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 as one of the most brilliant guides of his generation, Yannick Seigneur is the first Frenchman to have recorded 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 di him worked as a mover, and Megève, where his farmer grandfather taught him to herd sheep. At the age of 10, his parents told him to return to Megève, without his being interested in mountaineering. At 18, he joined the INSA engineering school in Lyon, and graduated from him 5 years later. Sportsman, champion of France university of athletics in 1961, he discovered mountaineering thanks to some friends, including Jean-Paul Paris. In 1965, he was awarded a diploma in high mountain guides and settled in Chamonix.

In his time, he was the best French mountaineer, competing 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 markets his exploits di him – via sponsorship, advertising, media coverage and films – Yannick Seigneur strongly offended his contemporaries di him, who criticized him for selling his soul tells him 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 his time, di him, sometimes pays a heavy price. Yannick Seigneur was an iconoclastic mountaineer…

Yannick Seigneur died of cancer on November 28, 2001 and was buried in the Chamonix cemetery.