Bernard Brizay

Bernard Brizay was born Bernard Tournoy on 4 August 1941 in Mont-Saint-Aignan, in the Seine-Maritime department of Normandy. French press later associated his childhood and studies with the Rouen area. He grew up in postwar France and pursued a classical humanities path that combined history with literature and the visual arts.

He earned a licence and a higher degree in history, with a thesis on French travelers in Rome in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as licences in French literature and the history of art. That mix of narrative history and art historical training later shaped both his journalism and his illustrated, place-based books on Beijing, Shanghai, and the Forbidden City.

Brizay left teaching in 1969 for political and economic journalism at Entreprise and Le Nouvel Économiste. In 1976 Éditions du Seuil published Le Patronat français. In 1977 the Eisenhower Foundation hosted him in the United States for a study of American employers, which became Le Patronat américain (PUF). He contributed to TF1's L'Enjeu and, from 1979, worked as a grand reporter at Le Figaro until retiring from journalism in 2005.

His first trip to China in August 1979 began a lifelong engagement. After more than twenty visits, a walk in October 2000 through the ruins of Yuanming Yuan, the Old Summer Palace destroyed and looted in 1860, convinced him to write a full history of that episode. The resulting book, Le Sac du palais d'Été, made him a reference voice in France on the Second Opium War and on memory politics around Chinese cultural heritage.

After Le Sac du palais d'Été (2003), Brizay published Les Trois soeurs Soong (2007), Le Roman de Pékin (2008), Shanghai, le Paris de l'Orient (2010), La France en Chine, du XVIIe siècle à nos jours (2013), Les trente "empereurs" qui ont fait la Chine (2018), and Petite et grande histoire de la Cité interdite (2023). Several titles were translated into Chinese and circulated during Franco-Chinese cultural years and book fairs.

The Chinese edition of his Summer Palace history received the Wenjin Prize from the National Library of China in 2007. Shanghai, le Paris de l'Orient won the Auguste Pavie Prize of the Académie des sciences d'outre-mer in 2011. In August 2014 he received the Special Book Award of China at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing for promoting Chinese culture abroad.

Beyond journalism and trade books, Brizay taught history of art earlier in his career and later served as a visiting or associate professor at Shenyang University in Liaoning. He took part in commemorations and media interviews around the 150th anniversary of the looting of Yuanming Yuan and remained a recurring voice on French history podcasts about imperial China.

Public sources record his birth surname as Tournoy and his professional name as Brizay. Detailed information about his spouse or children was not made public in the obituaries and notices reviewed for this profile. He spent his later years between France and repeated stays in China related to research, translation, and teaching.

Brizay helped French readers approach Chinese history through narrative books rather than only academic monographs. His Summer Palace study became a reference in debates about looted art and historical memory, while later volumes on Shanghai, Franco-Chinese relations, Chinese emperors, and the Forbidden City kept him present in bookshops and broadcast interviews into the 2020s.

Bernard Brizay died on 22 September 2026 at the age of 85. A funeral ceremony was announced for 30 September 2026 at the chapel of Église Saint-François-Xavier in Paris, followed by cremation at the Père-Lachaise crematorium. The cause of death was not made public.