Journalist Jacques Duquesne, one of the co-founders of “Le Point”, is dead

2023-07-10 21:41:24
The journalist Jacques Duquesne, on October 28, 2002, in the Médicis library of the Senate, in Paris. DAMIEN MEYER / AFP

Armed with his Catholic faith and his humanism, Jacques Duquesne will have shaped the French written press during the second half of the 20th century. The journalist and writer died on Wednesday July 5 of a lung infection at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris. Grandson of a miner from the north of France, this son of a municipal policeman and a stay-at-home mother has never forgotten his popular roots. Jacques Duquesne was born in Dunkirk on March 18, 1930 and was deeply marked by the destruction of his hometown during the Second World War.

After obtaining his baccalaureate in 1947, he moved to the capital to study at Science Po Paris. In 1957, the young journalist left for Algeria as a correspondent for the newspaper The cross. In January 1958, he described the torture and exactions of the French soldiers in a series of seven articles, entitled “Sufferings and hopes of Algeria”. Hundreds of readers send inflammatory letters to the editor, The cross is forbidden in Algeria, and the OAS will condemn it to death. Carrying journalistic values ​​to the highest level, it was inconceivable for him to do otherwise. “It had to be said. Because the essential was at stake: the soul of France, human rights”he wrote in 2000.

Crowned with the respect of his peers for his courage, his rigor and his accuracy, Jacques Duquesne becomes in 1964 deputy editor of the journal Christian Panorama (became in 1968 Panorama today) until 1970. As “rewriter” of the weekly L’Express, he is invited to rewrite a good part of the articles, before each closing, on Thursday evening, to give a homogeneity to the newspaper. An exercise to which the leftist, even if he never had a party card, had also lent himself to the Socialist Party, whose program he had rewritten, “Changing life”, in 1972 .

Humility and professionalism

Appreciated for his professionalism as much as for his humility, Mr. Duquesne was appointed head of the investigation department of L’Express in 1967 before being promoted to deputy editor in 1970. Annoyed by the crushing weight of Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber’s political career on the writing of L’Expresshe left the weekly to co-found Point, in 1972, alongside Claude Imbert and Georges Suffert. From 1974 to 1977, he edited the Pointthen became CEO and publishing director from 1985 to 1990.

Passionate about writing, he left around fifty books, including around ten novels, and, more surprisingly, comic strips. Mic and Mac – signed under the name of Jacques Petit-Duc for the review Bayard – et Oukala the little Indianpour Okapi. Awarded the 1983 Interallié prize for Mary Vandamme (Grasset, 1983), he even adapted his novel into a television series for TF1 in 1989. Some of his essays on his way of seeing Christianity were successful and were sometimes at the center of controversy, such as his Jesus (Desclée de Brouwer/Flammarion, 1995) or Marie (Lead, 2004). “He always had a freedom of tone, this desire to distance himself from any form of establishment”believes Antoine de Tarlé, former Chairman of the Board of Catholic Lifea group of which Mr. Duquesne was director general of publications in 1977-1978.

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