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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Although it appears every day around one o'clock, the Paris newspaper Le Monde is dated to the following morning, so that the paper one reads on Monday afternoon is written as though it were already Tuesday, and things that may happen today appear to have happened yesterday, while what happened last night appears to have happened two days ago. Even news that has not yet taken place is thus imbued with a note of calming retrospective hindsight. The postdating of actuality is typical of Le Monde's loft and what was, for a long time, its serenity. As it celebrates its sixtieth anniversary next month, it comes as close as any newspaper can to being the official journal of an entire educated nation.
It is hard to adequately explain just what Le Monde means to France. People say that it is like the Times in New York, but the Times seems, in comparison, modest in its ambitions. The Times, like certain pagan gods, claims only omnipresence: it is everywhere and sees all. Le Monde, like the God of the Old Testament, claims omnipresence and omniscience: it sees all, knows everything, and is always right.
A tabloid-size paper, folded like a broadsheet, it is perhaps the least newsy of all the great newspapers. Its circulation is currently around three hundred and fifty thousand, small by British standards. It is one of three important national dailies still left in France, along with the smaller Liberation, the left-wing daily that was founded as a Maoist instruction sheet in 1973 and evolved into a paper that is still one of the most entertaining in the world; and, of nearly equal size, Le Figaro, the conservative daily (and the only surviving paper from the Cubist collage era) that has lately gone from diehard Gaullist to sprightly Gallo-Thatcherian.
The front page of Le Monde usually begins with a headline that is, as often as not, recapitulative rather than declarative: "the american election approaches," or "m. putin: in the face of terrorism." Until recently, there was almost never a front-page photograph, and never one in itself sensational. (Faits divers is the French phrase for personality journalism, and Le Monde gets in trouble with its readers when it publishes any. Even the cursory treatment it gave to the inquest on the death of Princess Diana was regarded by many of its readers as inexcusable tabloidism.) Instead, nearly every day the headline is set off by a sketch by the paper's chief cartoonist, Plantu, who tends to be somewhat to the anarchic left of the editors. Until 1995, the front page began with an elaborate Gothic masthead and offered an editorial conducted in a tone of du haut en bas, in which the high was very high and the low very low.
Le Monde is not, by the anxious standards of American journalism, exhaustively reported; French journalists tend to think that there are more interesting things to do in life than to pester some politician or official who has never said anything interesting in the first place for one more quote. The news pages incline toward crisp and knowing summaries, with the first sheaf of stories devoted to foreign news, the second to French news, much of it written in an ironic, confident tone such as The Economist achieves in English. It is in the opinion pages, now called Debats, that the paper shows its real juice and superiority. Day after day, these pages, edited by a worried, serious intellectual named Michel Kajman, engage in high-minded debate on serious issues, where the reader is expected to grasp an allusion to Heidegger or a gesture toward Habermas. The opinions run, Kajman says, "from the democratic left to the democratic right; the extreme right and the undemocratic left have no place in our paper." It is far from kind to French nationalism, and far from uniformly hostile to the United States. One of the most talked-about opinion pieces in Le Monde in recent years was by Philippe Sollers, and accused all French culture of vegetating, of having become "moldy."
The editorial proper, which follows the opinion pages, is usually mild and brief. Then there are several business pages, a single page on sports, a science page, and reviews of jazz and classical concerts and movies and theatre. Once a week, the book review appears, typically with sonorous reviews of recent fiction and intelligent reviews of books on history and philosophy. The reviews are often positive, not to say effusive; in French magazine and newspaper reviews, the lines of friendship--of the reseau, the network, in which a writer happens to be situated--can usually be seen as clearly as the strings on a marionette in an old "Thunderbirds" show. On Fridays (that is, Thursdays), the paper does what is, by New York standards, a fairly cursory job of covering food and restaurants, perhaps for the same reason that the Times does a fairly cursory job of covering pigeons: they are just too familiar to notice much.
Despite the air of serene continuity, though, Le Monde has, in the past year and a half, endured a crisis that has riled its staff and undermined the paper's credibility--and which has certain parallels to the crises that overtook the BBC, accused of mishandling sources, and the Times, with the Jayson Blair affair, during the same period. "I doubt that anyone in France has undergone the degree of examination and inquisition that we three have in the past year," said Jean-Marie Colombani, the paper's editor-in-chief and director (and the man who wrote the now famous "We Are All Americans"...
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