2023-07-05 02:09:36
Denise Bombardier en mars 1990. SOPHIE BASSOULS / SYGMA VIA GETTY IMAGES
Journalist, host, essayist, author, Denise Bombardier, 82, died on July 4, following a dazzling cancer. This woman of character will have accompanied the history of Quebec, this Canadian province that she would have liked to see recognized as a country, since the post-war years of ” the great darkness », to those of the « quiet revolution which freed Quebecers from the grip of the Catholic Church.
His rants, his taste for controversy, “ out of pleasure and out of conviction” she said, her systematic positions in recent years to slay the ” wokisme or the multicultural model defended by the current Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, whom she hated, or even the “joual” (popular Quebecois speech) and the “franglais”, have made her a special intellectual figure, controversial, in a Quebec society that likes to cultivate appeasement.
Committed feminist, for having been brought up in a world of women but also for having had to defend herself, at 12, in the corridors of public television, from the assaults of a director who marked her, she says ” hot iron “, she became known in France for having been the only one, in 1990, on the set of “Apostrophes” by Bernard Pivot to strongly attack the writer Gabriel Matzneff who boasted of his sexual adventures with minors , when the other guests still displayed their complacency.
Denunciation of “abusers”
Literature, according to her, could not « serve d’alibi ». She had shouted her anger, judging that the writer would have had “accountability with justice” if he didn’t have “a literary aura”. The arrest earned him mockery and insults at the time. A video archive of this moment was widely relayed on social networks when Vanessa Springora’s story was published in 2020 Consent (Grasset), which will encourage the Paris prosecutor’s office to open an investigation for rape of minors against the writer. In 2011, Denise Bombardier had repeated the offense in the denunciation of ” abusers », co-writing with the French journalist Françoise Laborde Stop being silent! (Fayard) after the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn in New York.
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Born in Montreal in a modest environment, but especially in a family ” crazy and alcoholic, she said in an autobiographical novel, A childhood with holy water (Seuil, 1985), in which her father made terror reign, it was at school, run by nuns, then at university – she obtained a doctorate in sociology at the Sorbonne in 1974 – that she drew the rage to get out of it and ” get up “. She inherited her love for the French language from her mother: by offering him diction lessons at a very young age, she helped him to get rid of his Quebec accent, ” which allowed me to express myself well in the culturally deprived Quebec of my childhood”, she said.
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