Éric Fottorino

Éric Fottorino is a French journalist and writer. He is the winner of the Prix Femina, 2007, for Baisers de cinéma. After having been a reporter for the daily newspaper Le Monde, then becoming editor-in-chief and executive editor, he was appointed president of the directory group of the La Vie-Le Monde group in January 2008. He was removed from this latter office in December 2010.

His biological father, Maurice Maman, was of Moroccan and Jewish origin and was a gynecology student when he met his mother. The ultra-Catholic family of his mother, Monique Charbrerie, was opposed to their marriage. The young Eric was raised without his father. When he was 9, his mother married Michael Fottorino, a physiotherapist. It’s at this time that he took the name of Eric Fottorino. It was only years later that he managed to contact his biological father.

In 1984, after studies at the Faculty of Law at the University of La Rochelle and then at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris, Eric Fottorino started as a freelance reporter for Libération and La Tribune de l’économie.

He joined the daily newspaper Le Monde in 1986, initially as a news desk editor, tracking records of incoming source material, eventually moving on to work with agricultural and African source material. He then became a reporter (1995-1997) before becoming editor-in-chief in 1998, then a chroniqueur (a journalist who writes as a specialist in a particular domain) in 2003.