I was born on May 7, 1952 in Paris into an anti-colonialist family. My parents were FLN lawyers during the Algerian war and discovering that country soon after its independence triggered my interest in the wider world. Journalism abroad has continued to nourish this inquiring spirit.
The death of my father in 1966 (in a car accident in Algeria) was a severe blow to the whole family. I studied French literature in Paris and Aix-en-Provence and taught teenagers. But Left politics was the real focus of my life, especially the feminist movement.
From 1980 I reported for Le Monde Dimanche, the paper’s first weekly supplement.
In 1983 I became a full-time stringer in Algiers for the state-run Radio France International (RFI), the French newspaper Libération, and for the Paris office of the Associated Press. After riots in the eastern region of Algeria, the authorities expelled me from the country in November 1986.
Since then I have combined a full personal and family life with that of nomadic journalist.
I went first to Vienna for RFI and Libération at a fascinating moment in history. This was during the „Waldheim years“, when Austria was at last confronting its Nazi past, and when the Soviet system in Eastern Europe was collapsing.
I then moved to Lagos at a time when security problems were not as acute in Nigeria as they are today. Tripoli was next and although the Libyan authorities did not allow me to work as a press correspondent, I continued to write. The Shadows of Ghadames is a novel for young readers inspired by an old city in the Sahara Desert and the strict segregation there between men and women.
I also wrote a booklet for Reporters Without Borders on the role of journalists harassed by the Nigerian military dictatorship. Four Nigerian journalists had been sentenced to 25 years in prison for activities which would have been considered elsewhere as free opinion.
It was in Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya that I met Lutz and Susi Kayser, the protagonists of Project Wotan.
Back in Vienna at the end of 1999, I continued to work for Le Monde – I spent 25 years with the French daily – when all eyes were suddenly on Austria, the first European country to have a government coalition with a far-Right party, one which was heir to Nazism. Iran’s nuclear program, much larger than what was admitted by Tehran, was the other focus of interest as the International Atomic Energy Agency is based in Vienna. At the same time, I regularly published in the liberal Viennese daily Der Standard.
Then came Mexico, as exciting as Nigeria although very different. I was kept busy with the political crisis triggered by the 2006 presidential election; the rebellion in southern Oaxaca; the countrywide war against and between drug cartels and the Florence Cassez case, where a French woman was unjustly imprisoned for kidnappings.
From 2009 to 2015 I was based in Vienna. From there I covered Viktor Orban’s „illiberal“ Hungary. In 2016 I lived in The Hague in the Netherlands, from where I reported for the weekly magazine of Le Monde.
Since November 2018 I have been blogging from Vienna and Paris on Mediapart, a French Internet newspaper launched by former colleagues of Le Monde, and a leading voice of the Left in France.