Pierre Péan

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Pierre Péan is a controversial French author and journalist.

In L'Homme de l'Ombre ("Man of the Shadows"), Péan described Jacques Foccart's life, who was de Gaulle's advisor for African matters. Foccart deposed a lawsuit against him for libel, but Péan won it.

In 2003, he published La face cachée du Monde ("The hidden face of Le Monde) with Philippe Cohen. The book criticized the French newspaper's editors, claiming that they had purposefully turned their backs on Le Monde's past ethics. In particular, they alleged that Colombani and Plenel had, amongst other things, shown partisan bias (concerning Corsica, for example) and engaged in financial dealings that compromised the paper's independence. These findings remain controversial, but attracted much attention in France and around the world at the time of their publication, not least due to the fact that they impugned the analytical reliability of a paper whose emphasis is precisely on analysis and not simply straight reporting. Le Monde's difficulties have been accounted in part to this book.

In 2005, he published Noires fureurs, blancs menteurs. Rwanda, 1990-1994 ("Black furies, white liars. Rwanda, 1990-1994") about the Rwandan genocide. This controversial book was an explicit attack on François-Xavier Verschave's work concerning the Françafrique, a term conotting the specific kind of neocolonialism imposed by de Gaulle and successive presidents of the Fifth Republic on the former African colonies of the French colonial empire. In his book, Pierre Péan alleges the existence of a "counter-genocide", which immediately sparked critics of his book as a revisionist attempt to alter the accepted history of the Rwanda genocide with a false comparison.