Philippe Bouvard
Philippe Bouvard · Arts & Literature
Journalist and humorist, creator and 37-year host of RTL's Les Grosses Têtes (1977-2014); a hidden Jewish child of the Occupation, son of Andrée Gensburger.
6 décembre 1929, Coulommiers, France — 24 août 2026, Cannes, France
Paris, Cannes
Philippe Bouvard is recognized among Jewish contributors to Arts & Literature — Journalist and humorist, creator and 37-year host of RTL's Les Grosses Têtes (1977-2014); a hidden Jewish child of the Occupation, son of Andrée Gensburger.
The hidden child
Philippe Bouvard was born on 6 December 1929 in Coulommiers. His father, Marcel Bouvard, a Catholic, abandoned him the day he was born; his mother, Andrée Gensburger, came of an Alsatian Jewish family, and in 1939 she married Jules Luzzato, a tailor and a rabbi's grandson, who became the boy's true father. Under the Occupation mother and son hid, moving some ten times — La Baule, Limoges, the Loiret, the South — in constant fear of arrest; the Luzzato family was deported, and his adoptive grandparents were murdered at Auschwitz.
From Le Figaro to Les Grosses Têtes
He entered Le Figaro in 1952 as a courier in the photo department and rose to direct the paper's Paris pages (1962–1973), then went to France-Soir as chief editor and director. Television made him a household name with Le Théâtre de Bouvard (1982–1985), and on 1 April 1977 he created Les Grosses Têtes on RTL — the wit-and-laughter round table he hosted for thirty-seven years, until September 2014, when Laurent Ruquier succeeded him. He wrote some forty books, and kept his newspaper columns going into his nineties.
The identity, said plainly
For decades he kept his origins quiet: to marry Colette Sauvage in church in 1953 he even had himself baptized a Catholic in secret, and he called himself an 'unbelieving agnostic'. But the son of Andrée Gensburger was Jewish by his mother, and late in life he said it plainly: 'I am not at all ashamed of being Jewish.' He died on 24 August 2026 in Cannes, at ninety-six; the Jewish press of France saluted the hidden child who had made the whole country laugh.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: Wikipédia ; JForum ; Tribune Juive
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Journalist and humorist, creator and 37-year host of RTL's Les Grosses Têtes (1977-2014); a hidden Jewish child of the Occupation, son of Andrée Gensburger.
Source: Wikipédia ; JForum ; Tribune Juive
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