2023-11-09 02:34:38
Laurent Greilsamer, in Paris, March 6, 2014. JOEL SAGET / AFP
He is a young man of 70 who has just left us suddenly due to heart failure. He was smiling, caring, endearing, and the elegance of his appearance was a true reflection of his spirit. Always dressed to the nines, with just the right amount of humor and fantasy to sweep away any trace of austerity in him. For those who approached Laurent Greilsamer, and like me, for thirty years, had the privilege of working alongside him, the high idea he had of our profession, journalism, was obvious; its relationship to facts, to truth, to precision. The need to dispassionate the news to better understand the issues, with clarity and honesty.
Au Monde, where he spent thirty-four years, he knew like no one else how to point out the weakness of an analysis, the shaky sentence, the weak thought or the useless implication. He also knew how to cut a paper that was too long, giving it nerve and density, without betraying its author. On the contrary, entrusting him with proofreading was a guarantee. His gaze, always lively and warm – and so sensitive – behind the chiseled glasses, inspired both confidence and respect. With a smiling but intractable rigor, he did not let anything pass that would have lost or disturbed the reader.
Far from nitpicking, he relentlessly delved deeper, forcing us to go further, that is to say closer to the truth. His demands were in proportion to his ambition for the collective adventure that a newspaper represented in his eyes. It is no coincidence that at the dawn of the 2000s he led the writing of the Livres de style du Mondethese unique sums of knowledge and ethics, unique keys adapted to the culture of our daily life.
The trials of Klaus Barbie then Maurice Papon
A graduate of the Superior School of Journalism (ESJ) in Lille, Laurent quickly joined the “generic news” department of the Monde in 1977, at age 24, after a brief debut in Figaro then at Paris daily. He kept a very keen memory of this “Primitive” world of the rue des Italians, the early morning rituals, the numerous trials he had followed as an editor in charge of police-justice files. His first article in the evening daily, dated May 21, 1977, was a report in Normandy agitated by the rumor of a “pilgrimage” former SS at the large German cemetery of La Cambe, in Calvados.
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Having become a major reporter, he had carried out numerous investigations around the world, from Iran to South Africa including the tragedy of the earthquake in Yerevan, in Soviet Armenia, in 1988. But it is about the legal world, terrorism (Direct Action), the trials for crimes against humanity of the SS officer Klaus Barbie then of Maurice Papon that his sense of observation and synthesis, mixed with a great culture historic, had done wonders.
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