Much feels in flux in France these days. Will yo-yoing tariffs hit businesses? Is Perrier really that natural? And don’t even get started on the volatile summer heat.
But for the past 21 months, fans of a popular French game show have lived by a simple, ironclad certainty. Tune in at noon on any given day, and without fail, there he was: a soft-spoken young man named Émilien, with wiry round glasses and an astonishing depth of trivia knowledge.
Just as reliably, Émilien beat the other contestants. Again, and again, and again.
Although he has declined to reveal his last name for privacy reasons, Émilien is now a celebrity of sorts in France for his record-breaking winning streak on a show called “Les Douze Coups de Midi,” or “The Twelve Strokes of Noon.” Starting on Sept. 25, 2023, he competed 647 times and netted 2.56 million euros, about $3 million, in cash and prizes.
But it came to an end on Sunday, when a single defeat ended his reign.
Émilien, now 22, is as incredulous as the rest of us that he got that far.
“It’s a crazy story,” he said by phone this week. “I never expected it to last that long.”
Broadcast on the TF1 television network, each day’s show has four contestants compete in a series of trivia quizzes. The winner — le Maître de Midi, or Master of Noon — defends that title the next day.
“My goal was always the same,” Émilien said. “Every day, from the first to the 647th, to still be there at the end of the show, to do my best and come back the next day.”
“I never had any particular goal of reaching this or that record,” he added.
Yet he did. In a breathless statement that crowned Émilien “the greatest champion of champions,” TF1 said that his “legendary journey” had broken a world record for solo game show appearances and a European record for game show winnings.
“Émilien surpassed every limit, day after day, before the eyes of millions of loyal viewers,” the network said.
Émilien’s encyclopedic mind and unassuming demeanor led to intense media coverage, a steady stream of memes, a handful of haters who grumbled that he was being fed softball questions (an accusation that the show’s producers denied), and an Instagram shout-out from France’s culture minister, who praised his “composure, culture and modesty.”
In addition to the cash winnings, Émilien took home prizes worth about €800,000 — including 23 cars, trips to destinations like Venice and the Canary Islands, a parachuting session, televisions, smartphones, game consoles, scooters, musical instruments, jewelry, makeup, bicycles, household appliances and more.
“It’s a lot,” he acknowledged.
Émilien, who had a modest upbringing in the Vendée region of western France, said he had kept some of his winnings but had also given away or sold many items. He said he saw little need for 23 cars — or for 77 pounds of candy, which he arranged to have distributed to schoolchildren.
But Émilien did not stumble into success. He said he had always loved playing trivia quizzes, especially during the Covid-19 lockdowns, and grew up watching “The Twelve Strokes of Noon” with his grandparents.
He was turned down when he applied to be a contestant as soon as he turned 18 — “I was really shy” he said. But his grandmother encouraged him to try again two years later, and he succeeded.
That’s when things got serious.
“I could do quizzes all day long, for 15, 16, 17 hours, I didn’t mind,” Émilien said, adding that he would take notes and research trivia he came across, especially on unfamiliar topics.
Being on the show, which is taped during intensive sessions of one or several weeks and broadcast later, meant that he had to pause his history studies at a university in Toulouse.
“I tried to follow my classes at the same time as the show, but I clearly couldn’t,” he said. “My exams always landed during recording periods.”
Now, he is taking a one-year break to travel and enjoy his winnings before studying again, possibly to become a professor. But life will not quite be the same. People now recognize him in the street.
“At first it was the usual viewers, so mainly seniors,” he said. Then that shifted to include a growing number of young people, he said, some of whom confessed that he had given them the trivia bug.
Jean-Luc Reichmann, the show’s host, has attributed Émilien’s popularity to his lack of a know-it-all attitude — even though Émilien once interrupted him to object that a question about Indonesia’s capital was incorrect because the capital was being moved.
“You’ve become a role model for young people,” Reichmann said on social media.
Émilien is not so sure.
“I’m just someone who likes to answer questions,” he said. “If that gives helps some people broaden their horizons, that’s all I could hope for.”
Aurelien Breeden is a reporter for The Times in Paris, covering news from France.
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