Which characteristics of the People narrative explain its current success in France? The author first considers the intertextuality of People narrative structures: their roots in other popular forms but also their transferral to all the contemporary French media, irrespective of their degree of legitimacy. He then defines the semantic and syntactic peculiarities of the People genre with, above all, the creation of a narrative around the photographic image, in a system where the star's body must at all costs serve as evidence. Finally, these structures are compared with various analyses on popular culture or the mediatization of private life. What type of satisfaction does the gossip columnist's narrative produce: a form of escape, symbolic compensation for social inequalities? The pleasure of recomposing a social puzzle or the excitement of merging news with fiction?