias invites you to watch the sequence in the video above.
“But it made me understand that from now on, the future belonged to me. And that it was up to me alone to manage“, he adds. Orphaned by his father, he became “adopted by the nation“. “What hurt me the most in my teenage life, and probably my sisters too, was when I received my ward of the nation card.“on which his father’s name was written.”There was the words ‘death for France’ but an official had taken a ruler and crossed out the words. So my father died for nothing“, he remembers, with tears in his eyes. “And I threw away this card. I wanted to show France that I didn’t need to be adopted by it. I’m going to fend for myself.“
