Jean Teulé, a self-taught writer who became very popular as a TV columnist in the 1990s, died on Tuesday October 18 at the age of 69. According to a press release from Mialet-Barrault editions, the novelist died of cardiac arrest at his home in Paris. He had lived there since 1998 with his partner, actress Miou-Miou.
In March 2022, he still told, with his biting verve, his mocking irony and his caustic humor, to RFI listeners, the story and the genesis of his latest book. Agincourt in rainy weather, printed in 300,000 copies, restores one of the worst in the history of France. In 1415, face to face, a starving English army, weakened by dysentery, and a supernumerary French army, bloated with sufficiency and weighed down by stupidity. Against all expectations, the first will dominate the second, thanks to a series of blunders and a muddy ground.
“ That we don’t get bored »
Last year, on the occasion of the poet’s bicentenary, he published Damn it, Baudelaire!an extraordinarily lively portrait of Baudelaire: He is the absolute poet “, he confided to RFI, before admitting to having long thought of never devoting a book to Baudelaire: “ He was too disagreeable to me, too misogynistic, too mean to everyone. But in the end, he bowed to the genius: ” If one must read a collection of French poetry, it is The evil flowers. It’s the top. »
” A little terror, a little poetry, and fun, so that we are always caught in the awkward position and above all that we don’t get bored “, he described at the microphone of RFI, when discussing the ingredients of his novel Charlie 9, a very original portrait of “Charly”, nickname given to Charles IX, king of France from 1560 to 1574.
From his first novel in 1991, this history buff has cultivated an offbeat tone. Rainbow for Rimbaud tells the story of an ordinary inhabitant of Charleville-Mézières, in the footsteps of the famous poet.
“I don’t read novels”
Adored by his readers who transformed his books as O Verlaine (2005) or I, Francois Villon (2006) popular hits, the so-called Parisian intelligentsia had a very moderate taste for his books.
” I don’t read novels. I didn’t read it before writing, and I still don’t read it (…) I don’t want it to cut my legs, and to say to myself: if there are guys who write like that, it’s not worth taking a pencil “, he explained on France Inter in 2019.
Television assured him a certain fame with the general public, first alongside Bernard Rapp in the show The English Platethen on Canal+, which he joined in 1994. He was part of the adventure of Nowhere else as a columnist. He was also the companion of actress Miou-Miou, since 1998.
Jean Teulé has won original awards such as the Trop Virilo 2015 prize with Héloïse, ouch!on the love story with Abélard, or the Maison de la presse 2008 prize with The Montespanabout the husband of Madame de Montespan, the mistress of Louis XIV.
A Norman childhood
Born on February 26, 1953 in Saint-Lô, a Norman town that emerged in ruins from the Second World War, Jean Teulé was initially a mediocre student in the Paris suburbs. He had arrived at the great poets not thanks to a professor of letters, but by a record. ” That’s how I discovered Rimbaud and Verlaine, and I fell into it thanks to [Léo] Ferré who sang it extraordinarily well “, he said. ” Me too, I wanted to do my job as a smuggler, and that’s what happened. Lots of teenagers told me that without me, they wouldn’t have known these three guys. »
He then entered the world of culture via alternative comics. He is one of the cartoonists of the magazine The Echo of the Savannasfrom 1978 to 1983, then he published his own albums, starting with bloody mary in 1983. In 1989, he received a special prize at the Angoulême festival for a collection of reports, People from Francewhich was followed in 1990 by People from elsewhere, on Africa and Reunion. ” It takes few lines for Jean Teulé to draw a portrait or restore a drama wrote Le Monde in 2001. Le Figaroon the occasion of a fiction in 2007, The Suicide Shopgreeted an author “ neither too light in the subject nor too heavy in the humor “.