Jean-Pierre Elcampas, a great figure in French journalism and renowned for his countless interviews during a particularly long career, has died at the age of 86.
A tireless professional, who analysed and commented on political life for more than 60 years, Jean-Pierre Elkampas also served as head of radio and television stations.
This pillar of the French national media scene had also interviewed the greats of the world: Arafat, Gorbachev, Mandela, Castro, Bill Clinton, George Bush, Vladimir Putin...
Canal+ channel and radio station Europe 1 announced the death of their former star last Tuesday night, shortly after it was announced by Paris Match magazine.
President Emmanuel Macron today hailed «a holy monster of French journalism».
Born in 1937, Jean-Pierre Elkabas began his career as a correspondent for RTF (Radio-télévision française) in Oran, the Algerian city of his birth, before being appointed in 1961 in Paris.
After years on the small screen, he started working on Europe 1 in the early 1980s and was to make many back and forths on it.
After the victory of socialist François Mitterrand in the 1981 presidential election, he was dismissed from the public television station Antenne 2, accused of sympathising with the right-wing of former head of state Valerie Giscard d'Estaing.
He then served as president and CEO of the public television stations France 2 and France 3 and favoured the rise of new presenters. But when contracts worth hundreds of millions of francs were revealed with France 2's star presenter-producers, he was forced to resign in 1996.
The reactions to the news of his death were many from all those he had interviewed at one time or another.
«Jean-Pierre Elkabas left his mark on a whole generation. I belong to it,’ reacted the right-wing former president Nicolas Sarkozy.
Sarkozy's socialist successor, François Hollande, praised a «combativeness that no interlocutor could exhaust».
He is also famous for an answer - «Shut up, Elkabas!» - attributed to former French Communist Party leader Georges Marquet, which he never actually gave.
This phrase, which later became a «cult», was actually imagined by the humorist Thierry Leliron, joking about a stormy interview in 1980 between the head of the Communist Party and the journalist.
Jean-Pierre Elcampas was married to the writer Nicole Avril and fathered a daughter, the actress Emmanuel Bass.
