Yannick Seigneur

Yannick Seigneur, born May 24, 1941 in Paris and died November 28, 2001 in Passy (Haute-Savoie), is a mountaineer who has to his credit more than 500 route openings. Considered one of the most brilliant guides of his generation, Yannick Seigneur is the first Frenchman to have climbed three "8000". He is the father of four children: Loic, Yann-Éric, Adriane and Raphaëlle. He spent his first ten years between Paris, where his father worked as a mover, and Megève, where his farmer grandfather taught him to herd sheep. At the age of 10, his parents rejected in Megève, without him being interested in mountaineering. At 18, he joined the INSA engineering school in Lyon, and graduated 5 years later. Athlete, French university champion in athletics in 1961, he discovered mountaineering thanks to a few friends, including Jean-Paul Paris. In 1965, he graduated as a mountain guide and moved to Chamonix. In his time, he was the best French mountaineer, in competition with the Italian Reinhold Messner for the conquest of the fourteen "8000". Yannick Seigneur was the forerunner of alpine expeditions in the Himalayas, a climbing technique taken up by all the great mountaineers today. But by openly claiming to be a mountaineering professional who commercializes his exploits - via sponsorship, advertising, media coverage and films - Yannick Seigneur strongly offended his contemporaries, who reproached him for selling his soul to the devil. . He was rejected and ostracized by the mountain world, because he embodied a form of commodification of mountaineering for its own glory, a fact that had become commonplace in the world of mountaineering... Nevertheless, he opened the way to the "starization" of mountaineers in the 1980s, to individual exploits - speed, sequence of several summits - and to commercial expeditions of which he was also the precursor. Being too ahead of the times sometimes comes at a high price. Yannick Seigneur was an iconoclastic mountaineer... Yannick Seigneur died of cancer on November 28, 2001 and was buried in the Chamonix cemetery.