Non-conformist. If you had to sum up the long, rich and joyful 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 20th century, from having a career worthy of Balzac heroes, drawn from Lost Illusions: halfway between Lucien de Rubempré and Etienne Lousteau.
The blue and mischievous eye of journalist Philippe Tesson ended on Wednesday February 1, 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.
Born on March 1, 1928 in Wassigny (Aisne), Philippe Tesson comes from a family of the provincial bourgeoisie. 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 Le Silence de la mer, he says. Tossed between his native Thiérache and Paris, he was a fellow student at the Cateau-Cambrésis college of Pierre Mauroy, future prime minister of François Mitterrand, with whom he would 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 passing the very selective competitive examination 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 Combat columnists, 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 run after the Liberation by Pascal Pia and Albert Camus, is looking for a young editor-in-chief. His profile does the trick. “I became a journalist, that is to say a writer of the moment”, he summarizes.
“Combat”, opinion organ
The 1960s were marked by the beginnings of the Fifth 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 editions.
In 1965, he published his only real journalist’s book, De Gaulle Ier (Albin Michel). His “style” but also “the confusing spirit of the author” are thus hailed in the columns of Le Monde by Jacques Fauvet, editorial director. The combat positions taken on the occasion of May 68 will be an illustration of this. The newspaper first supported the students, before radically dissociating itself from them as soon as 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 6th arrondissement 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 Combat and took part of the editorial staff to found his own newspaper, Le Quotidien de Paris, the first issue of which came out on April 4. Combat will cease publication 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 the Daily doctor, launched in 1971 – which will be declined in Daily pharmacist, then of the mayor, he can realize his dreams and launch a newspaper which essentially deals with politics and culture. Chaotic, this adventure will continue for twenty years, until 1994. Insatiable, he also takes up Les Nouvelles littéraires in 1975, out of an immoderate taste for literature.
Ideological disagreement
Le Quotidien de Paris has had at least two lives: one, until the first suspension of publication in 1978, is that of a newspaper of information and commentary that favors style and debates of ideas. The titles are brilliant: “Giscard remains”, when Chirac leaves Matignon, in 1976, or “The night of the long pens”, when the union of the left breaks up, in 1977. From the reappearance, in 1979 , and especially when the left came to power in May 1981, Le Quotidien de Paris was transformed into a combat newspaper. In the month preceding his accession to the presidency of the Republic, François Mitterrand took the initiative to break with the founder of the Quotidien de Paris, while 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. For the writer Gabriel Matzneff, who was part of the adventure, he was “the captain of Tréville” of this team of musketeers which included personalities as different as Jean-François Kahn (at Nouvelles littéraires), Bernard Morrot, Philippe Aubert, Georges-Marc Benamou, Catherine Pgard or Eric Neuhoff. Because Le Quotidien de Paris represented another right, liberal and critical. “My newspaper is not compliant with what the compliant right expects from a compliant newspaper. For that, there is Le Figaro, “he said, in 1994, when everything stopped.
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 Les Nouvelles littéraires 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 his best, willingly accepting the role of the old grump on duty, learned but not pedantic.
He became a columnist at Le Figaro, which hosts long papers on the life of ideas, but also at L’Express, Le Figaro Magazine, Le 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 theater. For him, journalism should be used above all to ask questions. And the press dare, cultivate impertinence and disturb.
