Philippe Bouvard in “Le Monde”, with a punch to “Grosses Têtes”

DAt the beginning of December, he celebrated his 95th birthday. After being well over the legal retirement age, Philippe Bouvard is retiring at the start of the year. In June, he announced on RTL: « The 1^is January, I will have established the double record that I hoped for, that is to say sixty years of radio and sixty years of RTL. » The journalist, at the microphone of “Grosses Têtes” between 1977 and 2014 on this same station, and who had been running the weekly column for several years “The portraits of Philippe Bouvard” during the Sunday morning, says his goodbyes. A journey spanning several decades, which made him one of the most famous animators in France.

The archives of Monde reserve their share of curiosities. In 2014, in a survey for M The magazine of the World dedicated to Napoleon fans, Vanessa Schneider will tell that Philippe Bouvard “keeps the ministerial briefcase of the first consul in his office”. Previously, we learned, on November 6, 1979, that Jacques Mesrine had planned to kidnap him. And, a fact undoubtedly unknown to the most dedicated film buffs, the critic and writer René de Ceccatty recounted, on October 30, 2000, that, a few days before his assassination, the Italian director Pierpaolo Pasolini granted his last interview to… Philippe Bouvard.

He was only 24 years old on March 11, 1955, when his name appeared for the first time in the evening daily. Philippe Bouvard, young journalist in the Varieties section of Figaro, was a victim the night before, “in the exercise of his profession, of the aggressive irritability of a theater director”, who, furious at a recent criticism, “hit him in the face”. His fame is growing. On January 27, 1967, The Monde will even qualify it as “sociologist of All-Paris”. “He is one of those who contribute with humor and insight to depict this Parisian fauna where the generous qualities, credulity and talents of some conceal or serve as a safe conduct for the less estimable developments of others. »

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