The founder of “Marianne” and “L’Évènement du Jeudi” died on January 23 at the age of 86. His journalistic and political commitments were marked by the refusal of all intellectual conformism. In mourning, the entire editorial staff of “Marianne” is mobilizing to pay him a tribute worthy of the great journalist that he was.
He bore those initials which predestined for brilliant coups. Of those which lead neither to lukewarm conventions nor to existences which flow like a calm river. “JFK”, the evocative nickname given to Jean-François Kahn by those close to him, died on January 23 at the age of 86. This privateer of the press leaves behind him a unique, unclassifiable imprint, in a media-political world which hardly appreciates the rudeness of free electrons.
With his tone, willingly rebellious, allergic to all conformism, the founder of Thursday Event and of Marianne was one of the scrupulous observers, and sometimes the actor, of more than half a century of French political peregrinations, from the unspoken decolonial wars to the fractures of the Macronist period, including the election of François Mitterrand and the rise of the National Front. “I look back and I’m like, ‘My God, I’ve been through that!’ »he wrote in the first volume of his Memoirs published in 2021.
Grand reporter
However, the son of the philosopher Jean Kahn-Dessertenne, who ended his life in 1970, recognized him: it was somewhat by chance that in 1959 he began a career as a reporter for Paris Pressafter odd jobs at the PTT as well as in a printing house during his studies at the Sorbonne. Sent to cover what was long described as“events” from Algeria, an imperative which made him take the plane for the first time, the native of Viroflay came back forever marked. As much by the violence of men – “Chicago, next to Algiers in those May days, was Disneyland”he later recounted – that through the modesty of a press “self-intoxicated”to orders.
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Then recruited to Monde then to L’Express Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber and Françoise Giroud era, where he revealed the Ben Barka affair and covered the Vietnam War, he retained from his first experiences in the field a real distrust of the “myth of journalistic objectivity”. “It is because from the outset I did not believe in journalistic objectivity that I never stopped striving (…) against the odds, sometimes, against journalistic honesty, trusted in his Memoirs the one who in 1977 became editorial director of Literary news. Obstinately refuse falsehood, which is an absolute like lies, while recognizing the evolving relativity of truth. »
Refusal of “single thought”
Enough to give a biting, joyfully outrageous, sometimes nasty style, which he imprinted on Thursday Event then to Marianne when they were created, in 1984 and 1997 respectively. Journalism without the snobbery of journalists. The kind to lift the hood and spend hours, hands dirty, feeling the workings of a society which escapes, in order to understand it, any conventional discourse. And what does it matter if it bothers the profession or even the readers.
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This refusal of all “single thought” made him express very early on his doubts about NATO intervention in Serbia, the Iraq war or the little space given by the press of the time to the supporters of the no vote in the 2005 referendum, while he- even was in favor of it. An honesty which also allowed him, something rare in the small Parisian environment, to recognize his departures from the road, as when he slipped in 2011 regarding the DSK affair, simple “servant’s kit” according to him.
-If his journalism remained unique, his personality, a bit crazy, was just as much so. Those who knew him, especially Marianne and to Thursday Eventremember the late closures, the passionate arguments or his perfectionist obstinacy in constantly rewriting the articles submitted by the editorial staff, to the point of becoming brittle. A mad scientist of the press, Kahn dictated his papers – he did not know how to type on a computer – and never had a driving license.
Attachment to the republican model
Inevitably, its mark was also political. There too, this French song enthusiast, host of various radio shows, sounded a note of his own. Undoubtedly too cramped in organizations incapable of self-questioning and evolving, his loyalty went to deep convictions rather than to political parties. Even if it means taking unexpected side roads. Young Mendesist, who briefly joined the Communist Party, whose “militant fervor” he remembered, a fervent anti-Sarkozyist through the salty headlines of MarianneModem candidate in the European elections, he theorized a “revolutionary centrism”refusing the centrality of the State and money. “Whether I’m classed as left or right, I don’t care”he blurted out to South West in 2022.
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In the absence of labels, indelible ideas remained, including an unfailing attachment to the republican model and the stubborn refusal of any temptation of identity. “In addition to uncompromising anti-fascism, I remained addicted to two lines of force based on a democratic and social republicanism of conviction, he analyzed in his Memoirs. The phobia, when it is renewed, of the eternal social democratic betrayal and the almost visceral rejection of leftism. »
Cassandra of the left
During these last years, it was moreover with a guilty conscience on the port side that he tried to act, reproaching the left for countless renunciations on secularism, universalism, freedom of expression or respect political adversaries. “A reactionary left, recycling what until now characterized the most reactionary right, (…) is in the process of establishing itself”he denounced in Marianne in 2021. His allergy to certain radicalisms made him, on the other hand, miss the yellow vest moment, a movement of which he was the detractor, even though it drew its source from a number of misfortunes that he himself had previously experienced. strove to denounce. Proof of a bourgeois unconscious, some will say, genius of never being quite where we expected, others will answer.
This father of three children, brother of the doctor Axel Kahn, on the other hand, never ceded the slightest ground to the extreme right, calling on everyone to lucidly learn the lessons from the growing performance of the formation heir to Jean-Marie Le Pen. “We must hear what [le] exceptional score [de Marine Le Pen] in the first round expresses, in particular anger and expectations regarding immigration, public security and the purchasing power of the most deprived, he said with Jacques Julliard between the two rounds of the 2022 presidential election. […] But the election of the very solitary patron of the National Rally would constitute a disaster such as France has not experienced since 1940.”
Until the end, Kahn was able to immerse himself in a world as rough as he was. In the summer of 2024, he was commenting on a new political explosion, that of a surprise dissolution by a president at the end of his reign. “If our extreme right comes to power tomorrow, it would be logical for it in turn to imagine a decoration to honor those to whom it owes everything: Macron, Ciotti and Mélenchon. That of Mélenchon with fins »he tackled in The Point. Yes, God (or Marianne) experienced all that.
