Olivier Todd, Anglophile author, friend of Sartre, biographer of Albert Camus and 1960s BBC presenter

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10-03-2025

Olivier Todd, who has died aged 95, achieved celebrity in France as a war correspondent, intimate of Sartre and biographer of Camus; he was also a familiar face on the BBC in the 1960s, analysing les événements for British viewers and winning admirers both for his reporting and his Gallic good looks.
Born Oliver René Louis Todd (though he preferred the French form of his first name) at Neuilly-sur-Seine on June 19 1929, he was the illegitimate son of an English expat in France, Helen Todd – herself the illegitimate daughter of Dorothy Todd, who in 1926 had been sacked as editor of British Vogue for practising lesbianism.
His father, an Austro-Hungarian architect called Julius Oblatt, was long out of the picture by the time Oliver was born. His mother scratched a living as an English tutor; the Occupation years were especially lean.
After studying at the Sorbonne, in 1947 he won a scholarship to read moral sciences at Corpus Christi, Cambridge. The following year, aged 19, he married Anne-Marie Nizan, daughter of the philosopher Paul Nizan, who had been killed at Dunkirk; Jean-Paul Sartre was her guardian.
Sartre, whom Todd came to regard as something of a surrogate father, helped him find a publisher for his first book and wrote a preface for it. This was Half a Campaign (1956), an excoriating study of the failings of the French army in Morocco, where Todd did his National Service in the early 1950s.
While in Morocco the Anglophone Todd had been asked to provide some commentary by a BBC unit. He went on to be a regular contributor to BBC radio from the mid-1950s, giving talks on everything from the Nouveau Roman to Tintin and European Humanism.
In 1964 he joined the staff of the political weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, reporting from the Middle East and Vietnam. Sartre provided him with a letter of introduction to the North Vietnamese premier, Pham Văn Đong.
During this period Todd visited London once a fortnight to host Europa, BBC Two's round-up of European affairs; he was also a regular on BBC One's daily news magazine 24 Hours. In 1967 he offered a foreigner's view of 'Swinging London', alongside Robert Hughes and Lewis Nkosi, in the celebrated documentary Three Swings on a Pendulum.
In France he became well-known as an interviewer, persuading Sartre to make his first television appearance, and controversially asking Alain Delon whether he was bisexual (the actor denied it, but added: 'What harm would there have been in it?')
Todd had opposed US involvement in Vietnam, but, unusually for a French Left-wing intellectual, he was no enthusiast for Communism; he came to realise – as he observed in his book on the fall of Saigon, Cruel April (1975) – that 'I had militated to establish a regime in Saigon that I condemned in Prague or Budapest.' He refused to toe the line of Le Nouvel Observateur's support for the Vietnamese Communists, and in 1977 defected to Sir James Goldsmith's magazine L'Express as executive editor.
At first Todd and Goldsmith, both demi-Englishmen, got on well. But Todd would not water down his support for the Socialist, François Mitterrand, or his attacks on the incumbent president, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, a friend of Goldsmith's. He was summarily sacked in 1981.
Thereafter he became a full-time author. He was appointed the official biographer of Albert Camus, and after much labour his highly lauded life, described by William Boyd in The Daily Telegraph as 'remarkably candid and thorough', was published in 1996. He also wrote biographies of the musician Jacques Brel (1984) and the novelist André Malraux (2001).
Todd wrote several novels, notably Year of the Crab (1972): this was based closely on his own experiences of depression and nervous breakdown, and how he achieved some equilibrium by tracking down and getting to know his father.
After Sartre's death in 1980 he published a memoir of their friendship, A Rebel Son. The book provoked a sour response from Sartre's lover Simone de Beauvoir, who claimed in her own memoirs that 'as [Todd] was perpetually looking for a father, Sartre, whose deep benevolence often took the form of easy kindness, dedicated a book to him – 'For my rebel son.' But in fact… he did not like him at all.'
The Cambridge-educated Todd was always suspicious of the influence of his old friend on French literature: 'Sartre's terrorism somehow still numbs a lot of writers – there is the belief you have to be some sort of philosopher to be a novelist,' he wrote in the Telegraph in 1993. That year he was invited to serve as the first French judge of the Booker Prize and was delighted by the unpretentiousness of British fiction.
Never one to let pass an opportunity for a grand gesture, Todd almost missed the Booker judges' final deliberations and the prize ceremony. At the last minute he refused to use the ticket he had been sent for a British Airways flight from Paris, in protest at BA's banning Salman Rushdie from its flights as a potential terrorist target. The Booker organisers were forced to stump up for a second ticket.
He remained combative in old age, in 2009 denouncing President Sarkozy's proposal to transfer Camus's remains to the Panthéon: 'Sarkozy needs a little intellectual glitter… This is a gimmick.'
Olivier Todd was appointed a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1996.
With his first wife he had a son, the historian Emmanuel Todd, and a daughter. The marriage was dissolved and in 1982 he married France Huser, with whom he had another daughter. There was also a son by another relationship.
Olivier Todd, born June 19 1929, died December 28 2024
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