Death of Jean-Pierre Pernaut: a “shock” and a “great sorrow” for his former colleague Claire Chazal

He was the embodiment of the 1 p.m. news. Jean-Pierre Pernaut, journalist adored by the French, died on Wednesday March 2 at the age of 71, his family announced to AFP. “Tom, Lou, Olivier and Julia’s father died of lung cancer”, his wife’s agent, Nathalie Marquay-Pernaut, told AFP. After having fought a first cancer, of the prostate, in 2018, the journalist died of lung cancer, which he had announced to suffer from last May. “There was a leak announcing in the media that I was suffering from lung cancer. It’s true, I learned about this disease last May”he confided on the social network Twitter.

Shortly after the announcement, many personalities took the floor to pay tribute to the Emperor of 1 p.m. Among them, journalist Claire Chazal, with whom Jean-Pierre Pernaut shared the TF1 studios for more than half a century. “It is both a shock and a great sadness, a great pain, confided the 65-year-old journalist. A shock, because I didn’t know that Jean-Pierre was even sicker today. I know he had overcome cancer a short time ago, started working again, but I didn’t know there was a recurrence and something a little irremediable. So it’s obviously a shock and then a great pain, because I rubbed shoulders with Jean-Pierre during the 25 years that I spent at TF1. He was a warm, funny, sympathetic companion, an excellent journalist, whom I saw daily.”

“His love of France was reflected in his diaries”

On the air, the former presenter of the 20 hours of TF1 wished to salute the work of his former colleague, a journalist like no other. “Jean-Pierre deeply loved this France he knew, this France of the terroirsshe pointed out. He was born in Amiens, he loved the ancestral know-how, craftsmanship, geography and history of our country. This love, basically, was reflected in his journals and that’s why people returned this love to him. They were attached to him simply because he was sincere. He was not only a journalist passionate about his job, about major international, political, news or sports news, and they treated them perfectly, but he was also interested in the people around him, the people with whom he had grown up, this France he knew well. That’s why there was this attachment.”

Jean-Pierre Pernaut presented the 13-hour newspaper from 1988 to 2020. Married to Dominique Bonnet then Nathalie Marquay since 2007, he had four children: Olivier, Julia, Lou and Tom.

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