'Libération' celebrates half a century of life

This particular concern of Libération, a newspaper based in 1973 by thinker Jean Paul Sartre and journalist Serge July, was printed yesterday.

'Libération' celebrates half a century of life

This particular concern of Libération, a newspaper based in 1973 by thinker Jean Paul Sartre and journalist Serge July, was printed yesterday. He was born a Maoist, however it might be higher to explain him as a Trotskyist as a result of he has at all times been in "everlasting revolution". At first of the century I used to be a marketing consultant in three tasks promoted by Serge and his CEO, Evence-Charles Copée, a shrewd Belgian aristocrat, associated to the household that owns the monarchist La Libre Belgique. Serge and Evence wished to modernize the official organ of the gauche divine and for this they sought Édouard Rothschild as patron of a method that was a mix of “counterculture and political radicalism”.

My days in Libé started at ten within the morning with a tumultuous editorial board that generally lasted a number of hours. Assembly attended by about 25 journalists. Serge opened the assembly, however he went out and in, took calls, attended to guests and, now and again, took a stroll to criticize coverages or dynamit limitless monologues fashion mais oui, mais non que trien el de polleguera.

After that bonfire of the vanities, we went to Chez Jenny, an Alsatian restaurant in Plaça de la República. There Libé had a free bar and a reserved one with a communal desk only for us. At that noon meal, which lasted two or three hours, it was actually determined what the subsequent day's newspaper could be like.

"Now you'll perceive - Serge informed me - that in Libé we don't publish editorials: right here it's not possible to agree on something".

Meeting democracy of a newspaper that was born rejecting "capitalist promoting" till it went bankrupt after a number of weeks. Then Sartre returned to the lecture rooms and July determined that it was one factor to battle bourgeois France, and one other to be naive. That is how Trotskyism germinated, the pragmatism that has allowed them to outlive and piss off all presidents and prime ministers: from the enlightened Mitterrand (who hated them) to the tightrope walker Macron (who ignores them).

All this seasoned with large doses of creativity in iconic firsts or luxurious editions, as was asking Tàpies for example a whole version of Libé when Catalan turned 80 years outdated.

At the moment Libé is owned by a Dutch telecommunications group, however its editorial stays the identical. André Gattolin, who was its advertising and marketing director (and was virtually killed), and is now a senator for the Greens, informed me that Libé's "downside" was to not get new younger readers, however that over time 'develop into bourgeois and go to Le Monde.

Its journalists have been at all times younger and rebellious; they entered as squatters that there was no approach to evict they usually have been those who hold alive the best of an iconoclastic newspaper during which the outdated guard was at all times seen as a category of "chaise longue intellectuals" .

If Le Monde was born from the ashes of Le Temps, Libération is a distant baby of the elegant Fight by Albert Camus, and it was at all times on the antipodes of the plumb L'Humanité. Irreducible, clever and provocative journalism: a method that should not die. Honor and glory.

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