Citizen Prouvost
Sam White
Paris The recent death of Jean Prouvost, the newspaper proprietor, has provoked sPeculation as to whether the character of the French press would have been greatly different today if he had been allowed to resume his rightful role, as the country's leading newspaper proprietor, immediately after the Liberation. It is now generally admitted by some of his fiercest detractors of that period including the Ideologues who championed `a press free from the power of money' that prouvost's enforced hibernation during the critical years from 1944 to 1949 was a tragedy for the French press and a lin 8erm 6 cause of its present -doleful con ditiort. It was also a great personal traged y for Prouvost since, while he was warding off totally baseless charges of collaboration,•the spoilation of his newspaper properties was completed and the legal barriers against his effective return to the newspaper scene were erected by an unholy alliance of idealists and careerists, carpetbaggers and politicians. The harriers have finally crumbled but by the time they began doing so, Prouvost was nearing his nineties and the new Money Merl who broke through them were, to put it mildly, no Prouvosts. What distaiguished Prouvost from the run of millionaire newspaper proprietors in preWar Paris is that he regarded the busMess of owning a newspaper as an end and not a means to an end. Having entered it in early middle age after running a major family textile business, he quickly developed a passion for newspapers as such and for the newsPaPermen who make them. Lord Beaverbrook's famous words, `before I could learn about newspapers I had to learn about newspapermen', applied exactly to the way Prouvost himself went about learning the business. The result was the golden era of French journalism which lasted from the late Twenties to the outbreak of the war, giving an independence and status to French journalists which they had never known before and building circulations for papers like Paris Sou; Match and Marie Claire which had never been attained before or, for that matter, since. For the first time France had a ,newspaper proprietor who qualified as a llY Paid-up member of the fourth estate no obligations owed to, or favour to ask from, the government; he had, instead, a freedom based on profitability. This was Prouvost's situation when war came and, with it, an offer by Paul Reynand to join his government as Minister of Information. Prouvost refused the post, resisting great pressures in doing SO, but finally accepted when France was just about to collapse. His period of office lasted little more than a month but it stretched into the first few days of Reynaud's successor, Retain, before he hastily resigned. The stigma stuck. Never mind that the overwhelming majority of both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate had voted full powers for Main, or that a variety of Petain worshippers had worked their passage back Prouvost was a special case.
He was, as someone put it in a postLiberation Parliamentary debate, the representative of high finance in the Franch press. In fact, Prouvost behaved with considerable courage during the war especially after the Germans moved, into the unoccupied zone as is made abundantly clear by Robert Aron in his history of that period. He consistently bucked both Vichy and German censorship in Paris Soir which, along with the rest of the Paris press, had taken refuge in Lyon. He was once threatened with imprisonment when he wanted to shut the paper down, and finally had his problems solved by the Germans themselves who closed the paper for him after repeated breaches of the editorial 'guidance' they laid down for the French press. It was then, as liberation approached, that a new canard was spread concerning him: it was that, in addition to publishing Paris Soir in the unoccupied zone, he continued to be the proprietor of the Paris Soir published in Paris by the Germans. In fact he had been the victim of two expropriations the first by the Germans after the French collapse, and the second during the insurrectionary period preceding the Liberation of Paris on instructions from the provisional government in Algiers. The instructions read in part: `It would be intolerable if Prouvost's Paris Soir, which continued to be published in Paris after the occupation, were allowed to reappear.' The subsequent history of what was once Paris Soir is instructive and not unamusing.
Its printing works and offices were alloted to a courageous underground sheet called Defense De La France which promptly invited one of Prouvost's closest prewar associates, Pierre Lazareff, freshly returned from wartime exile in New York, to edit it. It reemerged as France Soir with Defense De La France as a subtitle. It quickly ran into financial difficulties and was finally sold to the giant French newspaper distribution organisation Hachette. This involved some difficulties since, under a law passed after the Liberation, newspapers which had emerged from the resistance could only be sold with the approval of at least one of the original founders. Most of the founders of Defense De La France had either died or quietly resigned but finally one was found to give the resistance cachet to the deal. He was a Robert Salmon and he was offered the job of Chairman of the new board on the specific undertaking that he would play no role in the running of the paper. Modestly he agreed to do so for the not so modest salary of one hundred thousand pounds a year. He continued to draw that for twenty five years, until Hachette finally wearied of the losses the paper was incurring and sold it to another financial group which settled with Salmon for a one million pound handshake. Prouvost's subsequent history was equally instructive and ironic. He was allowed to make some kind of a comeback, with permission to publish again his famous picture magazine Paris Match and his womens' magazine Marie-Claire. He then bought a majority share -holding in Le Figaro and tried to resume his old style editorial sway.
Here he tackled a specially privileged citadel of post-Liberation legislation regarding the press: not only was Le Figaro along with the communist L'Humanite one of the only two papers allowed to appear after the Liberation under its old title but it was one for which a special law had been passed. Or rather two laws. The first set an arbitrary.date by which papers in the occupied zone had to close after the Germans crossed it, and those who closed after it could not reappear a date deliberately set so that Figaro's chief rival, which closed only three days after it, would be automatically barred from reappearing in Paris. The second one was known simply as `Brisson's law' after the paper's editor in chief, Pierre Brisson. It was intended to protect his right to retain full control of the paper, a control which was.being contested by the widow of its former owner, the perfume manufacturer Coty.
Then Brisson died but his powers were vested in an editorial committee, consisting partly of members of the French academy and senior members of the staff who had grown somewhat sluggish in their ways as is the way with toilers in all protected industries. The panic at the thought of what Prouvost might do by way of disturbing their sleep was considerable. Prouvost was barred from exercising any editorial functions. Finally Prouvost gave up and sold out shortly before his death. His successor, the present owner Robert Hersant, is in many ways the antithesis of Prouvost.
To him newspapers are a business above all else, and he has made his repu tation as well as his fortune by ruthless rationalisation in the chain of provincial newspapers he already owns. He then took up the battle where Prouvost left off — and he won. The very editorial control which the staff refused to a talented journalist-proprietor they have granted, to a tough, mean operator. Furthermore by agreeing to Hersant's terms they have consecrated his sway over a huge section of the Paris press. He now owns not only a vast chain of provincial newspapers but also effectively controls the Figaro, owns half of France Soir and is about to acquire a major holding in L'Aurore.
In Hersant's case there is even more than the power of money — there is also the power of President Giscard. Through Hersant, Giscard is acquiring a disproportionate power in the Paris press but he is also pressing on with the appointment of his own people to key posts in television, in the national news agency, AFP, in the nationalised advertising distribution agency, Havas, and in the peripheral commercial radio stations in which the state is a shareholder. It looks almost as though, as far as the media is concerned, we are entering into what might be described as the Hersant-Giscard or Giscard-Hersant era.
There is, of course, Le Monde which has preserved both its independence and the structure it inherited from the Liberation — but then its success is as much due to the tribute that vice has had to pay to virtue as to anything else. Otherwise we are a long way from the ideals — many of them naive some downright pernicious — which the French press set itself after the war. We are also a long way from the kind of press France might have had if Prouvost had been given a chance to help shape its future.
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