The founder of “Marianne”, Jean-François Kahn, died this Wednesday January 22 at the age of 86. Joseph Macé-Scaron, former president of the editorial committee of the weekly, pays tribute to this press boss, writer and debateur, both “thinker” and “strategist”.
Of course, he was a brilliant, eruptive and generous journalist, but Jean-François is also a man who had the passion of thinking about the world in which he evolved. His vision, he theorized, just 30 years ago, in a work whose title illustrated his taste for creative paradoxes: Everything changes because nothing changes Who was, no doubt, the book he was most proud of. And that, not because he demonstrated, once again, that he was one of the last scholars of his profession and the only one who could discuss the concept of reality at Berkeley, Descartes or Hegel but because with the Time, this work remained unlocked news.
Read also: “Workward”, “Bouffeur de vie” … The journalists of “Marianne” tell their Jean-François Kahn
On almost 800 pages, he developed the concept of ” Structural invariant »Allowing to understand in an innovative way what change is, this word that we use wrongly and through in political or social discourse without ever wondering about its true nature.
Always topical contributions
He had understood, unlike his contemporaries who were sucking the word revolution as a treat, that when transformations appear in a society, everything is not changed: what remains unchanged are the invariants. I remember exciting conversations with the author on Paul Bois's major work Western peasants. Over two centuries, the great historian had studied the constant political physiognomies of the rural populations of the French West and resurfaces the importance of the land regime in place. JFK understood the need to think together in the same movement the immutable and the apparent changes. From that, he had managed to draw a philosophy of life, but also an editorial strategy that the press pattern worked to implement.
It was necessary to offer readers two elements: the first included everything that remained unchanged and which had to be preserved and this in all areas: from societal to tableware. The second captured the real change in work and offered readers who had not found a political offer for this change a way to express themselves by buying the newspaper.
-Read also: Natacha Polony: “Marianne's project” alone tells Jean-François Kahn's love for his country “
It is that for JFK the reader was most often an annoyed voter. It was this strategy that was followed – with what success! – When Marianne has become the organ of the anti-sarkozysm thus coming to fill a large void. We have forgotten a little too quickly that at the time the unique media thought communicated in the admiration of the “great man”. Everyone went there from his genuflection. Marianne was neither on the left nor populist, as was lazily written but the last refuge of those who refused to enter the unreasonable circle of the reason of the Saint-Simon Foundation, this holy brotherhood of helpless.
Later, some laughed when seeing sales run out of steam: ” You have been too anti-Sarkozysts! They sneered. The reality was, more simply, that it existed, again at the end of the five -year term, a political alternative sufficiently convincing for the reader to become a voter.
Read also: Chevènement, Domenach … These personalities who pay tribute to Jean-François Kahn
Today, structural invariants remain. Perhaps they are less visible because the ambient identity caricature, but the site to make them reappear in the open in their original sense is an exciting challenge. Likewise, the real changes that take place are difficult to see under the action of those that Arthur Schnitzler called ” Troubled water fishermen To the point that, in the same panurgical momentum, the editorialists inserted speak back to the fourth Republic. But Jean-François' roadmap is still topical, and it is also for this reason that it deserves to be thanked.
