Christiane Perruchot, a French journalist who began reporting in 1981, has distilled four decades of personal archives into a 344-page portrait of Burgundy, published by regional press specialist Liralest.
The project started with a box of notes. After she stopped working, Perruchot began sorting material she had accumulated since May 5, 1981—the day she signed her first articles for La Gazette d’Autun, a twice-weekly newspaper in Saône-et-Loire, a department in eastern France.
Her original plan was to hand the archive to students for a possible academic thesis. Instead, she decided to write the book herself.
From La Gazette d’Autun to Traces Ecrites News
Perruchot’s career spans a wide range of French newsrooms. After La Gazette d’Autun, she contributed to Le Moniteur, Le Monde, Les Echos, and L’Yonne républicaine.
In 1991, she founded the press agency Traces Ecrites. Its economic newsletter, Traces Ecrites News, carried her final article in July 2022—closing out 41 years of reporting rooted in a single region and what the article describes as a substantial body of raw material.
“When I stopped my activity, I wanted to sort my archives and my initial idea was to hand them to students for a possible thesis, before telling myself that I could do this work myself,” she said. She finished the first chapter in October 2023, then spent fall 2024 in an intensive push to meet deadlines set with the publisher.
Mitterrand in Château-Chinon as a symbolic starting point
The book’s cover sets the tone: a photo of François Mitterrand at the restaurant “Au Vieux Morvan” in Château-Chinon, taken on May 10, 1981—the night of the second round of France’s presidential election.
It frames Burgundy first as a political backdrop, before turning to the region’s wine country, whose global reputation took shape over the same four decades Perruchot covered as a reporter.
The book tracks Burgundy’s political, economic, and social life from the Mitterrand years through what Perruchot calls the region’s wine “golden age.”
A publishing project rooted in regional journalism
Traces Ecrites, the agency Perruchot founded in 1991, remains a reference point for economic coverage of Bourgogne–Franche-Comté and the Grand Est—two administrative regions in eastern France.
The book positions itself in that same tradition: journalism rather than memoir, built from primary sources and four decades of on-the-ground reporting.
Liralest, the publisher, specializes in regional titles.
