Philippe de Baleine

French journalist who may have inspired a character in Tintin

Philippe de Baleine, a prominent French journalist and magazine editor who pursued a parallel career as a prolific author, often writing under a pseudonym, died on 7 June at his home in Paris. He was 96.

An author of some 50 novels and non-fiction books, de Baleine received two prizes from the Académie Française, France’s top literary academy, including one for Voyage Espiègle et Romanesque sur le Petit Train du Congo(roughly A Mischievous and Romantic Trip on Congo’s Little Train). A colourful travel journal published in 1993, it chronicled a trip of more than 300 miles aboard a train that connected Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of Congo, to the city of Pointe-noire on the Atlantic Ocean. It was one of several books in which de Baleine recounted journeys on historic railroad lines in West Africa, a region that was fertile ground for his travel writing.

In the 1990s, de Baleine turned to writing a detective series about the British royal family under the pseudonym Margaret Ring. On the back covers of his books (which were not translated into English), he described Ring as the widow of a military attaché of The Queen and said she lived on a farm in Sussex, England.

He also wrote ten detective books under the pseudonym Philip Whale – an apparent play on the name Baleine, which means “whale” in French – in a series overseen by the best-selling spy novelist Gérard de Villiers.

De Baleine was editor-inchief of the news weekly Paris Match in the 1970s and 1980s. At other times he also ran the French version of the women’s magazine Marie Claire and the French scientific monthly Sciences & Vie, among other publications.

As a journalist, he reported from West Africa and Southeast Asia, where he covered the first Indochina war, in which colonial French forces were defeated by the insurgent Viet Minh in 1954. He later covered the Vietnam War.

De Baleine’s vivid reporting was said to have been an inspiration for the Belgian cartoonist Hergé (the pen name of Georges Remi). He is widely believed to have based one of his characters in The Adventures of Tintin on de Baleine. The character, Jean-baptiste de la Battellerie was a restless, colourful reporter always on the lookout for scoops. François Pédron, a friend who worked with de Baleine at Paris Match for 15 years, said: “Philippe was admired for his rigour, both as a reporter and as an editor, so he’d rather see that caricature of himself in Tintin as an honor.”

De Baleine was born in Paris on 27 September 1921, the eldest son of an upper-class family. He and his six siblings grew up in the affluent 16th Arrondissement in western Paris, where he would spend most of his life. He began his journalistic career after studying law. In 1946 he was named editor-in-chief of the daily France Soir, a leading newspaper in the first years after the Secondworld War.

He joined Paris Match as a reporter at large in 1949, around the time the magazine was relaunched with a strong emphasis on international reporting and photojournalism, much like Life magazine in the United States.

After the photographer and publisher Daniel Filippacchi purchased the magazine in 1976, de Baleine became its editor-in-chief. He held that job until 1984.

By then he had embraced a second career as a writer of books, both fiction and nonfiction. He published his last book in 2011 at 91. His family said he had been writing his memoirs at his death.

De Baleine took many trips to West Africa, which Marina de Baleine, his second daughter, said was his favourite region. There he completed several first-person books focusing on railroad travel. In addition to the one about the Congo train, they included one that recounted a trip along the rail line that connects Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, to Abidjan, the coastal urban centre in Ivory Coast, almost 700 miles to the south.

“Where could I find better comic scenes, sometimes tragic ones, than on those colourful convoys, those traveling circuses?” de Baleine wrote in Le Petit Train des Cacahuètes (The Little Train That Carried Peanuts), about a trip from the port city of Dakar, the capital of Senegal, to Bamako, the capital of Mali, about 850 miles inland.

Marina de Baleine, who once went on a train trip from Ouagadougou to Abidjan with her father, said: “He was curious about everything, from the French subway system to Congolese sorcerers he would meet on his reporting trips.”

De Baleine’s first two marriages, to Christiane Werts and Monica Vejarano, ended in divorce.

In addition to his daughters Marie-christine, from his first marriage, and Marina de Baleine, from his second, he is survived by another daughter, Isabelle de Baleine, also from his first marriage; his third wife, Martine Nair; a son, Arthur de Baleine, from his third marriage; and four grandchildren.

Three of de Baleine’s children became journalists.

“Although my father wasn’t much of an extrovert, he always had fascinating tales and stories from his many travels,” Marie-christine said. “I was fascinated by him, and I’m sure my sisters were, too, which might explain why we wanted to do the same job.”

Pédron, his friend and former colleague, said of de Baleine, with a touch of drollery: “What he loved the most was long-form reporting, because those stories would send him far away for a pretty long time. He would have peace for two months, and he was happy with that.”

ELIAN PELTIER