Jean Testanière: the “star medium” comes out of the shadows

They are called Michel Delpech, Isabelle Adjani or François Mitterrand. Essential personalities with different destinies, who have the common point of speaking to the hearts of the French. They all, one day, approached Jean Testanière, nicknamed the “medium of the stars”. If he does not claim this nickname, he does indeed claim to have divinatory abilities. Today, he tells his story with some of the greatest French glories in his first book “And if life was only a beginning? » (XO Editions), written with four hands with Aurélie Fredy.

Today, no one is unaware that François Mitterrand could occasionally take an interest in divinatory practices and that he had a certain sensitivity to the stars. In 2000, Elizabeth Teissier, the former president’s appointed astrologer, thus revealed to the general public the intimate conversations she had with the former president between 1989 and 1995, with whom she was willingly granted a secret affair. General de Gaulle too, a man of Catholic faith with little suspicion of sympathy for these practices, would nevertheless have allowed himself to be advised, half-wordly, by Maurice Vasset, a career soldier and resistance fighter versed in astrology. At the beginning of the 20th century, it was Madame Fraya, a palmist, supposedly able to read the lines of the hand, who was regularly visited by Georges Clemenceau, Raymond Poincaré and even the socialist Jean Jaurès. Little wonder that many statesmen have been tempted, knowing that 28% of French people believe in astrology, according to the findings of a YouGov study conducted in 2019.

An extraordinary life journey

Jean Testanière is, in a way, one of those. Mediums, mages, diviners, fortune-tellers who advise the greatest – and sometimes the most modest. Often discreet people with a low inclination for the light. Who, however, sometimes come out of the shadows and tell their extraordinary stories. Jean Testanière thus has an impressive network of friends from the world of song or cinema and has established himself, over the years, as an influential man in the whole of Paris. For example, he will be in the front row of François Hollande’s speech at Le Bourget, a turning point in the socialist candidate’s campaign in 2012. An impressive career that he does not owe to his personal fortune, his social capital from birth, his name or any sense of plot. The greater part of his life, he has in fact spent outside these circles, concentrating on his work as a teacher and as a specialist educator with disabled children, in the south of France, hence his accent. suggests that he is from. It is his gift as a medium that would have allowed him to have one of the most extensive address books in the capital. He has, according to him – and he insists – never marketed his services as a medium, offering them to the biggest stars, as well as to all comers, most often at their request.

In “What if life was just the beginning“, Jean Testanière goes back in depth on a somewhat chaotic life path, which will see him tossed between different schools, morally overwhelmed by growth retardation, weakened by the early death of his father and gradually realizing that he has, according to him, a particularity, an “anomaly”. From a classic school scene, accurately depicted twenty-four hours before it happens, to visions of dead people or deeper predictions, all the scenes evoked by Jean Testanière breathe the irrational and the inexplicable. Jean Testanière is well aware that the subject is eminently sensitive and often lends itself to criticism. It does not claim, however, to convince its readership, which may or may not choose to believe it. He also returns extensively to the Catholic religion, which rocked his childhood and to which he adhered for a long time, with a faith of the charcoal burner specific to the Latins. With Jean Testanière,the junction between the stars of heaven and earthas he says in his book, is never far away.

” I have always been amazed at the spontaneity with which people trusted me, opening wide the doors of their secret garden, giving themselves up without ever doubting my discretion »

Optimism at heart

A reader with little interest in divination or mediumship has every interest in reading the book as the autobiography of a man who, coming from a fundamentally modest background and who devoted part of his life to handicapped children, succeeded in win the highest echelons of Parisian life. “The mystical epic of a small provincial punctuated by intoxicating peaks and devastating abysses», in his own words, taken from his book in which, however, reigns an optimism and a refreshing love of life. “I have always been amazed at the spontaneity with which people trusted me, opening wide the doors of their secret garden, giving themselves up without ever doubting my discretion (…)“, he confides in the prologue of his book. Those less permeable to mysticism will agree without difficulty, on reading these lines, that his benevolence and his kindness are undoubtedly two undeniable gifts specific to Jean Testanière.