L'année des trois papes

On 6 August 1978, Paul VI died at Castel Gandolfo. I had been TF1's permanent correspondent in Rome for over a year, and the whole city slipped into another kind of time: the Church's. On 10 August, on the evening news, I explained from Rome the timetable and make-up of the conclave. The heat was crushing and the Pope had asked not to be embalmed: there was talk of bringing the funeral forward.

On 26 August the chimney of the Sistine Chapel caused confusion. Five times running, the crowd in St Peter's Square could not tell the colour of the smoke. Then the Patriarch of Venice, Albino Luciani, a labourer's son, stepped onto the balcony and gave his first blessing in Latin. With Bernard Chevallier, I commentated on those pictures live for the evening news, and came back to the smoke in the late bulletin. Thirty-three days later John Paul I was dead, and it all began again.

Habemus papam

On 16 October, at 6.19 pm, the smoke was white, beyond argument this time. The cardinals announced a name nobody had expected: Karol Wojtyla, Archbishop of Kraków, the first non-Italian pope in more than four centuries. I summed up the life of this unknown man on air. Then, live with Roger Gicquel, anchoring in Paris, Bernard Chevallier and I explained a choice that was to change the history of Europe.

Six days later I covered the inauguration Mass, at which the new Pope delivered part of his homily in French, then the visit of President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, received at the Vatican before taking his seat as honorary canon of St John Lateran. Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II: I approached and questioned all three. Three pontificates in seventy-one days: the job seldom offers such a run.