His great-grandfather Michel Kauffmann left Alsace in 1871 after the Treaty of Frankfurt and settled in the region of Vitré. Jean-Paul Kauffmann was born at Saint-Pierre-la-Cour but when he was nine months old, his parents joined Corps-Nuds, in Ille-et-Vilaine, to take over a bakery. He entered as a boarder in a religious college at age 11. Unhappy during these "overwhelming years", he took refuge in reading the works of Balzac, Stendhal and above all, Jean de La Fontaine. For love of literature, he believed he had the vocation of a journalist and studied at the École supérieure de journalisme de Lille between 1962 and 1966. He did his military service as a cooperant in an educational service in Quebec. He extended his stay there by working in a weekly supplement in the Montreal press. Assistant to the Quiet Revolution, he dreamed of staying permanently in this country after falling in love with Mara, a bookseller from Latvia, as he recounts in his narrative Courlande.
Hostage in Lebanon
Returning to France in 1970, he was employed as a journalist for Radio France Internationale for seven years, then to AFP. In 1977, he joined the editorial office of the daily Le Matin de Paris and in 1984 became a grand reporter for . While his magazine sent him to Lebanon, he was abducted in Beirut with sociologist Michel Seurat on 22 May 1985. His wife was actively committed to his release which happened on 4 May 1988 with other hostages, through the intervention of Jean-Charles Marchiani, while Jacques Chirac was Prime minister of François Mitterrand. Michel Seurat, for his part, died in custody in 1986. On the occasion of this abduction, Jean-Paul Kauffman lived the traumatic experience of traveling on several occasions, wrapped in an Oriental carpet where asphyxia led him to lose consciousness, which led him to deepen his reflection and strongly marked his life:
Writer
In 1994, Jean-Paul Kauffmann created the magazine L'Amateur de cigare. As a writer, he published L' which earned the Prix Jean-Freustié, then La Chambre noire de Longwood : le voyage à Sainte-Hélène which was awarded numerous prizes ; La Lutte avec l'Ange and 31, allées Damour - Raymond Guérin 1905-1955. All these books have a common theme: enclosure, but never directly evoke his experience of hostage. In 2002, Jean-Paul Kauffmann received the Grand prix de littérature Paul-Morand awarded by the Académie française. For the first time in 2007, in La Maison du retour, he evokes his captivity, his hostage position and the moments that followed his return, the painful relearning a "normal" life, his inability to read, him the literature enthusiast. As in all Jean-Paul Kauffmann's books, everything is written in a hushed tone through the history of buying a house, a den or an airlock to return to his family, towards life. An amateur of Bordeaux wines, he has published several books on this subject. With Courlande, the story of a journey is the plot of several quests including that of the identity of a country, Courland. He was awarded the Prix de la langue française in 2009 for all his work.
1997: Preface to Brouillard d'automne, by, La Table Ronde
1997: L'Œil originel, photographs by Frédéric Desmesure, published on the occasion of the 9th Salon Vinexpo and the exhibition "Regards du monde", Bordeaux, Parc des expositions, 16–20 June 1997,
