Philippe Tesson: If I had to sum up the character, the words that would prevail would be elegance, charm, fidelity.
Loyalty to others as well as to oneself.
“Journalism”, of course, too, because he embodied more and better than anyone else this profession which was for him a self-realization as much as a function.
He could have first represented, in the eyes of many, what will have been the passion of his life, the theatre, of which he was one of the most relevant and sharpened critics, of which he remained a possible but returned actor – and what actor ! –, which he served in a thousand ways until the end, whatever the cost.
He could also, I am convinced, embody literature, the one he loved, à la Paul Morand, whose apparent haughty and suave gratuitousness would have been only the dissimulation of a commitment. Of a commitment that translated in any case by the almost internalized sound system of a writing that unfolded in him. What book he could have, he should have written, of which his own existence, which was a game, would have been more than the theme, the stake.
But no ! What it embodied, even after moving away from its shores, was journalism. Newspaper boss? The term would have horrified him. He was the opposite of what we are accustomed to designate as a press boss, a character who would sometimes be incapable of carrying out an investigation, of writing a report, but who, indeed, sometimes talentedly, directs newspapers. He was not enthroned above his journal, of which he was the demiurge, he was in it, invested in it, almost dissolved in it. Unrivaled for writing a title, a catchphrase, an inter, spotting the slightest fault in style, suggesting an angle, hatching an idea, opening a track, recruiting talent.
In recent years, he gave himself entirely, with what energy, what reactivity, to the animation of a small theater. Likewise, his journalistic ideal was the small newspaper. That its very smallness made free.
Officiating for a time at his side, in the first Quotidien de Paris, I kept encouraging him to develop this jewel that he had known how to design by equipping himself with a sales department, by regulating the setting up, by considering minimal promotion. All this seemed to him detrimental to the purity of his UFO. When the circulation increased, it worried him.
Le Quotidien de Paris – at the time, the right was in power – appeared to be a rather left-wing daily. In fact, all sensibilities cohabited there. Even the most right-handed. But Philippe Tesson favored, in fact, especially in the form of free forums, the most dissenting expressions. On several occasions, I made fun of his tendency to greedily and almost systematically accept the expression of the most incandescent anarcho gaucho opinions. In fact, there was one aspect of his positioning that I had misjudged.
Philippe Tesson believed that the right, it was in the order of things, an indisputable necessity, a quasi-moral obligation, should be in power. But that, from then on, the function of an independent and free press was to counterbalance it by opening itself up to all allergic reactions, including and above all the most radical ones.
Right-wing anarchism? Rather anarchizing liberalism. Somewhat libertarian conservatism.
Because, yes, Tesson was the most intrinsically liberal personality I have known.
In 1981, the left came to power. So he felt that a kind of contract was broken; that it was no longer the game; that the normal order of things had been unduly, scandalously and dangerously reversed. That his duty was to oppose, in his own way, clear-cut, radical (because he liked radicalism) this aberration.
So, after Le Quotidien de Paris first manner which appeared as a brilliant and sometimes even excessive left-wing newspaper, he concocted a second Quotidien de Paris which imposed itself as a brilliant, and sometimes also excessive, right-wing newspaper. So much so that most of the most talented and talented journalists of the 1990s were trained by the Quotidien de Paris first or second way.
Had he ceased to be liberal? No way !
At the end of 1979, he entrusted me with the management of Nouvelles Littéraires, which he had just taken over. His change of foot, the perfect consistency of which did not appear to me immediately, put me somewhat at odds. I was led to express, on a few occasions, opinions critical of the place, not globally of its new orientation, but of its excesses. In the middle of winter, we even titled, in the form of a mockery intended for him “The cold kills, Mitterrand accomplice!” “.
He took no offense. Not the slightest pained remark. It was I who, at a certain moment, finding it impossible that I would eventually get into his cabbage when Les Nouvelles Littéraires – although they have gone, thanks to him, from a circulation of 2,000 to 70,000 copies, what he found excessive – were still in deficit, it was he who paid the difference, presented my resignation to him. But he, a unique, admirable case, didn’t bother him at all. That he would possibly be criticized for the contribution of his money rather excited him.
We remained, moreover, unfailing friends.
Eternal young man, eternal acrobat, always balanced on the tightrope that crossed his mind, mental social dancer, capable of accepting three lunches the same day, at the same time, Philippe Tesson, in addition to his invaluable contribution to the theater – and his passion for music – discovered, when print journalism became marginal, an almost innate talent as a radio commentator. His interventions, before being demonstrative and argued, were like music, precisely, of which each word, like notes, led to the deployment of an enveloping melody that took you in the folds of its seductive volutes.
Even if we didn’t always understand everything, we never got tired of finding the man, the exceptional man, in his way of singing his undulating but solid certainties.
I miss him already.
