Jean-Pierre Pernaut succumbed this Wednesday to cancer at 71 years, a year and a half after his retirement from the JT, while he was still presenting a program on LCI. “The father of Tom, Lou, Olivier and Julia died of lung cancer,” confirmed his wife Nathalie Marquay-Pernaut in the afternoon.
Emmanuel Macron hailed on Twitter the “passion for France” of Jean-Pierre Pernaut, while Prime Minister Jean Castex referred to the “familiar voice” and “reassuring face” of the presenter. “We lose a great journalist,” reacted the Minister of Culture Roselyne Bachelot.
A cliché is an image, a village with a bell tower surrounded by houses, then farms and meadows and finally a forest, crossed at high speed aboard a TGV that rushes across the country. The presenter of the 1 p.m. news of TF 1 from 1988 to 2020, stopped in this village. He even wanted to stop time. An idealized vision perhaps, but these villages exist. A reassuring permanence in a world that turns at the speed of a disenchanted merry-go-round.
Jean-Pierre Pernaut left, at 71 years old, victim of this cancer against which he could not fight, inoperable. Leaving millions of people inconsolable. Not only his followers: we were all used to this man sitting at our table or in the center of our small screen, who had started before computers and left the news in the era of social networks.
When he took over the head of the 1 p.m. news of TF 1, in 1988, after the privatization of the channel, the already experienced 38-year-old journalist led a revolution. He succeeded Yves Mourousi, his antithesis, a charming man who knew the Tout-Paris but nothing or almost nothing of deep France. What will appear years later as a caricature or a nostalgia that is a bit old-fashioned for his detractors, is first and foremost a gesture of rupture: to give a voice to those who never have one, by creating a powerful network of local correspondents that TF 1 did not have.
