Audiovisual archives
The French National Audiovisual Institute holds hundreds of my news programmes and reports. Here is a selection, from the ORTF studio to St Peter's Square. The picture grain has aged; the history has not.
The American press had just revealed the My Lai massacre. I question the American journalist Jonathan Randal. I had just come out of three years of the Vietnam war for AFP: this is one of my very first television archives.
A week after Biafra's surrender, Christian Bousquet and I made French television's first report from the region: a refugee camp, a hospital, Red Cross doctors. I had covered that war in the summer of 1968 for AFP.
Fresh from the Greek colonels' jails, the composer Mikis Theodorakis lands in Paris at the invitation of Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber. Melina Mercouri is waiting for him at the airport. I was there with my camera.
The same evening the news broadcast my interview with the Swedish prime minister. Olof Palme talks to me about his country's neutrality, rapprochement between East and West, and the Swedish model that all of Europe was watching.
Three days after the launch of "24 heures sur la Une", I anchor the lunchtime edition. In the headlines: the start of the school year and the Aranda affair. A complete bulletin, put online by the INA.
At the end of his third African tour, the President of the Republic answers my questions in Lomé, Togo. Colonisation is over, he tells me, and cooperation must not be a one-way street. Eight minutes, broadcast that same evening on the news.
The Yom Kippur war is raging along the Suez Canal, and France is debating a reform of its Constitution. I anchor this half-hour bulletin, put online in full by the INA.
At the ORTF open-house exhibition, children play at making the news: one is the director, another the newsreader. To show them the real thing, the report films me during a bulletin, with the text I read off the camera. Behind the scenes of the job, in three minutes.
Georges Pompidou had died two days earlier. In the studio I go through the candidates for the Élysée: there are already seven, and the campaign is gathering pace. France was heading into a lightning campaign.
Valéry Giscard d'Estaing had just been elected. I anchor the news of 24 May 1974: the new President, François Mitterrand received at the Élysée, the Cannes Festival, and the death of Duke Ellington. Twenty-four minutes of a France moving into a new era.
The ORTF's last day but one. On the one o'clock news, while workmen take down the letters from the front of the Maison de la Radio, I explain to viewers how the corporation is being split into seven companies, and introduce a brand-new logo: TF1.
The fourth instalment of my summer series filmed in Hollywood for the eight o'clock news. Charlton Heston talks to me about "Midway". He begins in French, then carries on in English.
I was then running TF1's arts desk. Johnny Hallyday is preparing his Palais des Sports show: eighty people around him, dancers, rehearsals. He admits to me that he had been bored away from the stage.
This is my earliest Roman archive: in 1977 I became TF1's permanent correspondent in Rome. In St Peter's Square, before the crowd gathered for Easter High Mass, Paul VI delivers his Easter message and then gives the urbi et orbi blessing.
That very morning in Rome the Red Brigades had kidnapped the president of the Christian Democrats and killed his bodyguards. On the eight o'clock news, Raymond Girard and I tell the story of the day and what it means for the Italian government. Fifty-five days of anguish were beginning.
Live from Rome with Bernard Chevallier, I commentate on the first appearance of the new Pope: Albino Luciani, Patriarch of Venice, a labourer's son. He gives his first blessing in Latin. His pontificate was to last thirty-three days.
Black? White? Grey? Five times in a row the smoke from the Sistine Chapel threw St Peter's Square into confusion. Live on the late bulletin, I describe that strange day and explain the rules of the conclave.
At 6.19 pm the white smoke rises. The cardinals announce a name nobody expected: Karol Wojtyla, Archbishop of Kraków. I sum up the new Pope's life; then, in a live link with anchor Roger Gicquel, Bernard Chevallier and I explain this historic choice.
Sitting in front of a television set in Italy, I zap from one private channel to the next to show how anarchically they were multiplying. The French then had only three public channels. Without knowing it, I was showing them their future.
In St Peter's Square the Pope has just kissed a child when he is shot. Over pictures from Italian television, I report from Rome on the eight o'clock news. Ten days later I published my investigation into the gunman, Ali Agca, in Le Figaro Magazine.
The archives shown on this page are preserved and distributed by the Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA), which holds the rights. Each link leads to the official archive page.