Claude Sarraute

Claude Sarraute (24 July 1927 – 20 June 2023) was a French writer and journalist and columnist for Le Monde. She was a recurring panelist on the humoristic radio show Les Grosses Têtes between 1984–1995 and from 2014 until her death. She was the daughter of lawyer and novelist Nathalie Sarraute, and lawyer Raymond Sarraute. Her first marriage, with American journalist Stanley Karnow (1925–2013), lasted from 1948 to 1955. She remarried in 1957 to doctor Christophe Tzara (1927–2018), son of Swedish artist Greta Knutson and Romanian Dada poet Tristan Tzara. They had two sons, Laurent and Martin, and divorced in 1966. In 1967, she was married to Jean-François Revel (1924–2006), philosopher, writer and member of the Académie Française from 1998 on. They had two children, a daughter Véronique (born 1968) and a son Nicolas Revel (born 1966), the former Chief of Staff of the Prime Minister Jean Castex.

During the war, her mother and two sisters fled the capital because of the anti-Jewish laws of the Nazi-collaborating Vichy France, but Claude and her father stayed in her native Paris. After the war, she worked for four years as an actress, mainly playing minor roles in avant-garde pieces by contemporaries like Romain Weingarten, until she started working for Le Monde in the early 1950s. She died in the 4th arrondissement of Paris at the age of 95.