Chapter 7. Producer, author, free man

Leaving a channel is not leaving the trade. In 1988 I became editor-in-chief of Sygma Télévision, the broadcast arm of one of the great Paris photojournalism agencies. That same year, I took the plunge.

CBP Productions, a house of my own

On 1 October 1988 I founded my own company, CBP Productions. The client list shows the range: Center Parcs, Lyonnaise des Eaux, the Lilly laboratories, the City of Paris, the Compagnie Bancaire group. I brought the rules of reporting to the corporate film: go and see, get people talking, cut it tight.

There was fashion too, with the prestige films I produced for Marithé and François Girbaud: catwalk shows, shoots in the forest, Steadicam shots. And in 1989 a weekly thirty-minute magazine, on Friday evenings on Paris Première, which Le Point described as the first television programme devoted to property. From the paddy fields of Vietnam to the catwalks, no one can accuse me of repeating myself.

La Cinquième, then the planets

In December 1994 La Cinquième was born, France's channel for knowledge. I was part of the founding team, in charge of documentaries and discovery, and stayed until 2001, just before it became France 5. In November 1995 Le Monde introduced me as the editor of the channel's discovery, arts and documentaries department, in a piece on the series "Teva", fronted by Teva Victor: inform, educate, open eyes. Its shoots took me back to Polynesia, more than twenty years after Mururoa.

In November 2002 France 5 broadcast "Les Conquistadors du système solaire", a fifty-two-minute documentary born of an original idea I share with Claude Lemoine and directed by Hervé Martin-Delpierre: forty years of robotic exploration, told with the astrophysicist André Brahic and the astronaut Jean-Pierre Haigneré. I had begun my career watching empires come apart in Africa; I was carrying it on by watching humankind set out for other worlds. In June 2004 Paris saw the screening of "Ronald Reagan, la mémoire effacée", a documentary for France 2 that I co-directed with Jeremy Marc, produced by Alain Delon and Cyril Viguier.

The Paris Bar goes on screen

On 1 September 2005 I set up a second company, International Broadcast Ventures, INBROV for short. A few months later the bâtonnier of Paris, Yves Repiquet, gave me carte blanche to invent a monthly online video magazine: "Le Barreau en Images". The first issue was announced in the Bar's bulletin of 14 February 2006. Six to ten minutes of reports, every month, for the twenty thousand lawyers of Paris, when YouTube was barely a year old.

Twenty-two issues followed, up to the autumn of 2007. On 1 April 2007 we treated ourselves to a hoax about the colour of magistrates' robes, convincing enough to draw protests. Le Figaro of 5 and 6 May 2007 called it a first in the world of lawyers. On 23 November 2006, at the Maison du Barreau, I had also chaired the round tables of the conference "Confiance et arbitrage".

A success, and a great first on the net.

In April 2010 Le Figaro was still applauding the magazine's new format, by then followed by twenty-two thousand lawyers. Meanwhile, in 2007, I had sat on the jury of the International Emmy Awards, and in 2011 I devoted a fifty-two-minute film to Jimmy Carter. At the end of 2012 INBROV ceased trading. What remained was the thing I had long been putting off: writing.

Taking up the pen again

A journalist tells other people's lives, seldom his own. It took me time to come round to it. In July 2013 L'Harmattan published, in its "Graveurs de mémoire" series, "De l'AFP à la télé, mes 7 vies sur les points chauds du globe". It is the book that gave this website its shape: seven lives, seven chapters.

Ten years later I broke another habit: restraint. A news anchor does not give his opinion, and I had held to that throughout my career. In 2023 I took back my freedom of speech: a column in Géostratégie magazine, a long filmed interview and, in December, a polemic whose title says it all, "Ras le bol de fermer ma gueule". You may disagree with me: that is how a real conversation begins.

On 27 February 2026 I published its sequel, "Ras le bol de chez ras le bol", a short text I chose to bring out myself. I care about it above all for its chapter on war. I saw war in Vietnam, in Biafra, in the Italy of the Years of Lead, and I filmed at Mururoa and Fangataufa in the days of the French nuclear tests. When I hear war spoken of lightly, I know what that word holds.

Another book is on its way: "Les Avatars du Quatre", four in all its forms. A journey to the heart of the number four, from the invisible to the everyday. It will be published soon.

Why this website

I have spent my life telling other people's stories. Yet nothing is more fragile than our work: a wire dispatch rarely carries a byline, a news bulletin lasts only as long as it takes to read it. Of what I have seen, only a few reels in the INA vaults and some second-hand books would remain if no one took the trouble to gather it all. That is what this website is for: to put the dates, the places and the faces back in order, and to hand them on to those who come after.

I think of the young journalists who set off today with a telephone where we set off with a telex. And above all of the boy or girl growing up with no degree, no connections and no bearings, like the Italian labourer's son I was in Nogent-sur-Marne, who left school with nothing but a primary certificate. I would like them to read these pages and think: so it can be done.

I did not make history. I had the luck to be there as it went by, and the duty to tell it. In my teens in Nogent, a fortune-teller told me I would travel the world, meet presidents, kings and popes, and write books. She saw everything except the ending: that one day it would all have to be handed on. Cats, the French say, have seven lives. I have lived mine. The eighth begins here, and it is you who give it to me by reading.