The former head of the Midi libre agency in Bagnols, creator of the Gard Côte du Rhône company and president of the Friends of Rabelais has died at the age of 92.
Writer, journalist, man of culture, oenophile… Jacques Bonnaud, who died on Saturday March 5 at the age of 92, marked the history of Bagnols-sur-Cèze and the Rhone Gard.
Born in Nîmes on July 14, 1929, he began his career in 1950 as a sports journalist for La Marseillaise. Recruited by Midi Libre in 1954, he was given the task of creating an agency in Bagnols-sur-Cèze, of which he was responsible until his retirement in 1993.
“Today we are orphans…”
Jacques Bonnaud had been one of the founding members and first president of the Compagnie de la Côte du Rhône gardoise, which he had launched on the occasion of a Grand Prix Midi Libre cyclist whose arrival was in Bagnols on June 10, 1980.
“It was Jacques who had the idea of a wine brotherhood” recalls Géry Delbecque, president of the brotherhood since 2004, following Jacques Bonnaud. “Today, we are orphans… He was a great humanist, with extraordinary tolerance, a man of progress“admires the winemaker impressed by the great culture of his predecessor, one of whose great passions was Rabelais, or even opera.
An enthusiast of François Rabelais
Founding president of the Friends of Rabelais, Jacques Bonnaud had written a book “Gargantua, Rabelais en terre gardoise”, reissued in 2017, a text corrected from the one he had published 20 years earlier “Rabelais et le Gard”.
For years, he collected documents, works, objects around François Rabelais that he bequeathed to the city of Bagnols and which are kept in the Léon-Alègre media library.
Last October, an exhibition at the Rhone art center Saint-Maur, made it possible to discover part of this collection, one of the most beautiful French dedicated to the great writer and humanist of the sixteenth century.
The companions of the Côte du Rhône Gardoise had also taken over a sentence of Rabelais: “No honest noble man ever hates good wine.“
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Jacques Bonnaud was thus at the origin of the creation of the Académie de Lascours in 1988, of which he had been the president and then the permanent secretary until 2004, with the desire to disseminate knowledge and culture in the territory of the Rhone Gard.
This father of two sons, Pierre and Philippe, – from his marriage to Jeanine in 1953 –, grandfather of three grandchildren, Matthieu, Sara and Alexis, and great-grandfather of Chloé and Mathis, devoted to his town of Bagnols-sur-Cèze, where he was president of the council of wise men. He had written several books about his town.
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