An interviewer with an advance plane
The images have been widely commented on: asked by Paul Larrouturou about the possibility for PSG to make some of their trips by train and not by jet, Kylian Mbappé collapses with laughter. As for his coach, Christophe Galtier, he replies ironically that the club is studying the possibility of going to matches in ” yachting “. The controversy quickly took on a magnitude that the journalist was far from anticipating. He who attended his first PSG press conference wanted to raise “an interesting, legitimate question”. “Those who don’t like me think I want to make the buzzsighs Paul Larrouturou, who speaks every morning on LCI. But I just try to do my job by asking questions that people may ask. »
A regular at awkward questions
At almost 36 years old, Paul Larrouturou is not at his first stroke of brilliance. In May 2013, already, he attended for Europe 1 a press conference by François Hollande. “Why did you choose not to express yourself personally on Twitter? », he asks, huddled in a shirt with a disproportionate collar. ” What question ! », retorts the president, mocking, who had abandoned social networks after his accession to the Elysée. “It was brutal, remembers Larrouturou. All the colleagues had made fun of me. » Nothing to discourage him. A few months later, he wrote to Yann Barthès, who made fun of the sequence in “Le Petit Journal”, introducing himself as “the young journalist you imitated with a dog collar”. A coffee later, he was hired and would work with the presenter for seven years before joining LCI in the summer of 2021.
A political buff
“People see him mostly as a cheeky journalist, but he also has a real political sense,” comments Ruth Elkrief, who has worked with him at LCI for a year. Born in Bayonne in 1986 into a family of teachers, he grew up with France Inter, Telerama et The chained Duck, that his grandfather makes him read. At the table, we talk about life, death, love… And a lot of politics. She becomes his “only passion”, which he satiates by devouring books on the subject. A year ago, this distant cousin of MEP Pierre Larrouturou signed Elysee confidential (Flammarion), an investigation on Emmanuel Macron seen by those who met him. “I was often asked what he looked like and I couldn’t explain it… Now I say the answer is in the book!” »
A field reporter often attacked
In a portrait, Vanity Fair compared it to a « punching-ball ». It is true that he has taken blows: mistreated by Bruno Gollnisch’s umbrella in 2015, and ejected manu militari from the Salon des Entrepreneurs during a visit by Marine Le Pen in 2017, he was also attacked with his cameraman by Francis Lalanne. From the side of the road, where he holds out his microphone to various personalities, he has seen growing hostility towards journalists, “at best a misunderstanding, at worst a resignation and the feeling that we are all rotten”. “What shocks me the most, he adds, it is the fact that dialogue has become impossible with some. » A sequence, where he is taken to task by antivax activists who call him a ” parrot “, can testify to that.