The professional magazine Livres Hebdo announced on Tuesday April 25 that Jérôme Garcin would leave “Le Masque et la Plume” in December, France Inter’s flagship cultural program, which he had headed for thirty-four years. The writer and journalist, among the most discreet and modest personalities of the PAF, agreed to confide in Caroline Broué’s microphone in “A Voix Nue”. And it is very beautiful. In five episodes, each bearing the title of one of his books, he looks back on his life and work.
In the beginning was Le Syndrome de Garcin – where it is about Raymond, the paternal grandfather, neurologist who gave his name to this paralysis of the cranial nerves. “I loved him incredibly, but little knew him. He only lived to heal,” recalls Jérôme, who for a long time dreamed of practicing “humanistic and benevolent” medicine. But on the sudden death of his father, following a fall from a horse, the teenager decided to enter the hypokhâgne to “do like him” – Philippe Garcin was an eminent publisher and critic. “I was incredibly lucky: I was born in a cradle of papers,” he says.
But if writing about Stendhal was encouraged, “telling yourself was showing off: writing about your own people was unthinkable in the Garcin family”. However, to write on his too early disappearances, on his Fragiles (title of the second episode and his new work), Jérôme Garcin will do it. Years after the publication of La Chute de cheval (Gallimard, 1998), he allowed himself to write Olivier (Gallimard, 2011), or the story of his twin brother hit, the day before they turned 6 and before his eyes ( first shock), by a driver who did not stop, “a second shock which perhaps founded my life spiritually. I see this car fleeing and it’s a [and Jérôme Garcin’s emotion is then audible] scandal that I have never accepted. I think my idea of ??justice grew out of that moment.”
Hence, too, it will work for two. Entered, at the age of 19, at the Nouvelles littéraires, Jérôme Garcin became a journalist: “I passionately loved this job”, he says. A man of letters above all, he was for thirty-four years the producer of “Masque et la Plume”. The oldest public service program was created by the poet Jean Tardieu “who had the brilliant idea [and slipping in passing: “The channels should entrust more programs to poets”] to imagine a program of criticism (theater and literature at the time) in public. A show of critics, however talented, is off-putting, but the idea of ??making a show out of it and you’ll turn the “Leçon du Collège de France” into a play! »
“A small village of Asterix”
The other reason for the success of the “Masque” is, according to Jérôme Garcin, “that we hear in it a sound of truth that we hear nowhere else. Criticism today not only has less and less space, but is moving more and more toward lukewarm water, the soft consensus: we love everything. In a cultural world plagued by partnerships, there is still, on Sunday evening, a small village of Asterix where the critical spirit remains. And I think that if 15-25 year olds come to the show, that’s why – even if it means totally disagreeing with what is being said. »
Jérôme Garcin can be delighted that “Le Masque et la Plume” brings together some 600,000 listeners every Sunday and, if the choice of his or her successor has not yet been decided, the profile of a forty-year-old would be favored by Jérôme Garcin and the current director of France Inter, Adèle Van Reeth.
From then on, Jérôme Garcin could devote himself to his loved ones – his wife, actress Anne-Marie Philipe, his children and grandchildren (episode 4), his friends (including the faithful Bartabas), his books and his horses, on which he is inexhaustible: “The horse is an incredible confidant on which my books are formed, and the saddle became the couch on which I had never laid down. And then, I have the feeling that the horse embodies an immanent justice: it only accepts orders if given justly. The horse gives you back what you give it. »
Before he left the reins of the “Masque” and the cultural pages of L’Obs, it was time to give back to Jérôme Garcin, on the occasion of these five very beautiful programs, all that he gave to listeners. , and in particular the taste for literature and the theatre.
