This special issue of Libération, a newspaper founded in 1973 by the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre and the 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 turn of the century I was a consultant on three projects promoted by Serge and his CEO Evence-Charles Copée, a shrewd Belgian aristocrat, related to the family that owns the royalist La Libre Belgique. Serge and Evence wanted to modernize the official organ of the “gauche divine” and for that they looked for Édouard Rothschild as patron of a formula that was a combination “counter-culture and political radicalism”.
My days in Libé began at 10 in the morning with a tumultuous “Conseil de Rédaction” that sometimes lasted several hours. Meeting attended by about 25 journalists. Serge would open the meeting, but he would go in and out, receive calls, attend visitors and, from time to time, would put his hand out for a walk to criticize coverage or blow up endless “mais oui, mais non” style monologues that would drive him crazy.
After that “bonfire of the vanities” we went to Chez Jenny, an Alsatian restaurant in the Place de la République. There Líbé had an open bar and a "reserved" with a communal table just for us. In that noon meal, which lasted another two or three hours, they 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“Now you will understand -Serge told me- that in Libé we do not publish editorials: here it is impossible to agree on anything at all”.
Assembly democracy of a newspaper that was born rejecting “capitalist advertising” until it went bankrupt in a few weeks. Then Sartre returned to the classroom and July decided that it was one thing to fight bourgeois France and another to be naive. This is how the pragmatism Trotskyism germinated that has allowed them to survive and annoy all the 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, such as asking Tapies to illustrate a complete edition of Libé when the Catalan turned 80.
Today Libé is owned by a Dutch telecommunications group, but its wording remains the same. André Gattolín, who was its marketing director (and was nearly killed), and is now a senator for the Greens, told me that Libé's "problem" was not getting new young readers, but that over the years they would not become bourgeois and They will 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 have kept alive the ideal of an iconoclastic newspaper where 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 the distant son of André Camus's elegant Combat, and it was always at the antipodes of the leaden L'Humanité. Irreducible, intelligent and provocative journalism: a formula that should not die. Honor and glory.
