This special issue of Libération, a newspaper founded in 1973 by philosopher Jean Paul Sartre and journalist Serge July, was published yesterday. He was born a Maoist, but it would be better to describe him as a Trotskyist because he has always been in “permanent revolution”. At the beginning of the century I was a consultant in three projects promoted by Serge and his CEO, Evence-Charles Copée, a shrewd Belgian aristocrat, related to the family that owns the monarchist La Libre Belgique. Serge and Evence wanted to modernize the official organ of the gauche divine and for this they sought Édouard Rothschild as patron of a formula that was a combination of “counterculture and political radicalismâ€.
My days in Libé began at ten in the morning with a tumultuous editorial board that sometimes lasted several hours. Meeting attended by about 25 journalists. Serge opened the meeting, but he went in and out, took calls, attended to visitors and, from time to time, took a walk to criticize coverages or dynamit endless monologues style 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 table just for us. At that midday meal, which lasted two or three hours, it was really decided what the next day’s newspaper would be like.
“Now you will understand – Serge told me – that in Libé we do not publish editorials: here it is impossible to agree on anything”.
Assembly democracy of a newspaper that was born rejecting “capitalist advertising” until it went bankrupt after a few weeks. Then Sartre returned to the classrooms and July decided that it was one thing to fight bourgeois France, and another to be naive. This is how Trotskyism germinated, the pragmatism that has allowed them to survive 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 massive doses of creativity in iconic firsts or luxury editions, as was asking Tà pies to illustrate a complete edition of Libé when Catalan turned 80 years old.
Today Libé is owned by a Dutch telecommunications group, but its editorial remains the same. André Gattolin, who was its marketing director (and was almost killed), and is now a senator for the Greens, told me that Libé’s “problem” was not to get new young readers, but that over the years ‘become bourgeois and go to Le Monde.
Its journalists were always young and rebellious; they entered as squatters that there was no way to evict and they have been the ones who keep alive the ideal of an iconoclastic newspaper in which the old guard was always seen as a class of “chaise longue intellectuals” .
If Le Monde was born from the ashes of Le Temps, Libération is a distant child of the elegant Combat by Albert Camus, and it was always at the antipodes of the plumb L’Humanité. Irreducible, intelligent and provocative journalism: a formula that must not die. Honor and glory.
