Brilliant journalist, committed editorialist, the journalist and writer Olivier Todd, who died on the night of Friday December 27 to Saturday December 28, had embraced all the contradictions of the last century. Shared between England, his mother’s country of origin, and France, between communism and anti-communism, between Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus of whom he was the biographer, he left his mark with his lively and often sharp pen on the columns of New observer and of L’Express where he collaborated for a long time before turning definitively to writing.
Olivier Todd, born in 1929 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, was initially destined for a career as an academic and writer after studying at the Lycée Henri-IV and studying philosophy at Cambridge. . Married very young to Anne-Marie Nizan, the daughter of Paul Nizan, he returned to France where he collaborated on the magazine Modern timesdirected by Jean-Paul Sartre, while failing to obtain an English aggregation. Close to the Communist Party, he however refused to join it. He worked for a time as a teacher, then following the critical failure of his first books, turned to journalism in the 1960s thanks to his friendship with Jean-François Revel.
Collaborator of the BBC and New Observerhe covered the Vietnam War which made him definitively distance himself from communism and put him in lasting opposition to Jean Daniel, director of the magazine. Appointed head of the society section, he remained there for a few years before gradually moving away from 1973.
Licensed from “L’Express” by Jimmy Goldsmith
Unconvinced by the union of the left, he began a political refocusing and got closer to Valéry Giscard d’Estaing to whom he devoted a biography in 1977 (La Marelle de Giscard: 1926-1974). It was at this time that he joined L’Express as an editorialist before being appointed deputy director. He then defined himself as a social democrat “resolutely anti-communist”.
However, he was fired in 1981 by the magazine’s owner, James Goldsmith, who found the newspaper’s line during the presidential election too favorable to the left of François Mitterrand. Following his ouster, 13 journalists, including the newspaper’s director Jean-François Revel, resigned as a sign of solidarity. He then definitively turned to writing with a biography of Jacques Brel (1984), two novels Negotiation (1989) et The Wild Boar (1992) as well as an essay on his tumultuous relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, A Rebel Son (1986). He will then devote two biographies to Albert Camus (1996) and André Malraux (2001)
“Olivier Todd is dead. He was a model for me and like an uncle, but it is journalism that is in mourning”reacted journalist Bernard Guetta, close to the family and his son Emmanuel Todd. “Committed, subjective, he never claimed objectivity but he embodied intellectual honesty, courage and talent like no other”he continued.
