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IT PRIDES itself on being France’s mouthpiece of the free-thinking left, an irreverent daily founded in the wake of the 1968 student revolt by Maoist luminaries and Jean-Paul Sartre.
But the French newspaper Liberation plunged into its own existential crisis after the editor was asked to leave, and the paper which once boasted that it cared nothing about money found its future on the line in a row over funds.
Serge July, 63, a Sorbonne-educated, one-time Maoist revolutionary and veteran of France’s 1968 student rebellion, called journalists together at 10am after the paper’s daily news conference. The editor, who older colleagues call “the father”, announced that he had been asked to leave by the newspaper’s major shareholder, Edouard de Rothschild, who would not pump any more money into the ailing title while July still held the reins.
Journalists on the paper known simply as Libe described it as the end of an era and said the future of the title needed to be secured in a slumping print market.
Libe was launched by radicals in 1973 breaking with the bourgeoisie and running irreverent headlines. When the film star Jean Gabin died in 1978, it carried the headline: “Gabin is dead, [President] Giscard is in the shit, the Beaujolais is good, France carries on.”
Angelique Chrisafis
