Bernard Pivot, a French tv host who made and unmade writers with a weekly accumulation chat program that drew thousands and thousands of audience, died on Monday in Neuilly-sur-Seine, out of doors Paris. He was once 89.
His loss of life, in a sanatorium upcoming being recognized with most cancers, was once showed through his daughter Cécile Pivot.
From 1975 to 1990, France watched Mr. Pivot on Friday evenings to come to a decision what to learn upcoming. The rustic watched him cajole, needle and flatter novelists, memoirists, politicians and actors, and the upcoming future went out to bookstores for tables marked “Apostrophes,” the title of Mr. Pivot’s display.
In a French universe the place critical writers and intellectuals jostle ferociously for the community’s consideration to develop into superstars, Mr. Pivot by no means competed along with his visitors. He completed a type of increased chitchat that flattered his target market with out taxing his invitees.
Throughout this system’s heyday within the Eighties, French publishers estimated that “Apostrophes” drove a 3rd of the rustic’s accumulation gross sales. So admirable was once Mr. Pivot’s affect that, in 1982, one among President François Mitterrand’s advisers, the leftist highbrow Régis Debray, vowed to get “rid” of the ability of “a single person who has real dictatorial power over the book market.”
However the president stepped in to stanch the ensuing outcry, reaffirming Mr. Pivot’s energy.
Mr. Mitterrand introduced that he loved Mr. Pivot’s program; he had himself gave the impression on “Apostrophes” in its early days to push his untouched accumulation of memoirs. Mr. Pivot met Mr. Mitterrand’s condescension with excellent humor. The younger tv presenter’s emblems had been already perceptible in that 1975 episode: earnest, prepared, attentive, affable, respectful and leaning ahead to softly impress.
He was once mindful of his energy with out showing to enjoy it. “The slightest doubt on my part can put an end to the life of a book,” he instructed Le Monde in 2016.
President Emmanuel Macron of France, reacting to the loss of life on social media, wrote that Mr. Pivot were “a transmitter, popular and demanding, dear to the heart of the French.”
Mr. Pivot’s loss of life made up the entrance web page of the common tabloid newspaper Le Parisien on Tuesday, with the headline, “The Man Who Made Us Love Books.”
Nonetheless, “Apostrophes” had its low moments, which Mr. Pivot got here to remorseful about in upcoming years: In March 1990, he welcomed the scribbler Gabriel Matzneff who, grinning, boasted of the type of exploits that twenty years upcoming put him below ongoing felony investigations for the rape of minors. “He’s a real sexual education teacher,” Mr. Pivot had stated with excellent humor generation introducing Mr. Matzneff. “He collects little sweeties.”
The alternative visitors chuckled, with one exception: the Canadian scribbler Denise Bombardier.
Visibly disgusted, she known as Mr. Matzneff “pitiful,” and stated that during Canada, “we defend the right to dignity, and the rights of children,” including that “these little girls of 14 or 15 were not only seduced, they were subjected to what is called, in the relations between adults and minors, an abuse of power.” She stated Mr. Matzneff’s sufferers were “sullied,” most likely “for the rest of their lives.” Because the dialogue endured — Mr. Matzneff professed to be enraged at her intervention — Ms. Bombardier added: “No civilized country is like this.”
On the finish of 2019, with the accusations in opposition to Mr. Matzneff amassing, the impaired video drew outrage. Mr. Pivot replied: “As the host of a literary television show, I would have needed a great deal of lucidity and force of character to not be part of a liberty which my colleagues in the written press and in radio accommodated themselves to.”
On his display, there have been now and again confrontations between opponents; continuously it was once simply Mr. Pivot and a visitor. Six million population watched him, and just about everyone sought after to be on his display.
And just about everyone was once, together with French literary giants like Marguerite Duras, Patrick Modiano, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Marguerite Yourcenar and Georges Simenon. On one episode, Vladimir Nabokov, featured to discuss his copy “Lolita,” demanded {that a} teapot stuffed with whiskey be positioned at his disposal and that the questions be submitted in travel; he merely learn the solutions. On every other, a haggard-looking Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, no longer lengthy out of the Soviet Union, spoke thru an interpreter.
Mr. Pivot instructed the historian Pierre Nora in 1990 within the album Le Débat upcoming the display had ended that his favourite systems were with the greats whose apartments he were authorized to go into — mentioning the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, amongst others. “I left them with the spirit of a conqueror who had slipped into the private life of a ‘great man,’” he instructed Mr. Nora. “I left also with the delicious feeling of being a thief and a predator.”
Maximum of Mr. Pivot’s visitors have since been forgotten, as he stated within the interview with Mr. Nora. “In 15 and a half years, how many forgotten titles, covered over by other forgotten titles! But journalism, as I conceive it, isn’t necessarily only about what is beautiful, profound and lasting,” he stated. Mr. Solzhenitsyn, he conceded, “made me feel really, really tiny.”
The responses he elicited had been continuously completely usual, humanizing his exalted visitors. “Literature is just a funny thing,” Ms. Duras stated quietly, upcoming successful the distinguished Goncourt Prize in 1984.
The tv host wasn’t glad together with her commentary. “But, but, how is it that you create this style?” he pressed. “Oh, I just say things as they come to me,” Ms. Duras responded. “I’m in a hurry to catch things.”
A number of American writers gave the impression at the program, too: William Styron, Susan Sontag, Henry Kissinger, Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy and others. The poet Charles Bukowski was once on in 1978, drunken and downing bottles of Sancerre, molesting a fellow visitor and getting kicked off the platform. “Bukowski, go to hell, you’re bugging us!” the French scribbler François Cavanna, a fellow visitor, yelled. On a upcoming program, a younger Paul Auster basked in his host’s honour of the American scribbler’s French.
Bernard Claude Pivot was once born on Would possibly 5, 1935, in Lyon, to Charles and Marie-Louise (Dumas) Pivot, who had a grocery bundle within the town. He attended colleges in Quincié-en-Beaujolais and Lyon, enrolled on the College of Lyon as a legislation scholar and graduated from the Centre de Formation des Journalistes in Paris in 1957.
In 1958, he was once leased through Figaro Littéraire, the literary complement to the newspaper Le Figaro, to jot down such a tidbits in regards to the literary international that the French press overjoyed in, and Mr. Pivot was once introduced. He had diverse tv and radio systems within the early Seventies, helped inauguration Lire, a album about books, and on Jan. 10, 1975, at 9:30 p.m., aired his first of 723 episodes of “Apostrophes.” Every other program Mr. Pivot hosted, “Bouillon de Culture,” had a 10-year run, finishing in 2001. In 2014, he turned into president of the Goncourt Academy, which awards one among France’s maximum prestigious literary prizes, a place he saved till 2019.
In 1992, Mr. Pivot refused the Legion d’Honneur, France’s best civilian honor, from the French executive, pronouncing that operating reporters will have to no longer settle for such an award.
“My father was very modest,” his daughter Cécile, additionally a journalist, stated in an interview. “He didn’t want to have anything to do with that.”
Mr. Pivot was once additionally the creator of just about two accumulation works, basically about studying, and several other dictionaries.
Along with his daughter Cécile, Mr. Pivot is survived through every other daughter, Agnès Pivot, a brother, Jean-Charles, a sister, Anne-Marie Mathey, and 3 grandchildren.
“Do I have an interview technique?” he requested Mr. Nora, rhetorically, within the 1990 interview. “No. I have a way of being, of listening, of speaking, of asking again, that comes naturally to me, that existed before I started doing TV, and that will exist when I no longer do it.”
Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris.
