Biography

Michel Droit (23 January 1923 in Vincennes, Val-de-Marne – 22 June 2000) was a French novelist and journalist. He was the father of the photographer Éric Droit (1954–2007). After studying at the Faculté des lettres de Paris and Sciences Po, Droit joined the army in 1944 and was wounded near Ulm in April 1945. He took on a career as a press, radio and television journalist after the Second World War and at the 1960s he was the preferred television interviewer of général de Gaulle. His first novel, Plus rien au monde, dates to 1954. In 1964, he won the Grand prix du roman de l'Académie française for his novel The Return (Le Retour). On 6 March 1980, on the same day as Marguerite Yourcenar, he was elected as a member of the Académie française, replacing Joseph Kessel. Droit wrote a polemic against a reggae adaptation of La Marseillaise as Aux armes et cætera by Serge Gainsbourg, reproaching him for "provoking" a resurgence of anti-Semitism and thus making things difficult for his "co-religionists". Droit was attacked for this position by the Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l'amitié entre les peuples. Droit got into legal difficulties as a member of the CNCL, a television regulator set up in the 1980s, but this was thrown out of court with the help of his lawyer Jean-Marc Varaut. Droit accidentally killed one of his companions on a safari in Africa. Droit is buried in the Passy Cemetery. Source: Article "Michel Droit" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.