French TV presenter Bernard Pivot, who created and abolished authorship with a weekly book chat program that attracted millions of viewers, died Monday in Neuilly-sur-Seine, outside Paris. He was 89 years old.
The death was confirmed by his daughter Cécile Pivot, who died in hospital after being diagnosed with cancer.
From 1975 to 1990, in France, on Friday evenings, to decide what to read next, Mr. I watched Pivot. The country watched him fool, flatter and flatter novelists, memoirists, politicians and actors, and the next day Mr. I went out to the bookstore to find a table labeled “Apostropes,” the name of Pivot’s show.
In the French world, where serious writers and intellectuals compete fiercely for public attention to become superstars, Mr. Pivot never competed with his guests. He achieved a kind of elevated small talk that delighted the audience without burdening the invitees.
During the program’s heyday in the 1980s, French publishers estimated that “apostrophes” accounted for a third of French book sales. Mr. Pivot’s influence was so great that in 1982 the left-wing intellectual Régis Debray, one of President François Mitterrand’s advisers, pledged to “eliminate” the power of “the one person who has virtually dictatorial power over the book market.”
But the president intervened to quell the resulting protests, reaffirming Mr. Pivot’s power.
Mr. Mitterrand is Mr. I announced that I enjoyed Pivot’s program. He appeared in person on “Apostropes” early on to promote his new memoir. Mr. Pivot greeted Mr. Mitterrand’s humble attitude with good humor. The young television host’s trademark was already evident in the 1975 episode. Serious, sharp, attentive, affable, respectful, and gently leaning forward to provoke.
He was conscious of his power without appearing to enjoy it. “Just my slightest doubt could end the life of a book,” he said in an interview with Le Monde in 2016.
French President Emmanuel Macron, Reacting to death on social mediaMr. Pivot, he wrote, was “a popular and fastidious conduit for the French heart.”
Mr. Pivot’s death was featured on the front page of the popular tabloid Le Parisien on Tuesday with the headline “The man who made us love books.”
Nonetheless, “Apostropes” had its lackluster moments, which Mr. Pivot later came to regret. In March 1990 he welcomed writer Gabriel Matzneff. He laughed and boasted of the kinds of exploits that landed him in an ongoing criminal investigation two decades later. Investigation into sexual assault of a minor. “She is a true sex education teacher.” Mr. Pivot said humorously as he introduced Mr. Matzneff. “He collects little candies.”
The other guests giggled, except Canadian author Denise Bombardier.
Visibly disgusted, she called Mr. Matshnev “pathetic” and said that in Canada “we stand for dignity and the rights of children.” “Not only are these 14- and 15-year-old girls being seduced, but they are also being subjected to what we call abuse of power in relationships between adults and minors.” She said Mr Matzneff’s victims had been “tainted”, possibly “for their whole lives”. As her discussion continued, Ms. Matzneff professed resentment at her own intervention. Mr. Bombardier added: “No civilized country is like this.”
In late 2019, the old video sparked outrage as criticism piled up against Mr. Matshnev. Mr. Pivot responded: “As the host of a literary TV show, it would have taken a great deal of clarity and strength of character for me not to be part of the freedoms that my colleagues in publishing and radio had embraced for themselves.”
His shows sometimes featured confrontations between rivals. Often it is Mr. It was Pivot and a guest. Six million people watched him, and almost everyone wanted to be on his show.
And almost everyone did, including French literary giants such as Marguerite Duras, Patrick Modiano, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Marguerite Yourcenar and Georges Simenon. In one episode, Vladimir Nabokov appeared to talk about his novel “Lolita,” allowing a teapot of whiskey to be placed at will and asking questions to be submitted in advance. He simply read the answer. On the other hand, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who had just left the Soviet Union and looked haggard, spoke through an interpreter.
Mr. Pivot told historian Pierre Nora in the magazine Le Débat in 1990 after the show that his favorite programs were those with the great men he was allowed to reside in. In particular, I quote anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss: “I left them with the spirit of a conqueror who crept into the private lives of ‘great men,’” he told Mr. Nora. “I left with the good feeling that I too had become a thief and a predator.”
Mr. Most of Pivot’s guests have since been forgotten, as he admits in his interview with Nora. “In fifteen and a half years, how many forgotten titles have been covered up by other forgotten titles! “But my idea of journalism is not necessarily about being beautiful, profound and lasting,” he said. He admitted that Mr. Solzhenitsyn “made me feel really, really small.”
The reactions he elicited were often perfectly ordinary and humanized his noble guests. Mr. Duras spoke quietly after winning the prestigious Goncourt Prize in 1984. “Literature is really fun.”
The television host was not happy with her comments. “But, how did you create this style?” He pressed. “Oh, I’m just saying whatever comes to mind.” Ms. Duras answered. “I’m in a rush to grab things.”
The program also featured numerous American writers, including William Styron, Susan Sontag, Henry Kissinger, Norman Mailer, and Mary McCarthy. Poet Charles Bukowski got drunk in 1978, drank a bottle of Sancerre, molested his fellow guests and was thrown off the platform. “Bukowski, go to hell. You’re tormenting us!” exclaimed his fellow guest, French writer François Cavanna. Later in the program, a young Paul Auster enjoyed the host’s praise for the American author’s French.
Bernard Claude Pivot was born on May 5, 1935 in Lyon, to Charles and Marie-Louise (Dumas) Pivot, who owned a grocery store. He attended schools in Quincié-en-Beaujolais and Lyon, enrolled as a law major at the University of Lyon, and graduated from the Center de Formation des Journalistes in Paris in 1957.
In 1958 he was hired by Figaro Littéraire, the literary supplement of the newspaper Le Figaro, to write the kind of light stories about the literary world that delighted the French press and launched Mr. Pivot. He hosted various television and radio programs in the early 1970s, helped found Lire, a magazine about books, and broadcast the first of 723 episodes of “Apostropes” on January 10, 1975, at 9:30 p.m. Another program organized by Mr. Pivot, “Bouillon de Culture”, ran for 10 years until 2001. In 2014, he became president of the Goncourt Academy, which awards one of France’s most prestigious literary prizes. 2019.
In 1992, Mr. Pivot refused to receive the Legion d’Honneur, France’s highest civilian honor, from the French government, saying that working journalists should not receive such awards.
“My father was very humble,” his daughter Cécile, also a journalist, said in an interview. “He wanted nothing to do with it.”
Mr. Pivot is also the author of nearly two dozen books, mostly on reading, and several dictionaries.
In addition to his daughter Cécile, Mr. Pivot is survived by his daughter Agnès Pivot, his brother Jean-Charles, his sister Anne-Marie Mathey and three grandchildren.
“Do you have any interview tips?” he asked Nora rhetorically in a 1990 interview. “No. There is a way that exists naturally for me, a way of listening, speaking and asking again, that existed before I started doing TV and will exist even when I no longer do TV.”
Aurelien Bryden He contributed reporting from Paris.
