DISAPPEARANCE – Great voice of RTL, his chronicles, listened to every morning by hundreds of thousands of listeners, were feared by politicians of all stripes.
Politics was like his second skin. Very early on, he had fallen into it. As a teenager, when he was a high school student in Paris, he devoured newspapers. Nothing that happened in the Chamber, under this capricious Fourth Republic, was foreign to him then. He reveled in this theater. And, since then, his love of politics has never waned, he his wise commentator, preventer from going around in circles, incorruptible from the shock formula, half Saint-Simon half Mauriac, these two masters.
“ Politics, he said, I dedicated my life to her and she gave it back to me. » Philippe Alexandre has just passed away at the age of 90 in his holiday resort in Le Touquet. For years, starting in 1969, his RTL editorial punctuated the current affairs soap opera.
sharp arrows
To say he was tough was an understatement. His word was feared. “Humours, bad faith and excesses, isn’t this the essence of the editorialist’s function”, he had confided to the author of his lines, in 2016. The legend lent him as many defamation lawsuits as he had written books, that is to say a good twenty. In 1982, François Mitterrand went so far as to ask his head to Jacques Rigaud, the boss of RTL. Not only will the President of the Republic not get it, but he will continue to be the target of the ever sharper arrows of the editorialist. Coincidentally, the latter slammed the door of the station in rue Bayard, in 1996, after the merger of the Compagnie luxembourgeoise de télédiffusion (CLT) with the German group Bertelsmann: the very year of Mitterrand’s death.
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“Mitterrand was a convert to socialism, declared Philippe Alexandre, and converts are the worst”. It is an understatement to actually say that he was very early allergic to the charm of the person concerned. There “ uncle mania » was not the kind of house and the title of his last editorial on Mitterrand summed up his state of mind towards him: « Death of a Dom Juan “.
“He fascinated me from afarsaid the journalist, he was a political artist, but not a statesman. He had no sense of the general interest. His work is to have led the Socialists to power and to have launched the career of the FN. Abolition of the death sentence ? Anyone there‘already done. “Thus he expressed himself in Le Figaro in January 2016, at the release of Last monarchcollection of his fourteen years of chronicles on the former head of state, at Robert Laffont.
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Philippe Alexandre entered journalism through the provinces, in The liberated Oise, with the only tray in your pocket. At a time when schools specializing in media training were not yet well established. Should we see a cause and effect link? Without a doubt. Since then, the language of wood, the ready-made formulas and the elements of language invade columns and trays. Wrote to him in a jiffy, saber drawn, sure of his style and the coherence of his reasoning. Never a deletion!
Parodied by the “Guignols”
It was a “pioneer of radio scratch hair and drypoint” for Serge July. With the co-founder of Releasethey will form a sacred pair of duettists on television, whose caricature in the “ Info horns », on Canal+, will multiply the popularity. In this parody, July and Alexandre are always up for drinking a pear liqueur and eating “ peanuts »: a political debate that mimics the discussion at the counter at the bistro.
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His Politics lovers dictionary, published by Plon in 2011, gives the measure of the character’s independence. As we say today, he was never “ mainstream », espousing the dominant opinion. In this book, he confirms the thesis of the assassination of Robert Boulin, “disposed of in 15 centimeters of water”. He perceives in Valéry Giscard d’Estaing a “extravagant monarch”. He says that Raymond Barre never received him at Matignon: Philippe Alexandre had been wrong to be surprised that the Prime Minister, barely appointed, obtained a building permit at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, in the perimeter reserved for billionaires. He paints a vitriolic portrait of Pierre Mendès-France, “the nastiest man I have ever met” and who abused his wife. He throws, on the other hand, a rather sympathetic glance on Guy Mollet who would have confided to him that at the origin “De Gaulle was very hostile to the election of the President of the Republic by universal suffrage”.
Martine Aubry, meanwhile, was entitled to separate treatment. The Lady of the 35 hours, title of the book written with his wife Béatrix de l’Aulnoit, has become a nickname with phenomenal success. On its own, it could have made the fortune of its inventors if copyright had existed. The former Minister of Labor will never forgive them. “All Martine Aubry is there: a physiological inability to recognize its shortcomings, its errors, its failures”underlined Philippe Alexandre.
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Was he right or left? All camps were entitled to his murderous and memorable projections. A verve that he will put, at the end of his life, passing from one scene to another, to theatrical criticism for the magazine Read. Nor will we forget his taste for history, which inspired him to write several books with Béatrix de l’Aulnoit. The last two in particular: Clementine Churchill. The Lion Woman (Tallandier, 2015) and Thomas Cook 1808-1892. The inventor of travel (Robert Laffont, 2018). Without forgetting the one he devoted to his own history, he who was born in Paris on March 14, 1932. My tribe more than French (Robert Laffont 2017) is the fascinating journey, through the centuries and France, of his family of Jewish origin. A story that deserves to be referenced to overcome certain ignorance…