Bernard Pivot died Monday at the age of 89.
The writer and TV presenter stood out for his outspokenness and his ability to popularize literature.
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The 8 p.m.
He was the one who passed on to us the taste for literature. Every Friday evening, at 9:40 p.m., in Apostrophes, a program that is no longer presented, he offered the French a privileged moment with the greatest writers in France and the world. Without ever looking down on himself, Bernard Pivot knew how to make his literary high masses popular events. “He is a man who worked in the field, that is to say he gave reading and literature its nobility by getting as many people as possible to read it. He knew how to talk to people because that he knew how to listen”underlines Tahar Ben Jelloun, writer and member of the French Academy, at the microphone of TF1.
Mischief, good humor and some controversies
The Pivot style was mischief, and as we say today, moments of television, like that evening in September 1978 when, with one sentence, he elegantly made fun of his guest, the American novelist Charles Bukowski, totally drunk on set. “Finally, this American writer doesn’t hold the bottle”, he then quips. Or when he lets Serge Gainsbourg rage live with Guy Béart.
From his other show, Bouillon de culture, the French remember his famous questionnaire. “The genius of Pivot was that he was us. He was naive, good-natured, asked questions… His word counted. The next day, in the bookstores, people knew they would sell more books”, laughs actor Fabrice Luchini. In a few words, the late scholar was the symbol of an era which forbade nothing, a shambles for which he was sometimes reproached, notably when he welcomed the writer Gabriel Matzneff to discuss his assumed pedophilia without realizing it. offend. The person concerned later admitted that he did not actually have the right words.
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VIDEO – “He made you want to read”: the French mourn the death of Bernard Pivot
At the end of his career, he left television without nostalgia. Elected to the prestigious Goncourt academy, Bernard Pivot became president of the jury in 2014, for five years. A tireless lover of the French language, it is on “The habit of radio stations calling me when a writer dies is so great that, the day I die, they will call me”, he wrote. The taste for the good word… until the last breath.
