Philippe Labro, a prolific journalist, author, movie director and songwriter whose lyrical prose, boundless curiosity and oft-repeated determination to “forage in deep waters” offered France a sweeping image of itself over several decades, died on Monday in Paris. He was 88.
His death, in the Pitié Salpêtrière hospital, was caused by lymphoma of the brain, which was diagnosed in April, said Anne Boy, his longtime assistant. Mr. Labro lived in Paris.
A restless spirit, notebook always at his side, convinced that journalism was an exercise in unrelenting observation, Mr. Labro pursued a lifelong quest to capture his epoch by any means. “He wrote our popular, French, and universal history,” President Emmanuel Macron said in a tribute on X, “from Algeria to America” and from Herman Melville to Johnny Hallyday, the French rock ’n’ roll superstar.
In 24 books, including novels and essays; seven movies; lyrics to popular songs; and several television and radio shows, Mr. Labro probed the enigma of existence. No one medium sufficed. Truth, he believed, lurked between fact and fiction, and so he refused to be confined by one or the other. Quoting Einstein, he called life a “dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.” That piper was his muse.
Mr. Labro also liked Victor Hugo’s observation that “nothing is more imminent than the impossible.” He had good reason. It was in the United States, on Nov. 22, 1963, that Mr. Labro, then 27, achieved fame as the first French newspaper correspondent on the scene in the immediate aftermath of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas.
A framed copy of one of his dispatches, phoned in to the newspaper France-Soir, adorned his Paris office. Its headline quoted Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin, talking just before he was shot dead by Jack Ruby: “I killed nobody, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Mr. Labro had first gone to America on a scholarship at the age of 17, attending Washington and Lee University in the mountains of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. This American experience, which included months spent working with the U.S. Forest Service in Colorado, marked him.
“He was the most American of French writers,” the daily paper La Croix said.
The “don’t mess with me” spirit, as Mr. Labro put it, of the “tough guys” he met in the West informed a steely determination, an American directness and an impatience with sloppiness (he was the most punctual of men), as well as a deep love for America, whatever his late-life dismay at its condition. Hemingway and Faulkner were constant references.
His novel “The Foreign Student,” published in 1986, was set in Virginia and recounted some of his experiences there. It won the “Prix Interallié” literary prize.
At the time of Mr. Labro’s Kennedy reporting, France-Soir sold more than a million copies a day in six daily editions. Mr. Labro honed his journalism there over 13 years. He came to worship at the altar of what he called “deadlines, discipline and the primacy of style.”
He would go on to an illustrious career at the RTL radio network, becoming editor in chief in 1979, director-general of programming in 1985 and vice president in 1992, before succumbing to a severe depression in 1999, at a time when he seemed destined to become the company’s president — an experience recounted in his book “Fall Down Seven Times, Get Up Eight.”
Three years earlier, he had written “The Crossing,” an account of a brush with death caused by laryngeal edema, a swelling of the larynx, which hospitalized him for six weeks. It was a humbling experience, related with emotional intensity by a writer ever trying to push boundaries.
The cinema drew Mr. Labro as a medium that integrated observation, creativity, writing and images. He told the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur in 1983 that he would get irritated when one of his movies was described as “directed by the journalist Philippe Labro.” That felt limiting; he resented it.
Among his films were “No Apparent Motive” (1971) with Jean-Louis Trintignant and Dominique Sanda; “Chance and Violence” (1974), with Yves Montand; “The Hunter Will Get You” (1976), starring Jean-Paul Belmondo; and “Right Bank, Left Bank” (1984), with Carole Bouquet and Gérard Depardieu, his last cinematic work.
Mr. Labro wrote the lyrics for several songs by Mr. Hallyday. Perhaps the most personal, in its bold eclecticism and haunting desperation, was “Poem on the 7th,” set to the music of Beethoven’s 7th symphony.
The song involves an increasingly desperate questioning of the line between illusion and reality. The narrator demands proof from a witness of whether a scene — a river, a beach, grass, flowers, trees — really existed. He pleads, “Might the photos not be fake?” and “Do not mock me!” before concluding: “Do not tell me any more stories. I need to touch and see to believe it.”
It was a boots-on-the-ground journalist’s cri du coeur. Until early this year, when his TV show “The Essential With Labro,” on the C8 channel, owned by the conservative billionaire Vincent Bolloré, was shut down, Mr. Labro continued to chronicle his times. He also wrote a weekly column for the newspaper Journal du Dimanche until 2023.
Philippe Labro was born on Aug. 7, 1936, in Montauban, a town in southern France near Toulouse, the third of four sons of Jean-François and Henriette Labro. His parents hid Jews during World War II, earning them recognition by Israel as Righteous Among the Nations. This was a source of pride to Mr. Labro, a centrist who was alarmed by the rise of the far-right in Europe.
In 1960, toward the end of the war that marked Algeria’s fight for independence from French rule, Mr. Labro deployed to Algiers, the capital, where he worked as a reporter for a military radio station. His reporting angered the Secret Army Organization, commonly known as the O.A.S., which was formed in 1961 to defend France’s hold on Algeria by all means, including terrorism.
An incident from this period is recounted in his 2013 book, “The Invisible Piper,” a collection of three stories that appear to hover between the real and the imagined and that examine the way the course of a life hangs by a thread.
One of the stories is called “The Cross Hairs.” At a Paris restaurant, dining with two friends, Mr. Labro notices a man gazing at him intensely. They eventually fall into conversation, and the man, Rick, who has just been released from prison, informs Mr. Labro that, as an O.A.S. killer, he had had Mr. Labro in the sights of his rifle for several minutes outside a hotel in Algiers. But, suddenly paralyzed, he could not pull the trigger, Rick tells him, “for some reason I don’t understand.”
Later, Rick finds work as a fixer for two TV reporters who are killed in Vietnam. At a Paris event in their honor, where a documentary is shown, Mr. Labro takes the last available seat. It is next to a woman. That woman, Françoise Coulon, would become his wife. “I might also not have sat down beside her,” he writes.
One man, scarcely known, has allowed him to live and, years later, leads him to the love of his life. For Mr. Labro, the piper was at work here.
He is survived by his wife; their two children, Clarisse Davis-Labro and Jean Labro; another daughter, Valérie Labro, from his first marriage, to Geneviève Gourou; and Alexandra de Csabay-Labro, his wife’s daughter, whom he adopted.
“Respect silences,” Mr. Labro advised journalists, for they may be the prelude to an interviewee’s “going further and deeper.” He believed that there was a twist to every tale, even a familiar one: “Everything is said. We arrive too late. But there is always the manner of the telling.”
Roger Cohen is the Paris Bureau chief for The Times, covering France and beyond. He has reported on wars in Lebanon, Bosnia and Ukraine, and between Israel and Gaza, in more than four decades as a journalist. At The Times, he has been a correspondent, foreign editor and columnist.
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