The day Michel Fourniret sent a classified ad to Le Pèlerin

“Prisoner would like to correspond with people of all ages to forget loneliness.” This totally banal text, published in a small advert in Le Pèlerin on September 12, 1986, obviously could not suggest the drama that was about to unfold.

That a manipulator like Michel Fourniret thought that he would find, in the columns of a Catholic weekly, an interlocutor to begin an epistolary exchange with him is not surprising. Our studies show that our readers are engaged citizens, involved in a number of social and charitable activities: many of them, as such, are prison visitors. But that this call found an echo in a personality as disturbed and disturbing as that of Monique Olivier is a form of mystery that escapes us.

What more can I add? Our classifieds pages, which have existed for half a century, continue and will continue to offer asylum to prisoners wishing to break their isolation. The attention paid to the excluded, and prisoners are one of them, is one of the values ​​​​held by our title, dean of French weeklies. The correspondence that takes place on this occasion allows, in the vast majority of cases, discreet and fraternal solidarity. These do not belong to us.