Jean-Paul Kauffmann

Jean-Paul Kauffmann (8 August 1944, Saint-Pierre-la-Cour,Mayenne) is a French journalist and writer, a former student of the École supérieure de journalisme de Lille () (40th class).

His great-grandfather Michel Kauffmann left Alsace in 1871 after the Treaty of Frankfurt and settled in the region of Vitré. Jean-Paul Kauffmann was born at Saint-Pierre-la-Cour but when he was nine months old, his parents joined Corps-Nuds, in Ille-et-Vilaine, to take over a bakery. He entered as a boarder in a religious college at age 11. Unhappy during these "overwhelming years", he took refuge in reading the works of Balzac, Stendhal and above all, Jean de La Fontaine. For love of literature, he believed he had the vocation of a journalist and studied at the École supérieure de journalisme de Lille between 1962 and 1966. He did his military service as a cooperant in an educational service in Quebec. He extended his stay there by working in a weekly supplement in the Montreal press. Assistant to the Quiet Revolution, he dreamed of staying permanently in this country after falling in love with Mara, a bookseller from Latvia, as he recounts in his narrative Courlande.

Returning to France in 1970, he was employed as a journalist for Radio France Internationale for seven years, then to AFP. In 1977, he joined the editorial office of the daily Le Matin de Paris and in 1984 became a grand reporter for L'Événement du jeudi (). While his magazine sent him to Lebanon, he was abducted in Beirut with sociologist Michel Seurat on 22 May 1985. His wife Joëlle Kauffmann () was actively committed to his release which happened on 4 May 1988 with other hostages, through the intervention of Jean-Charles Marchiani, while Jacques Chirac was Prime minister of François Mitterrand. Michel Seurat, for his part, died in custody. in 1986. On the occasion of this abduction, Jean-Paul Kauffman lived the traumatic experience of traveling on several occasions, wrapped in an Oriental carpet where asphyxia led him to lose consciousness, which led him to deepen his reflection and strongly marked his life:

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