Mazarine Pingeot


Mazarine Marie Pingeot, who changed her name to Mazarine Marie Mitterrand Pingeot in November 2016, is a French writer, journalist and professor.

Biography

Pingeot is the daughter of former French president François Mitterrand and his mistress Anne Pingeot. She is said to be named after the Bibliothèque Mazarine, the oldest library in France, because of her parents' love for books. The existence of this daughter of president Mitterrand was long hidden from the press but was almost revealed by the French writer Jean-Edern Hallier. Ensuring confidentiality about it was one of the motivations behind some of the illegal wiretapping that Mitterrand ordered under the guise of fighting terrorism.
She was a student first at the elite lycée Henri-IV in Paris and then at the École Normale Supérieure de Fontenay-Saint-Cloud, a highly prestigious school. In 1997 she passed the agrégation de philosophie, and then briefly started - but did not complete - a Ph.D. thesis on the philosopher Spinoza, working as a teaching assistant at the Université de Provence Aix-Marseille I.
She was also a journalist and a television anchor.

Works

In 1998, she published her first novel, titled Premier Roman, which was not highly praised by critics but was translated into many languages, including English. In 2000 she published Zeyn or the Reconquest, for which Charles Bremner of The Times wrote "If there was a prize for braving the ridicule of critics, it would go to Mazarine Pingeot". In 2003, she published a series of literary comments, "They told me who I was". In February 2005, she published her fourth book, Not a Word, a diary about her childhood life as a national secret. In 2007 she published her fifth book, Le Cimetière des poupées, a novel about a woman who kills her baby and puts it in a freezer.

Family

She has one son, born 2005 and two daughters, born 2007 and 2009 with her former partner Mohamed Ulad-Mohand, a film director.