Official website
Claude Brovelli
Foreign correspondent
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I have had seven lives. Here they are.
Foreword
The fortune-teller was right
I was fourteen or fifteen when a fortune-teller on the high street in Nogent-sur-Marne, just outside Paris, told me I would travel the world, meet presidents, kings and popes, write books and make a name for myself. I was the son of a bricklayer's labourer and a childminder, Italians who had fled fascism. Seven of us lived in two rooms. I smiled. She was right about everything.
I left school with nothing but my primary certificate, worked nights in a factory in Bobigny, and then, in Stockholm, standing in front of the Agence France-Presse teleprinters, discovered what I wanted to do with my life. AFP taught me everything, down to the last comma. It sent me to Africa at the hour of independence, to nearly three years of war in Vietnam, then to the Biafran front. Television then opened its studios to me: I anchored the evening news on ORTF, lived through the birth of TF1, and set off again, this time to Rome, for six years at the heart of the Vatican and of an Italy shaken by the Red Brigades.
I met Che Guevara, Richard Nixon, Ahmed Ben Bella, Zhou Enlai, popes and presidents. Out of it all came books, reports and films. This site brings them together, so that nothing is lost. I have had seven lives. Here they are.
Claude Brovelli
Les Avatars du Quatre
My next book: a journey to the heart of the number four, from the invisible to the everyday.
My story
My seven lives
Son of Italian immigrants, wire reporter, war correspondent, news anchor, Vatican correspondent, special reporter, producer and author. Seven chapters, one passion: telling the world as it is.
NOGENT-SUR-MARNE, STOCKHOLM, PARIS
The boy from Nogent
DAKAR, BAMAKO (AFP)
A wire reporter in newly independent Africa
SAIGON, PORT HARCOURT (AFP)
War correspondent, from Saigon to Biafra
PARIS, LOMÉ, HOLLYWOOD (ORTF, THEN TF1)
Every evening, in France's living rooms
ROME, VATICAN CITY, BOLOGNA, VENICE (TF1)
Rome, three popes and the Years of Lead
PARIS, BACK FROM ROME (TF1)
Special correspondent: a homecoming, two books, a farewell
PARIS, ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE CAMERA
Producer, author, free man
A life in dates
The moments that shaped my journey, from the AFP newsroom to St Peter's Square.
My books
From the first eyewitness account of the Biafran war, published by Albin Michel in 1969, to my most recent broadsides: six books to say what I have seen, and a seventh on its way.
Filmography
Film and television
News broadcasts, special reports, documentaries, prestige films, and even a few screen appearances as myself.
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
For more than five years I anchored the evening news on ORTF. The French National Audiovisual Institute has preserved over a hundred of those broadcasts. Here is one, just as viewers saw it that night.
ORTF, 1re chaîne
"24 heures sur la Une", 14 September 1972 edition
My cameraman
Cyril Sauvenière
I told the story. He showed it.
On television, people only remember the one who speaks. In Rome, the man carrying the camera was Cyril Sauvenière. He went everywhere with me.
Archives
Period footage
ORTF news broadcasts, the election of John Paul II, the shooting in St Peter's Square: my reports as preserved by the French National Audiovisual Institute.
Timeline
A life, date by date
From joining AFP to my latest book: every milestone of a career that spans half a century of history.