Bernard Pivot, the journalist and writer who made millions read through his “Bouillon de Culture” has died – Culture

French journalist and writer Bernard Pivot, known for the television programs “Apostrophes” and “Bouillon de Culture”, died this Monday, aged 89, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Paris, his daughter Cécile Pivot told the agency France Presse (AFP).

“The man who made millions of French people read”, thanks to the promotional programs he presented for more than three decades on the France 2 channel, as AFP writes, and who also presided over the Goncourt Academy, brought one of these broadcasts to the Fronteira Palace , in Lisbon, in 1998, to dedicate it to Portuguese culture.

Born on May 5, 1935, in Lyon, into a family of small traders, he was passionate about History and his language, French, with all its “little peculiarities, as he regularly stated.

He studied Law, in Lyon, Journalism, in Paris, and made his debut as a journalist in the literary supplement of the daily Le Figaro, in 1958, which he came to direct, and which he switched years later, in 1973, to television, to present a literary magazine .

On January 10, 1975, he debuted his first successful program, under his own name, “Apostrophes”, which became a cult object on French television and, later, on the satellite channels emerging in the 1980s.

Interviews with writers such as Alexandre Solzhenitsyne, Vladimir Nabokov, Marguerite Duras, Marguerite Yourcenar, Umberto Eco and Jean-Marie Le Clézio, Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes and Pierre Bourdieu, exponents of letters and thought in the second half of the 20th century, stated the importance of the program for almost two decades.

Its scope was extended to include politicians and their tastes, such as French President François Mitterrand. In 1987, Pivot dared to interview Lech Walesa clandestinely in Poland, defying the pro-Soviet authorities in that Warsaw.

In January 1991, “Apostrophes” gave way to “Bouillon de culture”, in which Bernard Pivot expanded the universe of books, cinema and art.

It was “Bouillon de culture” that Bernard Pivot brought to Lisbon, at the time of Expo’98, to interview the writer Lídia Jorge, the filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira and his actors Leonor Silveira and Diogo Dória in the same broadcast, without forgetting the then minister of Culture Manuel Maria Carrilho.

“Bouillon de culture” was last broadcast in June 2001. This was followed by “Double jeu”, between 2002 and 2005, when Pivot moved away from a regular presence on screens.

Member of the Académie Goncourt since 2004 and president from 2014 to 2019, his literary biography includes several essays and two novels, one more forgotten, published in 1959 (“L’Amour en vogue”), and another in 2012 (“Oui, mais quelle est la question?”).

Today the Academy paid tribute to the first professional “non-writer” it co-opted, praising his “insatiable curiosity”, “high moral standards”, as well as “his uncompromising independence” in relation to major publishers.

Under his presidency, writes AFP, citing the Goncourt Academy, the 2006 (“The Benevolent”, by Jonathan Littell) and 2010 (“The Map and the Territory”, by Michel Houellebecq) awards will go down in history.

Today, French President Emmanuel Macron also remembered Bernard Pivot, who he defined as “popular and demanding, dear to the hearts of the French”, and who lived “with the French spirit of conversation, curiosity and ‘gourmandise’.”

Among Pivot’s works there is also a “Dictionnaire amoureux du vin” (2006).