Bernard Pivot, a French tv host who made and unmade writers with a weekly guide chat program that drew thousands and thousands of viewers, died on Monday in Neuilly-sur-Seine, exterior Paris. He was 89.
His demise, in a hospital after being recognized with most cancers, was confirmed by his daughter Cécile Pivot.
From 1975 to 1990, France watched Mr. Pivot on Friday evenings to resolve what to learn subsequent. The nation watched him cajole, needle and flatter novelists, memoirists, politicians and actors, and the following day went out to bookstores for tables marked “Apostrophes,” the title of Mr. Pivot’s present.
In a French universe the place critical writers and intellectuals jostle ferociously for the general public’s consideration to change into superstars, Mr. Pivot by no means competed along with his visitors. He achieved a form of elevated chitchat that flattered his viewers with out taxing his invitees.
Throughout this system’s heyday within the Eighties, French publishers estimated that “Apostrophes” drove a 3rd of the nation’s guide gross sales. So nice was Mr. Pivot’s affect that, in 1982, considered one of President François Mitterrand’s advisers, the leftist mental Régis Debray, vowed to get “rid” of the ability of “a single one who has actual dictatorial energy over the guide 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 appeared on “Apostrophes” in its early days to push his new guide of memoirs. Mr. Pivot met Mr. Mitterrand’s condescension with good humor. The younger tv presenter’s emblems have been already evident in that 1975 episode: earnest, eager, attentive, affable, respectful and leaning ahead to softly provoke.
He was aware of his energy with out showing to experience it. “The slightest doubt on my half can put an finish to the lifetime of a guide,” he instructed Le Monde in 2016.
President Emmanuel Macron of France, reacting to the death on social media, wrote that Mr. Pivot had been “a transmitter, common and demanding, expensive to the guts of the French.”
Mr. Pivot’s demise made up the entrance web page of the favored 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 remorse in later years: In March 1990, he welcomed the author Gabriel Matzneff who, grinning, boasted of the form of exploits that 20 years later put him underneath ongoing legal investigations for the rape of minors. “He’s an actual sexual schooling trainer,” Mr. Pivot had mentioned with good humor whereas introducing Mr. Matzneff. “He collects little sweeties.”
The opposite visitors chuckled, with one exception: the Canadian author Denise Bombardier.
Visibly disgusted, she known as Mr. Matzneff “pitiful,” and mentioned that in Canada, “we defend the appropriate to dignity, and the rights of youngsters,” including that “these little ladies of 14 or 15 weren’t solely seduced, they have been subjected to what’s known as, within the relations between adults and minors, an abuse of energy.” She mentioned Mr. Matzneff’s victims had been “sullied,” in all probability “for the remainder of their lives.” Because the dialogue continued — Mr. Matzneff professed to be indignant at her intervention — Ms. Bombardier added: “No civilized nation is like this.”
On the finish of 2019, with the accusations towards Mr. Matzneff accumulating, the previous video drew outrage. Mr. Pivot responded: “Because the host of a literary tv present, I’d have wanted an excessive amount of lucidity and power of character to not be a part of a liberty which my colleagues within the written press and in radio accommodated themselves to.”
On his present, there have been typically confrontations between rivals; usually it was simply Mr. Pivot and a visitor. Six million individuals watched him, and almost everyone wished to be on his present.
And almost everyone was, 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 speak about his novel “Lolita,” demanded {that a} teapot full of whiskey be positioned at his disposal and that the questions be submitted upfront; he merely learn the solutions. On one other, a haggard-looking Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, not lengthy out of the Soviet Union, spoke by an interpreter.
Mr. Pivot instructed the historian Pierre Nora in 1990 within the journal Le Débat after the present had ended that his favourite packages had been with the greats whose residences he had been permitted to enter — citing the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, amongst others. “I left them with the spirit of a conqueror who had slipped into the non-public lifetime of a ‘nice man,’” he instructed Mr. Nora. “I left additionally with the scrumptious feeling of being a thief and a predator.”
Most of Mr. Pivot’s visitors have since been forgotten, as he acknowledged within the interview with Mr. Nora. “In 15 and a half years, what number of forgotten titles, coated over by different forgotten titles! However journalism, as I conceive it, isn’t essentially solely about what is gorgeous, profound and lasting,” he mentioned. Mr. Solzhenitsyn, he conceded, “made me really feel actually, actually tiny.”
The responses he elicited have been usually completely unusual, humanizing his exalted visitors. “Literature is only a humorous factor,” Ms. Duras mentioned quietly, after profitable the distinguished Goncourt Prize in 1984.
The tv host wasn’t glad together with her comment. “However, however, how is it that you just create this model?” he pressed. “Oh, I simply say issues as they arrive to me,” Ms. Duras answered. “I’m in a rush to catch issues.”
A bunch of American writers appeared on this system, too: William Styron, Susan Sontag, Henry Kissinger, Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy and others. The poet Charles Bukowski was 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 author François Cavanna, a fellow visitor, yelled. On a later program, a youthful Paul Auster basked in his host’s reward of the American author’s French.
Bernard Claude Pivot was born on Might 5, 1935, in Lyon, to Charles and Marie-Louise (Dumas) Pivot, who had a grocery retailer within the metropolis. 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 employed by Figaro Littéraire, the literary complement to the newspaper Le Figaro, to write down the form of tidbits concerning the literary world that the French press delighted in, and Mr. Pivot was launched. He had numerous tv and radio packages within the early Seventies, helped launch Lire, {a magazine} about books, and on Jan. 10, 1975, at 9:30 p.m., aired his first of 723 episodes of “Apostrophes.” One other program Mr. Pivot hosted, “Bouillon de Tradition,” had a 10-year run, ending in 2001. In 2014, he turned president of the Goncourt Academy, which awards considered one of France’s most prestigious literary prizes, a place he stored till 2019.
In 1992, Mr. Pivot refused the Legion d’Honneur, France’s highest civilian honor, from the French authorities, saying that working journalists shouldn’t settle for such an award.
“My father was very modest,” his daughter Cécile, additionally a journalist, mentioned in an interview. “He didn’t wish to have something to do with that.”
Mr. Pivot was additionally the writer of almost two dozen works, principally about studying, and several other dictionaries.
Along with his daughter Cécile, Mr. Pivot is survived by one other daughter, Agnès Pivot, a brother, Jean-Charles, a sister, Anne-Marie Mathey, and three grandchildren.
“Do I’ve an interview approach?” he requested Mr. Nora, rhetorically, within the 1990 interview. “No. I’ve a method of being, of listening, of talking, of asking once more, that comes naturally to me, that existed earlier than I began doing TV, and that may exist once I now not do it.”
Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris.
