2023-07-08 09:00:00
The writer-academician and former minister of General de Gaulle had agreed in the early 80s to answer questions from Thierry Ardisson. Madelen invites you to discover or rediscover this rare interview.
Published exactly 50 years ago, When China wakes up…the world will shake then sold more than two million copies. It has been translated into 15 languages and remains today the reference for a key period in our history.
It all started in 1971, as part of a parliamentary mission. Alain Peyrefitte then discovers a country that fascinates him, even if he does not speak a word of Chinese. He observes it and takes notes for three weeks, which he transforms two years later into a book of which he absolutely cannot imagine the success. He analyzes, in particular, an economic and political development, carried by the revolutionary spirit, and predicts the consequences. He ensures that, demography obliges, China will eventually impose itself on the planet, from the moment it has mastered the technologies at its disposal. Between 1971 and 1999, he returned 18 times to Beijing and published a sequel in 1996: China has awakened.
Read also Nicolas Baverez: “50 years after Peyrefitte’s prophecy, China has awakened… and the world is shaking”
He does not mention this subject in a particularly unusual interview with Thierry Ardisson. The politician, also a French Academician, agreed to go one evening in the mid-1980s to the Bains-Douches nightclub to answer questions from the man nicknamed “The man in black». Madeleine invites you to discover or rediscover this interview where the Minister-Academician returns, among other things, to the four years, from 1962 to 1966, during which he was General de Gaulle’s Minister of Information.
The question is naturally put to him: was the summary of the TV News then established every afternoon in his office? He immediately gives an answer without jargon: since the birth of the JT in 1949, its predecessors had become accustomed to dictating their law to journalists. Just after his appointment, he discovered, amazed, in his office, bells intended to call, like servants, the directors of radio and television. He does not specify, however, that at the time, a presenter complied, with regret, with this rule: Claude Darget. He expressed his disapproval directly by a particularly sober reading of a text of which he was obviously not at the origin.
Faced with Ardisson, Alain Peyrefitte confides his surprise when, upon his arrival at the ministry, his teams explain to him the method which makes it possible to transform the “high massof 8 p.m. in an appendix to the Official Journal. He immediately decides to change things. Its priority, its major objective, is then to modernize and liberalize public broadcasting. His argument is clear: the French distrust the media controlled by the executive and, for information, they turn to outlying stations, starting with Radio Luxembourg, whose 13 hours is followed by ten million listeners.
In order to give journalists on the small screen a freedom which they obviously did not have, he took the initiative, in 1963, of a renovation, even an overhaul of the television news. On August 13, 1963, he presented it live, at the 20 hours by answering Léon Zitrone’s questions. He took the opportunity to announce the appointment of Raymond Marcillac as head of the newspaper’s new team. A few months later, he will begin a tour of France to present another reform which seems essential to him: the birth and development of regional television channels.
In 1964, he inaugurated the first in Marseilles, by participating in Provence News, a previously weekly newspaper, which became a daily meeting. He takes the opportunity to announce the construction of new transmitters so the consequence will be obvious: a significant increase in the number of viewers. Finally, on June 27, 1964, with the green light from General de Gaulle, the French broadcasting-television becomes theFrench Broadcasting and Television Office. There are then, in France, five million television sets. Ten years later, when the ORTF broke up, the number of positions will have tripled. But this is only the beginning.
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