Philippe Labro is a writer, filmmaker and journalist. Every Friday, for CNEWS, he comments on what he saw, experienced and observed during the week. A subjective and free notepad.
Wednesday 13 October
It is 9:30 am, when, under the sun of the very Indian summer, I see arriving, on the forecourt of the Saint-François-Xavier church, in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, all the women and men who want to make a last tribute to Etienne Mougeotte. We cannot count the number of those who owe their luck, their careers, their fame for some. Etienne Mougeotte, this great press boss with an exceptional career (Europe 1, Télé 7 Jours, Le Journal du Dimanche, TF1, Le Figaro, Radio Classique), was able, during his professional life, to spot talents, to guess the qualities of journalists , animators, producers and editorial writers of the media of which he was the project manager.
There was, in this enigmatic man, an ability to delegate without losing his authority, a curiosity for others, a sense of the general public, and, above all, a passion for information, “the news”, as one. said in our lingo. Experience, judgment, discipline, rigor, inventiveness and intuition, a sense of loyalty and camaraderie, it is all this, added to the memories of each and everyone, that we greeted this morning, with sadness.
Coincidence or convergence, the disappearance of this great press man came in the week which saw the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to two journalists, the Filipino Maria Ressa and the Russian Dmitri Mouratov, rewarded for their “courageous fight for freedom expression ”. This is good news, which underlines the capital importance of our profession, which is a vocation, at a time when false information, totalitarian manipulations, abuses of social networks, would tend to pervert this requirement: to investigate, to dialogue , stick to the facts after having properly verified them.
Yesterday, Tuesday 12, we learned that a figure of pure heroism was disappearing. We must, without hesitation, salute the last of the companions of the Liberation, Hubert Germain, who passed away at the age of 101. “Eteint” is the adjective which is appropriate to characterize this character of a novel – except that it was a “true novel”. Because he was the bearer of a flame, that of freedom, of the right choice, the real choice made by a daring, insolent young man who, on June 14, 1940, in the midst of the entrance exam to the grandes écoles in Bordeaux, s ‘had risen from his chair and returned a blank copy. “All that,” he had said, “is useless, I am going to war.”
He fought in Bir Hakeim, but also in Italy, Provence and the Vosges, wherever the winds of World War II carried him. On the occasion of this disappearance, I believe it necessary to recommend (I have often done so, in some of my books as well as in my press writings) the fascinating and instructive book by Benoît Hopquin: We Were Not Heroes (Calmann-Lévy ed.). The testimonies and stories of this generation of courage and honor are reproduced with talent. But is it probably also necessary to read Germain’s own Memoirs, Hope for France (ed. Les Belles Lettres). My colleague, Etienne de Montety, in Le Figaro de ce jour, drew up, in a double page, a beautiful portrait of this exemplary man.
FRIDAY OCTOBER 15
I ask you to acquire without waiting the re-edition of a book by Françoise Sagan, Derrière l’oeil (ed. Stock). We find there the spirit and lucidity, the style, the “little music” of the novelist. She has decided to revisit her own works and reviews them with irony and wisdom.
It’s delicious. She writes: “Rereading my books has sometimes pulled me by the feet in the swamps of humiliation, sometimes thrown on the clouds of complacency.” Sagan is as “marvelous” as the “clouds” of one of her finest titles.