Bernard Tapie: the man with a thousand lives

Bernard Tapie, who has died aged 78, was a colourful French entrepreneur, star of screen and stage, politician, sports icon, press baron and convicted felon. It was a roller-coaster life.

Bernard Tapie
(Image credit: © FRED DUFOUR/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

Famed for his tan and bouffant hair, Bernard Tapie, who has died aged 78, was by far France’s most glamorous business tycoon: admired even by detractors for his derring-do. “Half Count of Monte Cristo, half Jean Valjean” (hero of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables), he “wrote his own legend”, says Le Figaro. “No one could dictate his conduct,” and his career “mirrored the contradictions and fractures in France’s own history”. For Le Monde, Tapie was simply the man “with a thousand lives”.

Shrewd entrepreneur, star of screen and stage, politician, sports icon, press baron… “the elephant in the eulogies” following Tapie’s death, says The Guardian, “was his recurring relationship with French justice” – notably convictions for football match-fixing and tax fraud that saw him jailed for several months in the mid-1990s. But, as he later admitted, “the biggest” of all the “stupid mistakes” was the “Adidas controversy” – a complex legal battle that began in 1993, became a national obsession and “poisoned the last decades” of his life.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.