She had become a star in France after publicly opposing Gabriel Matzneff on television in 1990. Quebec journalist and novelist Denise Bombardier died Tuesday at the age of 82. This intellectual, committed feminist, was one of the first women to have managed to impose herself in the Quebec media and was known for her outspokenness.
The host “died peacefully” in Montreal “following a dazzling cancer, surrounded by people who loved her,” said her family, in a press release, evoking “her extraordinary strength, her spirit and her great humour, which she will have had until the last hour”.
Denise Bombardier was notably the headliner of Radio Canada in the 1970s and 1980s for political and cultural programs, interviewing many celebrities. She also had strong ties with France, where she had completed her studies, and had made an impression one evening in March 1990, during the Bernard Pivot show Apostrophes.
Matzneff reframing
In front of two to three million viewers, the Quebecer was opposed, alone, to Gabriel Matzneff, whose writings praised sexual relations with children and adolescents, believing that literature could “not be used as an alibi” . She had shouted her anger at him, worrying about the writer’s minor conquests and judging that he would have had “accounts to render to justice” if he did not have “a literary aura”.
A video archive of this exchange went viral when Vanessa Springora published a story in 2020 (The consent) on his traumatic relationship, at 14, with this man thirty-six years his senior. A book that caused the scandal to burst and prompted the Paris prosecutor’s office to immediately open an investigation for the rape of minors under the age of 15.