From May 68 to the demonstrations of the “yellow vests”, Michel Drucker will have seen popular movements in France, and the political scene evolve. “My parents were on the left, SFIO version. It is the France of my birth, it is the France of this left which no longer exists”, he first advances at the microphone of Didier Barbelivien, before remember the uprising of the year 1968. At that time, the emblematic host of the audiovisual landscape was a journalist at the ORTF. “We all thought we were Che Guevara, we all walked around with signs, with Roger Couderc, Léon Zitrone, Thierry Roland”, he recalls in Tell me what you sing.
“I was weighed down, I was 25”
“Free the ORTF!” recalls having chanted Michel Drucker with his colleagues, under the mandate of Minister Maurice Couve de Murville. “He freed us well. I was weighed down, I was 25,” says the host, then sidelined from public service. He explains that in Nanterre, “it was academics who were not the sons of workers” who demonstrated, like Daniel Cohn-Bendit, of whom Michel Drucker still has good memories: “I see him from time to time in time and he was one of my first guests of Can’t wait for Sunday over 20 years ago.”
A career saved thanks to Michelle Arnaud
The historic public service host returns to this episode of May 68, which disrupted his debut. “I was kicked out, I was the youngest. General (de Gaulle) made an exception for a guy like me because I was the youngest, and I already presented Johnny Hallyday, Sylvie Vartan and all these singers”, he says on Europe 1, recounting a quote from Claude François: “Drucker is the journalist who was fired, not the variety presenter.”
At the microphone of Didier Barbelivien, the presenter evokes the crucial role played by Michelle Arnaud, then producer. “She was the one who fished me out”, says Michel Drucker, “she introduced me to Georges Mustaki”, adds the host who today has nearly 60 years of career on French television.