La vie continue

I don’t know how well known Bernard Pivot is in the United States. I certainly hadn’t heard of him until I moved to a French-speaking country and got together with Anne-Sophie who grew up watching Pivot present authors on French television.

Pivot, who died Monday aged 89, hosted shows on French public television devoted to books, two of which Apostrophes and Bouillon de Culture aired from 1975 until 2001. I never saw those shows live, but I saw Pivot interviewed in real time on a successor show called La Grande Librairie.

By coincidence this show aired on January 6, 2021, though Pivot and his interviewer, Francois Busnel, made no mention of the chaos happening at that time at the US capitol. (The episode was probably taped before).

But I remember feeling comforted listening to Pivot, who lived through World War II as a child, talking about his everyday life, calling friends, describing his favourite dessert, contemplating his mortality, as he promoted his book called ‘mais la vie continue’. (But Life Goes On)

Indeed even in a time of great trauma or what the French might call “boulversement” tomorrow is always another day. Life carries on.  

Which brings me to watching the tributes to him that rained down following his death. La Grande Librairie devoted a two-hour episode to his life with clips from interviews with great writers not only from France but from across the world. Studio guests praised his curiosity, his interview techniques, his passion for books and the French language and his humanity and empathy, showing how he calmly stopped a disturbed man from taking his life on live TV in the 1990s. At one point he tells the man, ‘la vie est trop preciuese’

Another French TV station showed a rebroadcast of the last episode of his show “Bouillon de Culture” which showed him talking with actors writers, public intellectuals in a dignified but still somewhat informal setting. One of the studio guests was James Lipton, who was apparently inspired by Pivot’s use of the “Proustian questionnaire” and used it in his program “Inside the Actors Studio” which he hosted for many years on the American cable station Bravo.  

What struck me watching these clips is he just seemed to enjoy himself so much. He folds his arms in a casual, non-confrontational way. He leans forwards as he asks a question. He gently guides discussion in a spirit of curiosity and inquiry.

Was he loved by the French public because he was the man everyone wanted as their French teacher, or their child’s French teacher? (The man led spelling bees for adults. I kid you not).

The last “Bouillon de Culture” aired on June 29, 2001.

Those on stage couldn’t have known it at the time but this was 2.5 months before 9/11 that not only killed thousands in New York City but led to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and perhaps to an unravelling of an international order which in the 1990s seemed to be heading toward openness and the bringing together of cultures and infamously, one could say now, the end of history.

Alas history didn’t end, the world seems increasingly violent and worryingly uncertain. We may soon have again America’s most incurious president in office. Who, whatever one thinks of him, seems of a style that is very much at odds with the values that Bernard Pivot transmitted to millions in the French-speaking world for decades.

But there is still plenty of joy in the world, even just in France where the Olympic Games begin in the summer and Notre Dame cathedral is due to open in December.

La Vie Continue.

Merci, Monsieur Pivot.

Todd