The Fourth Estate of the Fifth Republic
ALAN, RAY
WHY THE FRENCH PRESS HAS FAILED The Fourth Estate of the Fifth Republic By Ray Alan Paris It was a Frenchman, Joseph de Maistre, who declared that every nation has the government it...
...The "respectable" Les Temps, which naive foreigners considered the Times of France, distinguished itself by accepting money from Nazi Germany, the Comit?© des Forges and, on one occasion, the Soviet Union-along with "guidance" (on which its editorials were directly and systematically based) from the Quai d'Orsay...
...Nor has its corollary, that peoples generally have the kind of press they deserve...
...Significant, too, is the relative profusion-reduced under the Fifth Republic by governmental sanctions-of "inside information" newsletters and weeklies, such as the La Canard Encha?®n?© and Aux Ecoutes, which purport to supply the reader with news and comment the rest of the press dare not or will not print...
...It must be stressed, however, that General de Gaulle has been much more tolerant of criticism than, for instance, Guy Mollet, whose government was condemned by the International Press Institute in 1957 for 40 specific violations of press freedom in six months-a record in the democratic world...
...Robert Murphy is stated to be on his way to Bonn, as American Ambassador, for the purpose of wrecking the Paris-Bonn axis, long after his retirement from public service has been announced...
...The headline-winning secrets prized out of Buckingham Palace, the White House and the Imperial Court of Iran by the semi-literate hacks who work for some of the wilder weeklies are among the curiosities of Europe...
...Today, only about a third of the capital's dailies earn their keep, and only four are affluent: the sensationalist conservative France-soir, the sober bourgeois Le Figaro, and the Iow-iq Right-wing Le Parisien lib?©r?© and L'Aurore...
...It is hard to say, but this particular cycle is one only journalistic integrity and courage can break...
...President Kennedy is reported to be sending troops to the Congo three or four days after he has made it clear that U.S...
...The present regime has also followed its predecessor's example in confiscating entire issues of critical newspapers, conducting the operation in such a manner as to cause them the maximum financial loss ("frapper dans la caisse" is the technical term...
...Even when the editor of a marginal paper has wrestled with his conscience and his chief accountant to decide whether he can afford to forego subsidies and brave seizures, he is not out of the woods...
...But the habit of political apathy and resignation, which he and the men in charge of his information media are doing their best to encourage, is unlikely to facilitate a democratic revival...
...But one cannot help contrasting the strength and authority of the leading provincial journals with the flabbiness of most of the Parisian daily press and the mistrust it all too often inspires...
...Yet the instinct of the press, with only a few honorable exceptions, is to specialize either in partisan, self-defeating abuse or -the general rule-in chauvinism and sycophancy...
...French workingclass housing does not yet offer a degree of privacy and comfort conducive to prolonged reading...
...The Catholic La Croix and Communist L'Humanit?© are said to be kept afloat by the earnings of their profitable week-end magazines...
...and as French families acquire more spacious accommodation and invest in their first armchairs, television is apt to insinuate itself at the expense of the press...
...All this suggests that the weakness of the Paris daily press is due primarily to the average Frenchman's lack of confidence in it...
...troops will not be available for service there...
...Thus: The complexities of the UK-Commonwealth-EEC triangle are boiled down to a British desire to flood Europe with trash manufactured in British-owned sweatshops in the Far East...
...T?©moignage Chr?©tien, a uberai Catholic weekly considered so fair and honest that most of the French Protestants I know read it...
...The problem is much older than the Fifth Republic...
...Similarly, the marriage of Governor Nelson Rockefeller's son to a Norwegian girl a few years ago was reported in Paris as having been arranged to provide Rockefeller with headlines and political capital to counteract the effects of Richard Nixon's trip to Russia...
...Unable to maintain an adequate staff of correspondents and specialists, he may find himself, especially if he wishes to blaze a distinctive trail, devoting an unhealthy proportion of his space to the more or less psychotic guesswork of weary part-timers and ill-paid hacks...
...French S?»ret?© officials, whose contempt for their national press is profound, estimate that in the last years of the Third Republic more than half the dailies published in Paris were in receipt of subsidies from the German, Italian or Soviet embassies, or from French organizations dedicated to the destruction of democracy...
...Much of this may be true...
...This does not mean, of course, that all other Paris dailies are harlots, though it does suggest that most of them are rather unhealthy...
...When there is a major crisis, it is papers like the La Canard, Le Monde, L'Express and L'Humanit?© that make the biggest immediate gains, and the sales of Swiss, British and American dailies rise sharply...
...Le Populaire, a pathetic ghost of the paper L?©on Blum once edited, has for years been a pensioner of the Socialist party and is periodically threatened with closure...
...But few of the unsubsidized papers were much better: The depraved L'Action Fran?§aise, for example, one of France's bestselling and most successful journals, churned out day after day for 30 years a torrent of lies, abuse and obscenity quite without parallel in the democratic world...
...Citizens who lack confidence in their nation's newspapers buy fewer of them...
...This failure has given the Government, through its control of the Agence France-Presse, a source of influence over French newspapers no less corrosive of journalistic self-respect than its secret funds and confiscatory power...
...Liberals here console themselves, as do liberals in Spain, with the thought that their ruler is an aging man...
...Covert subsidization is still practiced, but most of the money is contributed by the French taxpayer...
...Now that he is engaged (in violation of his own Constitution) in establishing a "presidential" regime in which he will dominate legislature, executive and most of the judiciary-and control radio, television and the nation's only news agency-a reliable, respected press might have provided France with at least one substantial safeguard against the abuses all absolutism breeds...
...While only four Paris dailies sell more than 250,000 copies, nine provincial dailies top this figure, and, over the whole country, the "provincials" outsell the "nationals" by about two to one-a ratio that takes more than chiens ?©cras?©s and histoires de clocher to explain...
...The easy answer is that too many papers-15, compared with 14 dailies in London, and seven in New York-are chasing too few readers and too little advertising money...
...Which came first, the material chicken or the moral egg...
...Why are so few Paris papers self-supporting...
...and La Nation fran?§aise, a royalist Catholic journal whose readers tend to believe that theirs is the one paper that can be trusted...
...A year later at Angers, echoing men Prime Minister Michel Debr?©, Mollet declared that "France is the only country with a completely free press,' and that journalists had only themselves to blame if "accidents" happened to them from time to time...
...L'Humanit?©, holy writ to the Communist party faithful...
...It is an open question whom Frenchmen mistrust more: their politicians or their newspaper editors...
...La Canard Encha?®n?©, admired outside France as brilliantly comic, is taken very seriously by most of its French readers, who include a high proportion of teachers and journalists: Over 60 per cent of them rely on it, in preference to any other paper, for their understanding of current affairs...
...Fewer than 250 newspapers are sold per thousand inhabitants in France, compared with 327 per thousand in the U.S., 381 in Australia, 383 in New Zealand, 464 in Sweden, and 573 in Great Britain...
...French circulation managers attribute their poor showing to a number of factors: French papers are slightly more expensive, and wages slightly lower, than in Britain and Scandinavia...
...and the papers, economically debilitated, are driven deeper into the practices and compromises that lose readers' confidence...
...The unrepentant Mollet told a meeting at Evreux in 1959, in reply to criticism on this point, that "it is very advantageous for a paper to be seized by the authorities since it receives considerable free publicity...
...Served by such a press, the Third Republic was extraordinarily robust to survive as long as it did...
...Le Monde sells about 210,000 copies, a few thousand fewer than L'Humanit...
...And American and/or British plots are held responsible for such events as the FLN revolt in Algeria, the ultra uprising of May 13, 1958, the Salan mutiny in Algiers and the Ghana-Guinea "union.' (All these examples are from "moderate" papers...
...It is a habit a responsible press could help to break...
...the last is from a frontpage editorial, quite unsupported by even a semblance of evidence, in Le Monde...
...The proCommunist Lib?©ration claims that donations from readers balance its budget...
...One other major consequence of the economic weakness of the Paris press must be noted: its inability to maintain an independent news agency that might be comparable with Reuters and the AP...
...A constitutional conference in Nigeria is described as a meeting to organize anti-French agitation in West Africa...
...The moral bankruptcy of the politicians opened the way for General Charles de Gaulle's drive for personal power...
...Nor can one ignore the success of the weekly L'Express, a success due primarily to its reputation for honesty and courage, or the loyalty inspired by more or less doctrinaire, and therefore reputedly uncompromising, papers like FranceObservateur, a Socialist weekly...
...But one of his own ministers, Andr?© Philip, who quarrelled with him on this point, has written of Mollet's Premiership: "Not since the P?©tain regime had France experienced such systematic and intensive use of all information media for the purpose of suffocating freedom of expression and thought and maintaining the government in power...
...Two or three papers, such as the Right-wing Paris-Jour (formerly Paris-Journal, originally the moderately Left-wing Franc-Tireur) and Combat, provide wealthy individuals with a fascinating if expensive hobby, and perhaps a hope of political influence...
...Under the Fifth Republic, as under the Fourth, the coyness of the majority of French newspapers over successive administrative scandals and such matters as the bazooka affair, the use of torture by the Army, and last fall's atrocities against Moslems by the Paris police (generally unreported until two liberal weeklies published details), has been a depressing reminder of the extent to which the moral and political weakness of democracy in France is bound up with the moral and material weakness of the Paris press...
...Meanwhile, the last word is, appropriately enough, with General de Gaulle, who last year described the French press scathingly-but also, perhaps, gratefully-as "cette presse qui ne s'occupe pas de grands probl??mes mais de petites histoires" Ray Alan, a regular New Leader correspondent, often reports on European and North African affairs...
...If dollars, rubles and exAlgerian francs are heard rattling occasionally, it is chiefly in the begging bowls of a few of the weaker weeklies...
...Only Francesoir, Paris-Match, and the weeklies that specialize in royal soap operas and the boudoir battle order of the entertainment world have circulations in excess of one million...
...The Fourth Republic established a secret fund to spare editors the embarrassment of soliciting foreign charity, and the Fifth Republic proved no less considerate...
...It is also argued -in the capital!-that in the provinces the French are on the whole more provincial in outlook (that is, less interested in national affairs) and probably more insular (less interested in the outside world) than their British and Scandinavian counterparts, and prefer the chiens ?©cras?©s and histoires de clocher of their local paper to topics Paris editors consider important...
...It is the servility, not the freedom, of the press which has brought disaster on our land...
...The generally responsible Le Monde, successor to Les Temps, was suspected in its early years of leaning rather heavily on the Quai d'Orsay, but it now attracts sufficient quality advertising to assure its independence...
...There will never be public-spiritedness in France without an independent press": The quotation is not from an editorial in L'Express by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber but from a speech by Fran?§ois Ren?© Chateaubriand in 1817...
...WHY THE FRENCH PRESS HAS FAILED The Fourth Estate of the Fifth Republic By Ray Alan Paris It was a Frenchman, Joseph de Maistre, who declared that every nation has the government it deserves, but his truism has never been popular in France...
Vol. 45 • October 1962 • No. 22
