Bernard Pivot, a French television host who made and broke writers with a weekly book talk show that attracted millions of viewers, died Monday in Neuilly-sur-Seine, outside Paris. He was 89 years old.
His death, in a hospital after being diagnosed with cancer, was confirmed by his daughter Cécile Pivot.
From 1975 to 1990, France watched Pivot on Friday nights to decide what to read next. The country watched him cajole, prod, and cajole novelists, memoirists, politicians, and actors, and the next day he hit the bookstores in search of tables marked “Apostrophes,” the name of Pivot’s program.
In a French universe where serious writers and intellectuals fight fiercely for the public’s attention to become superstars, Pivot never competed with his guests. He achieved a kind of elevated talk that flattered his audience without taxing his guests.
During the show’s heyday in the 1980s, French publishers estimated that “Apostrophes” drove a third of the country’s book sales. Pivot’s influence was so great that, in 1982, one of President François Mitterrand’s advisors, the left-wing intellectual Régis Debray, promised to “get rid” of the power of “a single person who has real dictatorial power over the book market.” ”.
But the president intervened to quell the resulting protest, reasserting Pivot’s power.
Mr. Mitterrand announced that he liked Mr. Pivot’s program; he himself had appeared in “Apostrophes” in its early days to boost his new memoir. Mr. Pivot received Mr. Mitterrand’s condescension with good humor. The hallmarks of the young television presenter were already evident in that 1975 episode: serious, enthusiastic, attentive, affable, respectful and with a tendency to gently provoke.
He was aware of his power without seeming to revel in it. “The slightest doubt on my part can end the life of a book,” she told Le Monde in 2016.
President Emmanuel Macron of France, Reacting to death on social media.he wrote that Pivot had been “a transmitter, popular and demanding, loved by the French.”
Pivot’s death made the front page of the popular tabloid Le Parisien on Tuesday, with the headline: “The man who made us love books.”
Still, “Apostrophes” had its low moments, which Pivot came to regret years later: in March 1990, he welcomed the writer Gabriel Matzneff who, smiling, boasted of the type of feats that 20 years later subjected him to to constant criminal persecution. investigations for rape of minors. “He is a real sex education teacher,” Mr. Pivot had said with good humor when introducing Mr. Matzneff. “He collects little sweets.”
The other guests chuckled, with one exception: Canadian writer Denise Bombardier.
Visibly upset, she called Mr. Matzneff a “shame” and said that in Canada “we defend the right to dignity and the rights of children,” adding that “these 14 or 15-year-old girls were not only seduced, but they were subjected to what is called, in relationships between adults and minors, an abuse of power.” She said Matzneff’s victims had been “tainted,” probably “for the rest of their lives.” As the discussion continued (Matzneff expressed outrage at his intervention), Bombardier added: “No civilized country is like this one.”
In late 2019, as accusations against Matzneff piled up, the old video sparked outrage. Mr. Pivot responded: “As the host of a literary television program, it would have taken a lot of lucidity and strength of character not to be part of a freedom to which my colleagues in the print and radio press accommodated.”
In his program, there were sometimes confrontations between rivals; often it was just Mr. Pivot and a guest. Six million people watched it and almost all of them wanted to be on his show.
And almost everyone was, including giants of French literature such as Marguerite Duras, Patrick Modiano, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Marguerite Yourcenar and Georges Simenon. In one episode, Vladimir Nabokov, introduced to talk about his novel “Lolita,” demanded that a teapot full of whiskey be placed at his disposal and that questions be presented in advance; he simply read the answers. In another, a haggard-looking Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who had not long left the Soviet Union, spoke through an interpreter.
Pivot told historian Pierre Nora in 1990 in Le Débat magazine, after the show ended, that his favorite shows had been with the greats whose residences he had been allowed to enter, citing anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, among others. . “I left you with the spirit of a conqueror who had slipped into the private life of a ‘great man,’” he told Mr. Nora. “I also left with the delicious feeling of being a thief and a predator.”
Since then, most of Pivot’s guests have been forgotten, as he acknowledged in the interview with Nora. “In 15 and a half years, how many forgotten titles, covered by other forgotten titles! But journalism, as I conceive it, is not necessarily just about the beautiful, the profound and the lasting,” he stated. Mr. Solzhenitsyn, he admitted, “made me feel very, very small.”
The answers he got were often perfectly ordinary and humanized his excited guests. “Literature is just a fun thing,” Duras said quietly, after winning the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1984.
The television presenter was not satisfied with her comment. “But, but, how do you create this style?” she pressed her. “Oh, I just say things as they occur to me,” Ms. Duras responded. “I’m in a hurry to catch things.”
A host of American writers also appeared on the show: William Styron, Susan Sontag, Henry Kissinger, Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy and others. The poet Charles Bukowski appeared in 1978, drunk and drinking bottles of Sancerre, sexually abusing a fellow guest and being kicked off the stage. “Bukowski, go to hell, you’re bothering us!” shouted French writer François Cavanna, another guest. On a later show, a young Paul Auster reveled in the host’s praise of the American writer’s French.
Bernard Claude Pivot was born on May 5, 1935 in Lyon, the son of Charles and Marie-Louise (Dumas) Pivot, who ran a grocery store in the city. He attended schools in Quincié-en-Beaujolais and Lyon, enrolled at the University of Lyon as a law student 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 tidbits about the literary world that delighted the French press, and Pivot was launched. He had several radio and television shows in the early 1970s, helped launch Lire, a magazine about books, and on January 10, 1975, at 9:30 p.m., broadcast the first of 723 episodes of “Apostrophes.” . Another program Pivot presented, “Bouillon de Culture,” ran for 10 years and ended in 2001. In 2014, he became president of the Goncourt Academy, which awards one of France’s most prestigious literary prizes, a position he held. until 2019.
In 1992, Pivot rejected the Legion of Honor, France’s highest civilian honor, awarded by the French government, saying that working journalists should not accept such an award.
“My father was very modest,” his daughter Cécile, also a journalist, said in an interview. “He didn’t want anything to do with it.”
Pivot was also the author of nearly two dozen works, primarily on reading, and several dictionaries.
In addition to his daughter Cécile, Mr. Pivot is survived by another daughter, Agnès Pivot, a brother, Jean-Charles, a sister, Anne-Marie Mathey, and three grandchildren.
“Do I have an interview technique?” he asked Mr. Nora, rhetorically, in 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 television, and that will exist when I no longer do it.”
Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris.