Héloïse Goy with Alexis Patri 10:51 a.m., January 21, 2022

In the next issue of its program "Rembob'Ina" broadcast on LCP, the program presented by Patrick Cohen rebroadcasts a report signed by Jean-Pierre Elkabbach and produced in 1973. It had never been rebroadcast since. It was during the filming of the report that the journalist met the writer Nicole Avril, who would become his wife.

If you were in front of your television in February 1973, you may have seen in the magazine Actuel 2, on the 2nd channel of the ORTF, a report by Jean-Pierre Elkabbach on the utopian city of Auroville.

You may also not remember it.

LCP therefore refreshes your memory, by rebroadcasting it as part of its 

program Rembob'Ina

, presented by Patrick Cohen.

Auroville is a city born in India in 1968 which had the ambition to create a harmonious society without money, without law, therefore without inequalities.

At the time when he decided to leave for this report, Jean-Pierre Elkabbach was 36 years old.

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The journalist explains today what motivated him at the time to discover this new city of Auroville with Nicole Avril, this writer who will become his wife.

"I do not have the merit of the discovery of Auroville: it is up to the writer Nicole Avril", he recalls.

"Our first meeting was this first trip together. She had known the French architect who believed in Auroville with a passion that was almost mystical. Nicole Avril had convinced us that we had to take an interest in this city which presented itself as a of harmony, of freedom, of the reconciliation of beings." 

Auroville, a subject that is still relevant today

On site, Jean-Pierre Elkabbach observes for three weeks the functioning of this fascinating and mysterious city which, at that time, had barely emerged from the ground. He tells Europe 1 what struck him the most during the filming of this report. "What struck us there was that it was the start of something, the passion, you saw young people from Palestine from Israel working together," he recalls. 'People came from all over Europe with the conviction that they were going to go beyond the mundane and ordinary life and that they had found meaning in their lives. That's what remains and what I rediscovered with emotion when I saw this documentary again.

This replay 50 years later is all the more interesting as today, Auroville still exists.

And the utopian city has changed a lot: it now covers 2,000 hectares and hundreds of thousands of trees have grown there.

It is still governed by its own laws and has more than 3,000 inhabitants from all over the world.

This fascinating report on the beginnings of Auroville is to be seen again on Sunday at 9 p.m. on La Chaîne Parlementaire.