Le Monde and Le Temps

This profile considers Le Monde and Le Temps.

Introduction

Le Temps and its successor Le Monde have served as France's newspapers of record - counterparts to the Times in London, the New York Times, the Sydney Morning Herald or the Age in Australia.

Le Monde and Le Monde diplomatique

Le Monde was founded in November 1944 by Hubert Beuve-Méry (1902-1989) as a national daily evening newspaper that would be the "conscience of the nation" and replace the venerable Le Temps. Beuve-Mery appears to have been influenced by Emmanuel Mounier and by the 'Uriage' movement centred around Pierre Dunoyer de Segonzac, which also influenced the development of the Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA) established in 1944.

As of 2003 Le Monde had a circulation of around 400,000, with accumulated losses of several million dollars. In March 2005 the Le Monde board announced a recapitalization agreement in which Spanish publisher Grupo PRISA and French defense and media group Lagardere SA would contribute €25 million each to a capital increase alongside other potential new investors.

The paper has traditionally valued its seriousness (arguably centred on style rather than rigorous analysis and investigation), with one advocate noting that

for a long time it cherished an editorial practice of not publishing any photographs to accompany articles! Layout and the gray and thickly laid pages suggested excessive seriousness, bordering on repulsion for many people.

Until bailed out by business in 1994 it also emphasised its independence - with an expectation that it would be self-sustaining rather than reliant on the pockets of a rich parent (eg Dassault) or subventions from a particular interest, such as those received by its precursor Le Temps.

Perry Anderson, in a 2004 lament for French Exceptionalism, claimed that Le Monde had formerly been

the world's finest newspaper ... Under the austere regime of Hubert Beuve-Méry, Paris enjoyed a daily whose international coverage, political independence and intellectual standards put it in a class by itself in the Western press of the time. The New York Times, the Times or the Frankfurter Allgemeine were provincial rags by comparison.

He went on to denounce it as

a travesty of the daily created by Beuve-Méry: shrill, conformist and parochial, increasingly made in the image of its website, which assails the viewer with more fatuous pop-ups and inane advertisements than an American tabloid. The disgust that many of its own readers, trapped by the absence of an alternative, feel for what it has become was revealed when a highly uneven polemic against the trio of managers who have debauched it - Alain Minc, Edwy Plenel and Jean-Marie Colombani - sold 200,000 copies, in the face of legal threats against the authors, later withdrawn to avoid further discomfiture of them in court.

La Face cachée du 'Monde' had for example claimed that Le Monde's directors inflated the paper's circulation figures, disguised the paper's financial standing while concurrently attacking business people who engage in financial malfeasance, and abused their power to obtain "advantages that permit them to put their accounts in a better position".

Historian Richard Vinen more acutely commented that

Libération reads almost like a deliberate antithesis of Le Monde and, as befits a gifted and spoiled youth, it benefits from an extraordinary degree of indulgence. Le Monde, which has been right about so many important things (Stalinism in the 1940s; torture during the Algerian war), is pilloried every time it falls short of its own impossibly high standards.

Associated publications

Le Monde is the flagship publication of Groupe Le Monde. The group includes

Le Monde diplomatique with a circulation of around 120,000,
weekly news magazine Courrier international (175,000) and
bimonthly Maniere de voir.

It has a small stake in Swiss daily Le Temps (formed through the 1998 merger of Le Nouveau Quotidien and Le Journal de Genève) and controlled by a Edipresse-Ringier joint venture.

Le Monde diplomatique was founded by Beuve-Méry in 1954 and gained a separate legal existence in 1995, with Group Le Monde transferring a 49% stake to the Gunter Holzmann Association.

The association includes the newspaper's employees and the Le Monde diplomatique Friends Association - around 10,000 readers. It was established after Gunter Holzmann announced a donation of US$1 million to ensure the paper's legal independence. That ownership by a non-profit is broadly similar to arrangements for A-Pressen, PCM and the Guardian Media Group.

Le Temps

Le Temps was founded in 1861 by Auguste Nefftzer (1820-1874) but is best associated with Adrien Hebrard (1833-1914).

Nefftzer was born in Colmar and began as a journalist at the Courrier du Haut-Rhin, subsequently becoming editor (and later manager) of the Paris daily La Presse. With Charles Dollfus he founded La Nouvelle Revue germanique (1858-1865), one of the more interesting attempts to bridge the cultural gap between France and Germany.

Prior to the 1940s Le Temps had become the French daily newspaper of record, with a smaller circulation but greater respect than Le Figaro. Like the Times in London under the Astors it was not subsidized by a stable of more popular publications and was thus dependent on the largesse of wealthy investors. That led to criticism that Le Temps was either a mouthpiece for commercial interests - for example an embodiment of the Mur d'Argent - or had been 'bought' by particular individuals and organisations, such as the de Wendel and Schneider steel-making interests.

Le Temps was underwhelmed by right wing radicalism during the 1930s, in contrast to Coty's Le Figaro, and de Wendel famously complained that France needed to return to an 'apolitical' conservatism. It adopted a cautious approach to Vichy but was increasingly captured after 1942. That capture resulted in refusal by the new government to licence it after the Germans left Paris in 1944.

Studies

Richard Barbrook's Media Freedom: The Contradictions of Communications in the Age of Modernity (London: Pluto Press 1995) and Marc Martin's Medias et journalistes de la Republique (Paris: Editions Odile Jacob 1997) consider the French regulatory environment and media concentration.

There is a more detailed account in the five volume Histoire Générale de la Presse Française (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France 1969-1976) by Claude Bellanger, Jacques Godechot, Pierre Guiral & Fernand Terrou. Raymond Kuhn's concise The Media in France (London: Routledge 1995) is also of particular value.

Le Monde's history is covered in Le Monde, 1944-1995 Histoire d'une entreprise de presse (Paris: Le Monde Editions 1996) by Patrick Eveno, Le Monde 1944-1996, Histoire d'un journal, un journal dans l'histoire (Paris: Plon 1996) by Jacques Thibau and Histoire et idéologie du Journal Le Monde (Aachen: Verlag Shaker 1993) by Annie Finkeldei.

For denunciations see Le Monde Tel Qu'il Est (Paris: Plon 1976) by Michel Legris and La Face cachée du 'Monde': Du contre-pouvoir aux abus de pouvoir (Paris: Mille et Une Nuits 2004) by Pierre Péan & Philippe Cohen. For the founder see Laurent Greilsamer's Hubert Beuve Mery (Paris: Fayard) and Richard Vinen's Bourgeois Politics in France, 1945-1951 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1995). Background about Dunoyer de Segonzac is provided by John Hellman's The Knight-Monks of Vichy France: Uriage, 1940-1945 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's Uni Press 1997).

Positioning vis a vis Libération is highlighted in works noted in the separate profile for that newspaper, including the The Long March of the French Left (London: Macmillan 1981) by Richard Johnson.

For Nefftzer see René Martin's Le vrai visage de l'Alsace. La vie d'un grand journaliste: Auguste Nefftzer fondateur de la Revue Germanique et du Temps (Besançon: Editions Camponovo 1953).

For the Wendels see Pierre Fritsch's Les Wendel, Rois de l'Acier Français (Paris: Laffont 1976), Jean Jeanneny's more searching François de Wendel en République: l'argent et le pouvoir, 1914-1940 (Paris: Seuil 1976), The Wendel Family: 'Affectio Societatis': The Story of A French Industrial Dynasty (1704-1976) (Fontainebleau: INSEAD 1999) by Christine Blondel & Ludo Van der Heyden and La banque Seillière-Demachy: Une dynastie familiale au centre du négoce, de la finance et des arts 1798-1998 (Paris: éditions Perrin 1999) edited by Raymond Dartevelle.

Chronology

1858 La Nouvelle Revue germanique founded by Auguste Nefftzer & Charles Dollfus

1861 Le Temps established by Nefftzer

1865 La Nouvelle Revue germanique closes

1904 Jaures founds L'Humanité

1920 PCF gains control of L'Humanité

1944 Le Temps refused licence (and thus suppressed) for collaboration

1944 Hubert Beuve-Mery founds Le Monde

1954 founds Le Monde diplomatique

1973 JP Sartre & Serge July found Libération

1988 Le Monde group launches Manière de voir as quarterly magazine

1994 business sector bails out Le Monde

1995 establishment of Holzmann Association

1996 SA Investissements Press comes under control of Pathé

1996 Le Monde diplomatique becomes separate company 51% owned by Group Le Monde

1997 Manière de voir becomes bimonthly

2001 Le Monde buys Sandoz Family Foundation's 20% stake in Geneva daily Le Temps

2003 20% stake in Le Temps reduced to 5%, with 82% held by Edipresse-Ringier joint venture