Poor but Honest

In prewar France, it was said that "every French journalist is for sale," and the saying was embarassingly close to the truth. The papers for which they wrote--rowdy, defamatory, opinionated and corrupt--hastened France's collapse. The Minister of Information in Paul Reynaud's 1940 Cabinet, powerful Jean Prouvost, agitated for Hitler's armistice terms, spoke out against Britain. To Parisians, during the occupation, the name of his Paris-Soir (circ. 1,400,000) became as irrevocably linked with German propaganda as those of Le Temps, Le Matin and others which spoke in Nazi accents.

When the French got their country back, any paper which had appeared during the occupation was suppressed. Of the big prewar Parisian papers, only a handful (notably the Communist L'Humanite and the Socialist Le Populaire, which were suppressed, and the conservative Le Figaro, which had scuttled itself rather than publish under Nazi rule) are left.

During the Nazi occupation, most of France's freedom-loving journalists went underground (25% were collaborators). They met secretly in hotel rooms and cafes in Paris and Lyons to devise strategies for the day of liberation. On Aug. 21, 1944, their hour came: they descended on the Havas building, arrested the collaborationists on duty there, started printing Paris' first uncensored papers to appear above ground since 1940.

Up from Scratch. The new papers were skimpy, one-sheet affairs, but they had great virtues: they were "poor but honest," born equal, and edited for the most part by courageous young resistance men who had fought for their chance of survival.

French papers are now of two kinds: the political papers, belonging to the parties, and the journaux d'information, the moneymaking, straight-news sheets. Today, in a city only slightly larger than Chicago, 30 dailies decorate the gay kiosks of the Parisian boulevards. Outstanding among them are the Communist-tinted Ce Soir (circ. 536,000), which concentrates on a robust sports section; Combat (circ. 165,000), generally conceded to be the most stylishly written; the Communist L'Humanite, a pamphleteering paper with a circulation of 470,000; and France-Soir and Paris-Presse (527,000 apiece), which feature splash headlines and big frontpage murder stories.

Last week all Parisian newspapers were permitted to increase to four pages, and to double their price (to about three cents). For some of the postwar hopefuls, born of adversity, this meant the biggest crisis of all: they had survived the worst days of short newsprint when expenses were low and they did not need large (or too competent) staffs. Now the competition would be stiffer. Gossip was that at least six of the dailies would be lucky to survive the coming year.

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