Man with a Mission

Late one night in his Paris apartment, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, editor of the weekly L'Express, got a polite phone call from a French policeman. Asked the cop: What time would Servan-Schreiber go to his office next day? Editor Servan-Schreiber, at 30 the wonder boy of French journalism, replied that he would be there at 8 a.m. as usual. Next day when he arrived at the office he found the doors closed tight and sealed with official wax. The government had seized the current issue of his weekly and temporarily closed the office. The charge: "ministers or generals were divulging secrets of national defense" concerning Indo-China, which L'Express had printed.

Last week, in the uproar that followed, Marc Jacquet, Under Secretary for the Indo-China States, who had in the past slipped reports to Servan-Schreiber, resigned, and there was a shakeup in the French military high command (see FOREIGN NEWS). But last week L'Express was out again--and its circulation shot up by 13,000--to 115,000--and is still rising. Said Editor Servan-Schreiber happily: "The government really did us the best turn they possibly could."

Neutralism v. Isolationism. In France, where many newspapers are helped by hidden government or party subsidies and many are corrupt, L'Express is a postwar journalistic oddity. Confident, alert Editor Servan-Schreiber got the weekly off to a fast start a year ago by printing in its second issue a parliamentary report on Indo-China that the shaky government had asked other papers not to print. L'Express grew steadily, now runs some of the leading writers in France. Editor Servan-Schreiber is a friendly critic of U.S. foreign policy, bridles at being called a "neutralist," and says his basic political idea is: "If the Western nations achieve unity, they will win the cold war . . . On one side we have the 'neutralists' in Europe and the 'isolationists' in America, allied against Western unity. On the other side [are] the pro-Atlantic groups in each country . . . The outcome of the struggle can very well decide whether Stalinism will be able or not to defeat us."

Servan-Schreiber, who speaks fluent English, has become one of France's outstanding political pundits. The son of a co-owner of Les Echos, Paris' oldest financial paper, Servan-Schreiber fled France during the war, trained as a pilot in the U.S., and flew with the Free French Air Force. His first political article, submitted to France's leading daily, Le Monde, caused so much comment that he went into journalism.

Workout in the Gym. Last year, with his father's backing, he launched the tabloid, twelve-page L'Express, hoped to "find a formula which would be a sort of cross between TIME and the [London] Economist. Servan-Schreiber has not hit that formula yet, but he has some other working formulas of his own. Up every day at 4 a.m., he works for about four hours before leaving for his office. Promptly at 7 every evening, Health Enthusiast Servan-Schreiber ("We French eat too much and exercise too little") and his ten-man staff cross the Champs-Elysees to a gym where, in identical blue gym suits, they work out for at least an hour. After the workout he returns to his office, works until he falls asleep, and is awakened by a night editor, who sends him home to bed.

Between editing L'Express and writing an occasional piece for Le Monde, Servan-Schreiber finds time for outside writing, also broadcasts on the French radio and lectures for BBC. France is in deplorable condition politically, he argues volubly, and "inertia [could] lead the country slowly and painlessly into Communism." But the country, says dedicated, austere Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, "may still be saved by young men convinced of their mission, whose personal lives are austere and dedicated to work."

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