The journalist and essayist Jean-François Kahn died this Wednesday, January 22, announced the newspaper Marianne and his widow Rachel Assouline Kahn. Media man, reporter, he founded two weeklies, l’Évènement du Jeudi in 1984 and Marianne in 1997. Son of the philosopher Jean Kahn-Dessertenne, brother of the geneticist Axel Kahn who died in 2021, he was 86 years old.
Born in 1938, Jean-François Kahn had to take his mother’s maiden name, Ferriot, to escape the anti-Semitism of the Nazis. He only took his name back after the war, in 1950. After his history degree at the Sorbonne, he worked at the PTT, joined the Communist Party, of which he remained a member for two years, then became an employee in a printing company. He began, somewhat by chance, a career as a reporter, at the age of 21, in 1959, for the daily Paris-Presse, which sent him to cover the Algerian war, from which he returned very marked, both by the brutality of the conflict, and by a press “self-intoxicated” to orders.
Chanter of “journalistic honesty”
He was then recruited by Le Monde, then at L’Express. He covered the Vietnam War and revealed the Ben Barka affair, with Jacques Derogy, in 1966. “I look back and I’m like, ‘My God, I’ve been through that!’ » »he wrote in 2021 in “Memories from Beyond Life”. Editorialist in the 1970s at Europe 1, he is wary “the myth of journalistic objectivity”and argues on the contrary for “journalistic honesty”.
On the political side, Jean-François Kahn was a fervent supporter of François Bayrou, the current Prime Minister, who also praised his memory on X: “Jean-François Kahn was a giant and a rare man. The incredible creativity that animated him, his audacity, made him found real period newspapers, Thursday Event, Marianne. He embodied “revolutionary centrism”, humanism and loyalty. We loved him”.
The founder of Thursday Event and of Marianne had the ambition, since the 1980s, to “overcome the left-right divide”. He supported the candidacy of François Bayrou for the presidential election in 2007 and 2012, and even led one of the Modem lists to the 2009 European elections. But once elected to the European Parliament, he left his place to number 2 on his list, Nathalie Griesbeck.
-In his memoirs, recounts Marianne, he defined his civic commitment as follows: “In addition to uncompromising anti-fascism, I remained addicted to two lines of force based on a democratic and social republicanism of conviction. The phobia, when it is renewed, of the eternal social democratic betrayal and the almost visceral rejection of leftism. » He also, during the time he led Marianne, widely claimed his hostility to Nicolas Sarkozy.
He sometimes knew how to recognize his errors of judgment: when Dominique Strauss-Kahn was accused of raping Nafissatou Diallo, a New York maid, Jean-François Kahn estimated that“there was no attempted rape”and that it was only a matter of “servant’s kit”. Faced with the outcry caused by his remarks, he withdrew from journalism, even if he continued to produce columns and some public interventions here and there. One of the latest dates back to the attempted takeover of Marianne by far-right businessman Pierre-Édouard Stérin, to which he violently opposed.
Humanity is under attack, defend it!
Your newspaper has been the subject of 5 SLAPP procedures over the past year. Obviously, the truth is disturbing. The forces of money and reactionaries seek to silence us. They won’t make it. Thanks to you!
I want to know more!
