The collector Pierre-Jean Chalencon, in the Palais de Vivienne in Paris on December 15, 2020. – TELBA / LMS / SIPA
It is often said that there is no bad publicity, just publicity. Suffice to say that Pierre-Jean Chalençon could not have dreamed of a better pub! For a year, the “collector”, who has become a media personality, has continued to multiply the controversy, from a dubious tweet on the “death” of Line Renaud to his “forced” departure from the France 2 program. Deal concluded, until its recent implication in the affair of the prohibited dinners which defied the chronicle since this weekend. Did he organize a private pay party without masks in the midst of the pandemic, or even dine in illegal restaurants with ministers as suggested by a report from M6? The concerned pleads, by his lawyer, “humor” and “the sense of the absurd”. But who is this Pierre-Jean Chalençon exactly?
Collector of Napoleon and controversies
Born June 7, 1970 in Rueil-Malmaison, he had several lives in one. He is thus known as a confidant of Charles Trenet and author of a biography published in 2015, but also as a collector, and more precisely a collector of objects on Napoleon I. A passion that he has had from an early age and which has enabled him to acquire one of the largest collections in the world on Napoleon, of several thousand pieces.
It was through this door that Pierre-Jean Chalençon took his first steps on television, first in Your objects have a story then in Deal concluded, both on France 2 and still as an expert. But after three years of auction, the collector left the show in June 2020 following a controversy on social networks. In fact a photo where he posed all smiles alongside Dieudonné at the birthday of Jean-Marie Le Pen. Malay bingo?
Deprived of “TPMP” and “DALS”
This departure was the culmination of several more or less controlled skids, after a questionable tweet on Bilal Hassani and the fourteenth place of France at Eurovision, another on Line Renaud invited to “join” Johnny Hallyday. It was no surprise to anyone when Cyril Hanouna offered him to join the team of TPMP at the start of the 2019 school year, a proposal that will never materialize. “We did some tests, but it didn’t stick”,
according to the host of C8. He was also failed from Dance with the stars, “Not serious for me, more serious for them”, he had commented.
Sense of the absurd or endangering others?
What viewers know less is that Pierre-Jean Chalençon is the owner of a former private mansion in Paris, the famous Palais Vivienne, at the heart of the M6 report and where a private party without masks takes place.
The organizer, not to say the “collector”, affirms in disguised voice-over: “I had dinner this week in two or three restaurants which are supposedly underground restaurants, with a certain number of ministers”. In a press release sent this Sunday by his lawyer, Pierre-Jean Chalençon implicitly acknowledged being this source, but therefore pleaded “humor”. To see if the Paris prosecutor finds it funny: he opened a criminal investigation “of the counts of endangering others and of covert work”, in order to “verify whether parties were organized in disregard of health and safety rules. determine who were the possible organizers and participants ”.