Jean-François Kahn, founder of Marianne, died at 86

The journalist Jean-François Kahn, founder of Marianne et Thursday Event died at the age of 86. A historian by training, he turned to journalism at the end of the 1950s by joining the newspaper Paris Presse l’Intransigeant, for which he notably covered the Algerian war, The World, Then L’Express during the 1960s, where he this time followed the Vietnam War.

From the 1970s, Jean-François Kahn joined the world of radio by becoming an editorialist on Europe 1, then, in 1977, he took the helm of the “Literary news” as editorial director. During these years, the French discovered his face on television, since he appeared regularly in programs such as The moment of truth. He is also present on the airwaves with the broadcasts With drum and trumpet on France Inter, and, in the 1980s, the show Sing it to me, both dedicated to French song.

A line marked by “revolutionary centrism”

His career took a new turn in 1984 when he created the magazine Thursday Event then, in 1997, the weekly news Marianne, of which he was the director until 2007. Within the Thursday Event then Marianne, Jean-François Kahn, involved within the Democratic Movement (MoDem) of François Bayrou, defends a line “revolutionary centrist”, “who strikes as much on the left as on the right to overcome the left-right divide within a free, dissonant space”. He continues to write a column entitled « Bloc-notes » in the pages of the weekly for four years. Aged 72, he announced his retirement from journalism in 2011, in the spotlight of a controversy linked to the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair.

After this date, Jean-François Kahn continues to collaborate occasionally for Marianne. In 2014, he published Media Horrora critical work on the media, which he considers threatened by the “single thought”. In June, he took a position against the transfer of Marianne, owned since 2018 by Czech businessman Daniel Kretinsky, to Pierre-Edouard Sterin, founder of Smartbox, who claims to be a conservative libertarian.