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Un homme seul
Description:
This story could have been titled "My Father's Book." Frédéric Beigbeder sets out to discover Jean-Michel Beigbeder (1938-2023), whom he makes into a real character in a novel, somewhere between Roger Martin du Gard and Ian Fleming: "he was a Frenchman who thought he was American when he was actually English." He tries to understand this solitary and secretive man, the son of an American and a Béarnese man, who described himself as a "solipsist." A childhood in a Catholic military boarding school, the abbey school of Sorèze, then after the "rosary kapos" of Sorèze, with the Marianist brothers of the Villa Saint-Jean in Fribourg, hardened him for life. Barely an adult, he fled his native country to study management at Harvard Business School. In the early 1960s, he imported the profession of "executive search" to France, "placing" all the CAC 40 executives (or almost), for fifty years. Or poaching them ("economic warfare is the only one whose deserters are rewarded"). Unless this prestigious activity, leading him to travel the world and build networks among all the "decision-makers" in France at the time, was a perfect cover for his activities as an honorable CIA correspondent? This tomb of a brilliant and absent father is also the portrait of a generation of pleasure-seekers. These lonely men, whom we now call "boomers," forged their selfishness during the Second World War. Comfort was their ideology, luxury their utopia, divorce their fate, America their horizon. They were not made to be fathers. Both a pessimistic philosopher and a jet-set playboy, Jean-Michel Beigbeder embraced the 20th century, its pleasures, its globalization, and its wanderings. His son sensitively contemplates the disappearance of a man who also symbolizes the collapse of a world, and profiles his self-portrait in the mirror of his father
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