Non-conformist. If you had to sum up the long, rich and joyous career of Philippe Tesson in one stroke, this epithet is the one that would suit him best. Like what being the son of a notary does not prevent, even in the XXe century, to have a journey worthy of Balzac heroes, drawn fromlost illusions : halfway between Lucien de Rubempré and Etienne Lousteau.
The blue and mischievous eye of journalist Philippe Tesson ended on Wednesday 1is February, in Chatou (Yvelines). Journalist, press boss, columnist, cultural columnist, radio host, TV polemicist, imprecator and team leader, he played all the roles and also trained generations of young colleagues who gained confidence by working on his sides.
“I became a journalist, that is to say a writer of the moment”
Born on 1is March 1928 in Wassigny (Aisne), Philippe Tesson comes from a provincial middle-class family. Thanks to his theater-loving mother, he acquired a solid general culture early on. But his childhood was especially marked by the Second World War: his father was a prisoner of war and German officers stayed in their house. The atmosphere was quite close to that described by Vercors in The silence of the Sea, he said. Tossed between his native Thiérache and Paris, he was a fellow student at the college of Cateau-Cambrésis of Pierre Mauroy, future Prime Minister of François Mitterrand, with whom he will remain friends all his life.
At the Liberation, after Sciences Po, he passed the competition for the new National School of Administration (ENA) but gave up along the way. He was 20 years old when he embarked on a world tour, without a penny in his pocket. His ambition at the time was to become a writer, but he stalled. After having succeeded in the very selective competition for secretary of parliamentary debates, he took the plunge into the press, despite the reservations of his family, for whom journalism was not a profession.
He completed a thesis on “German romanticism and the literary sources of Nazism”, when through chroniclers of Combat, Pierre Boutang, Maurice Clavel and Roger Stéphane, he met in 1960, the boss of the newspaper, Henri Smadja. This Franco-Tunisian businessman, who bought the daily newspaper animated at the Liberation by Pascal Pia and Albert Camus, is looking for a young editor. His profile does the trick. “I became a journalist, that is to say a writer of the moment”he summarizes.
« Combat », organe d’opinions
The 1960s were marked by the beginnings of the Ve Republic and the advent of triumphant Gaullism. Like his boss, Philippe Tesson is favorable to French Algeria and hostile to General de Gaulle, a position he will revise later. Under his leadership, Combat is an organ of opinion, without great financial means, which favors critical thinking and gives a large place to strong opinions. At the same time, he directs a collection called “Le Brûlot”, published by the Round Table.
In 1965, he published his only real journalist’s book, De Gaulle Iis (Albin Michel). They are « style » but also “the bewildering mind of the author” are thus greeted in the columns of the Monde by Jacques Fauvet, editorial director. The positions of Combat on the occasion of May 68 will be the illustration. The newspaper initially supported the students, before radically dissociating itself from them when the influence and the leftist threat on the movement appeared.
Philippe Tesson then tries a singular adventure. He is a candidate without label, in the legislative elections of June, in the 6e district of Paris. Despite the support of Maurice Clavel, it will be a phenomenal flop. But it is on a personal level that his life changes. He meets Marie-Claude Millet, a doctor by training, fourteen years his junior, who becomes his wife and with whom he will have three children, including the writer Sylvain Tesson.
In February 1974, he cast off the moorings of Combat and takes part of the editorial staff to found his own newspaper, The Daily of Paris, the first issue of which comes out on April 4. Combat will cease to appear three months later, after the sudden disappearance of Henri Smadja, its owner.
In the meantime, Philippe Tesson and his wife have laid the foundations of a prosperous press group. Thanks to the commercial success of Doctor’s Dailylaunched in 1971 – which will be available in Pharmacist’s dailythen from maire, he can make his dreams come true and start a newspaper that mainly deals with politics and culture. Chaotic, this adventure will continue for twenty years, until 1994. Insatiable, he also resumed in 1975 Literary Newsout of an immoderate taste for literature.
Ideological disagreement
The Paris Daily has known at least two lives: one, until the first suspension of publication in 1978, is that of a journal of information and commentary which favors style and the debate of ideas. The titles are brilliant: “Giscard remains”, when Chirac left Matignon, in 1976, or “The night of the long pens”, when the union of the left broke up, in 1977. From the reappearance, in 1979 , and especially when the left came to power in May 1981, The Daily of Paris turns into a battle log. In the month preceding his accession to the presidency of the Republic, François Mitterrand took the initiative to break with the founder of the Paris Dailywhile the two men had been dating since the 1960s.
In 1987, he separated from his editor-in-chief, Dominique Jamet, who dared to sign an appeal in favor of the re-election of François Mitterrand. The ideological disagreement between the two men, long very close, is then complete. The writer Gabriel Matzneff, who was part of the adventure, described it in 1980 as “Captain de Treville” of this team of musketeers which included personalities as different as Jean-François Kahn (at the Literary News), Bernard Morrot, Philippe Aubert, Georges-Marc Benamou, Catherine Pégard or Eric Neuhoff. car The Daily of Paris represented another right, liberal and critical. “My newspaper does not conform to what the conforming right expects from a conforming newspaper. For that, there is Le Figaro »he said, in 1994, when everything stops.
His passion for letters
The press boss had to throw in the towel due to growing economic difficulties. More patron than capitalist, he injected tens of millions of francs to keep the newspaper afloat, refusing state aid. For him, money was above all a means, not an end.
An editorial phoenix, he was then reborn on television, hosting the new literary magazine “Ah! Which titles” with the journalist Patricia Martin on France 3. Member of the Interallié prize since 1992, of the Nimier prize since 1980, he reconnects with his passion for letters, he who had been forced to give up Literary News in 1983. He multiplies the appearances on the radio or on television, the glasses placed on the top of the forehead. It is in talk shows like “Rive droite/rive gauche” that he gives the best of himself, willingly accepting the role of the old grump on duty, learned but not pedantic.
He becomes a columnist Figaro, which hosts long papers on the life of ideas, but also L’Expressau Figaro Magazine, au Point, regularly jousts with the editorialist Laurent Joffrin, with whom he co-wrote a book on the state of society, Where has the authority gone? (Nile editions, 2000).
Seductive, overflowing with energy, Philippe Tesson wrote quickly and by hand. Journalism, he had not learned it, he knew it instinctively. Out of coquetry, he liked to say that he had stopped too late, which had prevented him from devoting more time to his other passion: the theatre. For him, journalism should be used above all to ask questions. And the press dare, cultivate impertinence and disturb.
Philippe Tesson in a few dates
1is mars 1928 Born in Wassigny (Aisne)
1960 Is named editor-in-chief of “Combat”
4 avril 1974 Founds “Le Quotidien de Paris”
1975 Takes over “The Literary News”
2011 Becomes owner of the Théâtre de Poche in Montparnasse
February 1, 2023 Death in Chatou (Yvelines)