France: journalist and writer Philippe Tesson is dead
The journalist and writer Philippe Tesson on November 16, 2011, in Paris.
AFP - MEHDI FEDOUACH
Text by: RFI Follow
2 mins
Journalist and polemicist Philippe Tesson died on Wednesday February 1 at the age of 94.
He was the father of the writer Sylvain Tesson.
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Journalist, writer, founder of newspapers, and even a theater man.
Philippe Tesson died at his home in Chatou, in the Yvelines, on Wednesday February 1.
He had been the editor of the legendary newspaper
Combat
from 1960 to 1974, before founding his own newspaper,
Quotidien de Paris
, which he directed for 20 years, from 1974 to 1994.
Discoverer of many journalists
With this liberal daily, support of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing before opposing the Socialists and François Mitterrand, he had set foot in the stirrup for many personalities: Éric Zemmour, Jean-Marc Sylvestre, Catherine Pégard, Claire Chazal... He had left the newspaper in 1994, two years before it ceased publication for financial reasons.
In the 90s, a wider audience had discovered his verve and his blue eyes on TV sets, where he intervened as a polemicist and willingly took the posture of the assumed reaction.
“
Today, I am resolutely on the right.
At 90, we are no longer on the left.
Even Mélenchon will change
”, laughed this passionate about politics.
He was the friend of Pierre Mauroy, who had been his classmate at the college of Cateau-Cambrésis, and declared support of Emmanuel Macron in 2017.
Passionate about theater
His other passion was the theatre.
He had notably written as a theatrical critic in
Le Canard enchaîné
or
Le Figaro
and in 2011 bought the Théâtre de Poche-Montparnasse, which he directed with his daughter, Stéphanie Tesson.
Father of two other children,
the writer Sylvain Tesson
and the journalist Daphné Tesson, Philippe Tesson was born into a bourgeois family in Wassigny, in the Aisne, on March 1, 1928. With his doctor wife, Marie-Claude Millet (1942- 2014), he had also founded
Le Quotidien du Médecin
and Le
Quotidien du Pharmacist
.
He continued to chair the jury for the Interallié prize until the end, which he had joined in 1993.
(
With
AFP)
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