"Libération does not need a requiem," wrote Edouard de Rothschild in Le Monde in July, trying to persuade the readers that France's other great left-wing newspaper was not about to fold. As Libération's largest shareholder (38.7 per cent), no one can blame him for trying, but few were taken in. Eighteen months earlier, the baron had announced he would save the paper with €20m, but that money has already gone and each month the paper loses a further €1m, four times more than was budgeted. With circulation down to 137,000, de Rothschild is unwilling to invest more unless the staff trim €6m a year off running costs—two thirds of which would come from wages. If Libération's problems were merely financial, de Rothschild might be right to pooh-pooh the premature obituaries, but they go much deeper, stemming from an editorial policy, indeed a very identity, which no longer reflects today's France.
"La France d'en bas, the France of fields and factories, the metro and tramways shall have a voice," proclaimed Libération's first editorial, written in May 1973 by the founding editor Jean-Paul Sartre and his 31-year-old acolyte, fellow Maoist Serge July. If any one person incarnates Libération today, it is July, principal editor for 33 years. With time and success, the paper mellowed: in 1981, Maoism gave way to Mitterrandism, but July remained true to the newspaper's rebellious independence—and his devoted journalists. "He set the guidelines on the important issues—racism, threats to democracy—and then gave us freedom to write," says Denis Robert, a former Libération journalist whose investigation into the Clearstream banking scandal recently threatened the government. "He refused a political label, encouraging writers whose ideas were the opposite of his own." When the great and not so good are under investigation, one staffer told me, "they spend hours on the phone to July, pressuring him to get us off their backs. But July never mentions it—and has never changed a word I've written."
Libération became the smart radical's essential reading—emblematic of a certain idea the French have of themselves. Then, in the 1990s, July discovered the American press. "That was the beginning of the end," according to Denis Robert. "He dropped the readers' letters and put in a financial page. As it lost its youth, the paper lost its impertinence and independence. Trying to be serious, it lost its readers."
July, meanwhile, had become the acceptable face of nonconformity: fashionable author, intellectual, television commentator—with an arrogance to match. Like all French opinion-formers, in May 2005 July assumed his compatriots would do as he bid and toe the establishment line on the European constitution. When they didn't, he was furious and in an infamous editorial equated those who voted against the treaty with the xenophobic, racist Jean-Marie Le Pen. That did not go down well with his readers, 53 per cent of whom had voted "no." In June this year, following "a deep disagreement about recapitalisation" with de Rothschild, July resigned.
But while Libération's journalists despair, claiming July was sacked, and the mainstream press is polite or silent, the blogs are less forgiving: "Libération never questions the unbridgeable divide between its journalists, almost all from the Paris-Po-bourgeoisie, and the world beyond the périphérique"; "The French no longer want to read so-called serious papers and journalists no longer want to produce readable ones." Certainly in France profonde few now buy Libération, claiming it represents only a type of Paris intellectual whose concerns are irrelevant to the rest of France. To attract new readers, Libération needs a different format. "People don't want more news," one editor admitted. "They want opinions." The editors developed a project for a daily magazine with only six major items—in-depth analysis, plus a report, an investigation, an interview. The verdict from de Rothschild's camp was the idea had come too late. The paper limps on, a dwindling shadow.
But the print versions of Le Monde and Le Figaro are also doing badly. It is not just a question of losing readers to the internet and free press, since at least two papers are consistently increasing their circulation: L'Equipe—a sports paper that last year became France's bestselling national daily—and La Croix, a Catholic daily whose circulation is rising to rival Libération's. Le Figaro, representing the largely Catholic right, while still losing readers nevertheless managed last year to push Le Monde into third position, perhaps a small sign of a deeper change in French thinking: the secular and intellectual giving way to religion and sport. But no national daily competes with the top regionals—Ouest France virtually outsells Le Monde, Le Figaro and Libération combined.
But Libération can still at times express what many consider the best of France, with a wry, often acerbic humour that cuts through the pomposity of its rivals. For 33 years it has represented "a certain idea of France"—not De Gaulle's, perhaps, although there are similarities in its provocation, its independence and its defence of moral principles. It successfully spun the Sartrian myth of the French radical intellectual; now, alas, a vanishing species.
