Journalist, foreign correspondent and prolific biographer

Jean Lacouture, who has died aged 94, was a journalist, historian and prolific biographer, who composed lives of many of the most outstanding figures in French literary and political life.

In a long professional life, he published, in addition to work for newspapers and magazines, 71 books. Journalism has been called the first draft of history and indeed in 1961 Lacouture launched a series called “L’histoire immédiate” with the prestigious publisher Seuil. Immediate history does, however, run the risk of needing to be revised at a later stage when more facts have come to light and Lacouture sometimes had to revisit some of his earlier confident judgments, particularly on the merits of revolutionary movements like the Khmer Rouge or phenomena like the Chinese “cultural revolution” .

He was born in Bordeaux in 1921, the son of Joseph, a surgeon, and Anne-Marie (Servantie). Though his family background was strongly conservative – his mother in particular was an intransigent political Catholic – the young Jean gravitated towards the left, though his political engagement in the Resistance was to be somewhat tardy.

He enrolled in 1939 at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po), later returning to Bordeaux to study law. In April 1944 he joined a unit of the maquis and later entered Germany as part of the second armoured unit of Gen Philippe Leclerc. Indo-China In October 1945 he joined the French army in Indo-China as part of its press service, helping to produce a newspaper for the troops. At a time when a negotiated settlement between the French and the Viet Minh (predecessor of the Viet Cong) seemed possible, Lacouture met, and was hugely impressed by the revolutionary leaders Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap. In 1946, however, war broke out, culminating in eventual French defeat in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu.

On a further military posting in Morocco he met his future wife, Simonne Grésillon, a journalist with Agence France Presse and a convinced anti-colonialist. She was to be a major influence on his thinking: “My sails were well set by Simonne; she was my admiral.”

In 1949 he became diplomatic editor of Combat, a newspaper associated, in the postwar period, with Albert Camus. From 1957 until 1976, he worked for Le Monde, where he was eventually to become foreign editor.

He was in Egypt in 1956 when Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal. He strongly deprecated the ensuing Anglo-French intervention and retained an admiration for Nasser. During the 1960s he began also to write for Le Nouvel Observateur, edited by his friend Jean Daniel.

In the 1960s too he embarked on his parallel career as a biographer, tackling Charles de Gaulle first in 1965 and returning to him, more sympathetically, in a three-volume study in the 1980s.

Among his other subjects were John F Kennedy, François Mitterrand, Greta Garbo, French prime ministers Léon Blum and Pierre Mendès France and the writers Montaigne, Montesquieu, Stendhal and Malraux.

Side by side with his vast literary output he somehow found the time to indulge his huge enthusiasms for opera, rugby and bullfighting. His wife, Simonne, died in 2011.