Janine Boissard, the French novelist whose six-volume L’Esprit de famille saga followed the Moreau family, died in Paris on Sept. 26, 2026, at age 93, according to a death notice. Her publisher, Fayard, announced her death on Sept. 28. A funeral service was listed for Oct. 2 at Notre-Dame-de-Grâce-de-Passy in Paris. The notice and reports reviewed here do not state a cause of death.
Born in Paris on Dec. 18, 1932, Boissard published her first novel, Driss, at 22 under the name Janine Oriano. She used that name for early work before publishing as Janine Boissard, the byline that became closely associated with her family saga. The change came after a first stretch of writing that included both novels and crime fiction.
In 1971, B comme Baptiste appeared in Gallimard’s Série Noire collection. ActuaLitté identifies Boissard as the first French woman published in the series. She later worked for television as a screenwriter, adapter and dialogue writer. Her career moved between genres and formats, with the crime collection providing an early milestone before she found wider recognition in family fiction.
Boissard began publishing L’Esprit de famille under her own name in the late 1970s. The six books appeared between 1977 and 1984 and follow the Moreau family and its four daughters: Claire, Bernadette, Pauline and Cécile. The sequence includes Claire et le bonheur, L’Avenir de Bernadette, Moi, Pauline and Cécile et son amour. In the publisher’s description, the sisters have sharply different interests and abilities, but share an attachment to their home and parents, whom they both challenge and admire. The books frame family as a place where relatives gather strength before turning back toward the wider world, not a way of shutting it out.
The final book makes that family idea concrete in a fictional crisis. At Christmas, the Moreaus learn that Dr. Moreau has had a cardiac event. Cécile encounters a new love, while Bernadette takes on the challenge of trying to save her in-laws’ castle by starting a pony-riding school. The synopsis puts affection, grief, work and fresh beginnings in the same household, rather than treating family life as a single uncomplicated feeling.
The series also moved to television. TF1 adapted it in 1982 as a seven-episode series, and Boissard took part in the screenplay, adaptation and dialogue. ActuaLitté identifies Roland-Bernard as director and Maurice Biraud, Denise Grey and Anne Teyssèdre among the cast. The TV series is one of several screen versions tied to her work; other books, including Recherche grand-mère désespérément and La Maison des enfants, were adapted for film or television. Boissard saw her writing travel from page to screen productions she helped shape.
She continued publishing long after the Moreau series ended. ActuaLitté lists novels including Une femme en blanc, Marie-Tempête, Au plaisir d’aimer and Une femme, an autobiographical book published in 2016. Fayard released Puisque tu m’aimes in 2020, Ne pleure plus, Marie in 2021, Quand la belle se réveillera in 2022 and Elle parlait aux fleurs in 2023. In 2025, Puisque tu m’aimes also appeared in paperback. Fayard described her career as nearly 70 years and more than fifty books.
ActuaLitté also reports that Boissard received the Palmes académiques for her work with young people. That recognition adds another strand to a public life often associated with family novels: her writing career spanned adult fiction, work for television and a distinction for youth-focused service.
Fayard’s announcement described Boissard as exceptionally kind, with a quick and mischievous sense of humor, and said her books had brought millions of readers together across generations. Those are the publisher’s words. The work behind them is concrete: a six-volume series, multiple screen adaptations and new novels published for decades after the Moreau sisters first appeared.
Her writing crossed from crime fiction to popular family novels, then into scripts and later books. L’Esprit de famille remained her most recognized series, but it formed one part of a career that lasted close to seven decades. Readers can still follow that path in the books themselves, from Driss under the Oriano name to the novels she published as Janine Boissard.
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