Departures of note

Antoine Spire was a French journalist, essayist, publisher and intellectual who became one of the defining voices of France Culture radio. Joining the station in 1976, he spent more than twenty years producing and hosting landmark programs such as Voix du silence, which gave a platform to exiles and the dispossessed, Staccato, a daily cultural magazine approaching current events through the human sciences, and long interviews with leading intellectuals on À voix nue. He made radio a place for the confrontation of ideas and for giving new voices their chance.

Born in Paris into an old French Jewish family from Lorraine, Spire studied at HEC and earned a master's degree in sociology in 1968. He spent twelve years in the French Communist Party, working as commercial director of the party's publishing house Éditions sociales before leaving in 1978 and later directing the collection "J'écris ton nom... liberté" at Éditions du Seuil. From 1985 to 1987 he was cultural editor-in-chief at Le Matin de Paris.

Beyond radio, Spire collaborated on numerous works of popularization with intellectuals including Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, George Steiner and Edgar Morin, directed collections at Éditions Le Bord de l'eau, and served as director of the human sciences research department at the Institut national du cancer. He was elected president of the PEN Club Français in 2020. He also led editorial advising at Le Monde and contributed to La Vie over a long and varied career.