His existence was eventful, punctuated by resurrections. He liked to say that as a young man, hit by a car while leaving one of the gay clubs he was roaming around at the time, he was pronounced dead. On the way to the morgue, we realize that his heart is beating: turn around, head to the hospital where, for the first time, doctors save his life.
He was born, like his older sister Isabelle – a virtuoso pianist who died prematurely – and his younger brother Marc, into a Protestant and fanciful family. The father, Jean, a polytechnician, gave up a brilliant job to devote himself to painting – he also founded the Seita museum, open from 1979 to 2000. The mother, Catherine Cambier, illustrated children’s books. All these little people live, on rue du Cherche-Midi, in a huge apartment invaded by paintings and grand pianos, a place suitable for all kinds of parties.
Frédéric Edelmann began scattered studies, interrupted in 1977 in favor of a career as a journalist. For years, he will be for Le Monde a caustic architecture critic, respected, feared, multiplying the barbs against the Tartuffe of the trowel, supporting the concrete artists, daring in the columns of his newspaper puns far from the Beuve-Méry doctrine (“be boring”). Let us cite for example the “beau logis Nouvel estarrive”, published on a certain Thursday at the end of November. This playfulness is only the screen for a vast culture and an eclecticism that has never been quenched which gave rise, at the beginning of the 2000s, to a passion for China where Frédéric Edelmann made numerous trips and whose language he studied.
Handsome guy with his false appearance of Burt Lancaster, figure of the Parisian homosexual world – he even takes the very austere director of Le Monde, Jacques Fauvet to the Palace, for one improbable evening – he is one of the first in France to anticipate the ravages of AIDS and co-founded the Aides association in 1984 with, among others, Daniel Defert (1927-2023) and Jean-Florian Mettetal (1952-1992), a doctor with insolent beauty and a touchy character. The two men have had a tempestuous love affair for several years: they left Aides in 1986 for Arcat-Sida, an organization geared more towards health professionals, and launched the Journal du sida. Edelmann’s commitment earned him the Legion of Honor; his relevance as an architectural critic, numerous prizes and the rosette of Arts and Letters.
Also read: Françoise Barré-Sinoussi: “We still cannot cure AIDS”
Shortly after learning of his HIV status, Frédéric Edelmann met the second major love of his life, Caroline Bagros, in the mid-1980s; he marries this spicy blonde who looks like Mireille Darc from the Grand blond era. Over time, he contracts just about every disease imaginable and, each time, defeats them. AIDS, which killed Jean-Florian Mettetal and so many other loved ones, tried to kill him: the journalist was saved at the last minute by his stoicism, his sense of derision and, above all, the arrival of triple therapies.
Despite their separation, he and Caroline never divorced: she watched over the exhausted phoenix until the end, supported by Henri, her doctor companion. Frédéric Edelmann died in Caroline’s arms, shortly after whispering to her: “You are an angel.”
