L'affaire Aldo Moro et les années de plomb

On 16 March 1978, at about nine in the morning, a Red Brigades commando attacked Aldo Moro's car in via Fani, Rome. His five bodyguards were killed. The president of the Christian Democrats, the man who had opened the governing majority to the Communists, was abducted. That evening, on TF1's eight o'clock news, Raymond Girard and I told the story of the day and what it meant for the Italian government.

Fifty-five days followed during which Italy held its breath. Should anyone negotiate with the kidnappers? The political class tore itself apart. On 3 May I interviewed Bettino Craxi, the Socialist leader and one of the few to argue for a humanitarian way out: every effort, he told me, must be made to save Moro. Six days later his body was found in the boot of a car in the heart of Rome.

Bologna, 2 August 1980

The Years of Lead did not end there. On 2 August 1980 a bomb exploded in the waiting room of Bologna station, at the height of the holiday getaway: eighty-five dead, more than two hundred injured. The next day, on the late bulletin presented by Ladislas de Hoyos, Sylvie Hay and I went through the first leads, which pointed to the far right.

I lived for six years in that Italy, the Italy of kidnappings, bombings and trials. I also covered the earthquake that devastated the Naples region in the autumn of 1980. I tell the story of those years in my memoir, "De l'AFP à la télé".