Tartuffe at Le Monde

Sam White Paris In the beginning de Gaulle created Le Monde. Although to this day Le Monde carries on its masthead that it was founded by Hubert Beuve-Mery, Beuve-Mery has freely acknowledged that the idea of a newspaper like Le Monde was de Gaulle's, and that it was de Gaulle who personally chose him to be its first editor.

De Gaulle's instructions to Beuve-Mery were simple: 'I want a great newspaper'. This was shortly after the liberation of Paris in 1944 when only two Paris dailies were allowed to reappear under their prewar titles—the conservative Le Figaro and the Communist L'Hunzanite. De Gaulle had a particular contempt for Le Figaro because he knew that its reappearance had been engineered as a result of a deal between the then Foreign Minister Georges Bidault and the leader of the Christian Democrats. He was also contemptuous of the only other important paper to emerge after the Liberation, France-Soir, which by appropriating as a subtitle the name of a clandestine sheet published under the Occupation was able to reappear as a re-vamped version of the prewar mass circulation Paris-Soir. At the same time the prewar Le Temps, which was France's most influential paper before the war, was banned on a trumped-up technicality. With Le Temps's presses and premises available the way was open for the publication of a serious newspaper which would rival Le Figaro.

On de Gaulle's instructions funds were allotted for the new paper and BeuveMery was named as its editor. His major qualifications for the task were that he was a considerable scholar who headed the French Institute in Prague before the war, that while acting at the same time as parttime correspondent for Le Temps he had resigned from that post in protest against that newspaper's pro-Munich policy, and that he had an excellent record in the Catholic resistance. The paper which is now a co-operative owned by its staff had a curious set-up at the beginning. It was at the time supervised by a board which held the bulk of its shares and these were equally divided between representatives of the Gaullist Catholic and Protestant resistance. Then in 1946 came de Gaulle's first fatal referendum in which his proposed constitution—which incidentally is precisely the constitution under which France has functioned since 1958—was defeated, with Le Monde joining forces with Le Figaro in helping to defeat it. It was to be de Gaulle's first but by no means last experience of Le Monde's, and especially Beuve-Mery's, abiding hostility to him. By the time de Gaulle had left the scene Le Monde was running into heavy political storms. This came with the onset of the cold war when Le Monde took a neutralist, anti-NATO stand marked by a virulent anti-Americanism which still remains a major characteristic of the newspaper. For the enfeebled governments of the Fourth Republic dependent on American aid both domestically and for financing its colonial war in Indochina this was too much and a temporarily successful plot was hatched to depose Beuve. This happened in 1951 and *was followed immediately by a mutiny of the staff. What really clinched matters however and ensured Beuve's return to the editorship was the attitude de Gaulle took from his exile in Colombey-les-deuxEglises. He pondered for two days and then instructed the Gaullist nominee on the board to switch his vote to Beuve. After this victory the statutes of the company were changed and it became a co-proprietorship with power vested in a so-called 'editorial committee'.

A word should be said here about the character and political philosophy of Beuve-Mery. A man of utter probity but coraiderable vanity he is a devout Catholic (as is indeed the present editor Jacques Fauvet) who was educated by the Dominicans and remained under the considerable influence of members of that order. The Dominicans were the founders of the 'worker-priest' movement and Beuve was himself a leading light of that left-wing intellectual Catholic movement which emerged from the war and which sought what might be termed 'a historic compromise' with Marxism. With this went a deeply-ingrained French nationalism sharpened by the humiliations of defeat and occupation and which regarded continental Europe as the natural sphere for French influence. He was profoundly ignorant of both Britain and the United States—he spoke no English—and with this ignorance went a basic conviction that somehow the Anglo-Saxon world and especially the Americans represented a kind of new barbarian threat to Latin civilisation. The menace for him came from the West and not from the East.

This philosophical mishmash compounded of the ideas of the new French Catholic Left and the outlook of the classic French Right was of course in many ways a caricature of Gaullist policy. The mystery is why such ideas as they had in common should have driven them apart rather than drawn them together. The answer probably lies in Beuve's firm conviction held tenaciously over the years that de Gaulle

intended to install some kind of monarchofascist state in France. Indeed in their very last conversation held shortly after de Gaulle's return to power he asked him in all seriousness whether he intended to restore the monarchy. De Gaulle replied: 'Even to toy with such an idea would be ridiculous'.

In this interview which took place at Beuve's request—the General had just lifted the ban imposed by the army on the sale of Le Monde in Algeria—de Gaulle opened proceedings by saying something which must have stung Beauve's vanity. He said, 'Of course I read Le Monde. EVeryone does. I derive a great deal of amusement from it'. Beuve replied—and it is Beuve himself who has put this interview on record —that 'if at any time Le Monde ceased to amuse him and he had a serious criticism to make of any of its policies he would welcome a personal approach in the matter from the General'. De Gaulle's response was a calculated snub: 'You say that, but you know very well that I am for the liberty of the press.' Beuve ends his account by paying this tribute to de Gaulle: 'Unlike all his predecessors de Gaulle never at any time directly or indirectly tried to bring pressure on Le Monde'.

It was, however, the events of May 1968 which provided le Monde with its first opportunity for a direct onslaught on the regime and this it did with relish and a total .lack of scruple. It openly sided with the student rioters and published pages of highly suspect and totally unverified socalled eyewitness accounts of police brutalities. So much so that the impression was quickly created that there were as many as seventy killed in the four weeks of rioting, whereas in fact there was not a single fatality in the Paris area as a result of the nightly clashes between police and rioters. In addition it called for the resignation in the face of the rioting mobs of what was after all the legally constituted government of France. Beuve-Mery at the time was stranded in Madagascar and was appalled on his return to discover what had happened to his newspaper during his absence. There were, however, compensations and they were heady ones. The circulation of Le Monde had soared during that month from some 400,000 to over 800,000 and an entire new source of readership had been tapped. Today Le Monde's circulation has stabilised at about 580,000 which, coupled with its price of 1 franc 30 centimes a copy Plus the richest advertising revenue of any newspaper in France, makes it not only the onlY moneymaker in the Paris daily newspaper field but a highly prosperous enterprise in itself. With remarkable skill and perspl• cacity Le Monde has succeeded in becoming both part of the French establishment as well as its principal adversary. Its reliance on official leaks, especially from the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Finance, has given it a string of notable scoops which have made it essential reading for both the civil service and the business communities.

At the same time its leftism has given it a continuously expanding readership among students and the young generally. It also makes a special effort to cultivate a large readership in the former French African colonies—profitably supplemented, inci dentally, by regular supplements on these countries—with the result that it remains curiously silent about the excesses of almost all of these countries' rulers.

At the moment Le Monde is under sharp, if .somewhat muted, fire as a result of a

critical study of it written by a former

member of its staff, Michel Legris, So smug and self-satisfied is Le Monde, and so un

used to criticism, that it over-reacted to the Publication of M. Legris's slim volume With a solemn front page warning to its readers that it was all part of a plot to undermine and eventually destroy the Journal. That disposed of the book without the painful necessity of answering some of

its more serious charges: Le Monde's notorious reporting of the Khmer Rouge

take-over of Phnom-Penh, in which it des cribed the expulsion of the city's two million Population as 'a spectacular gesture', or its scandalous support for the Portuguese

Communists in their action in seizing the Socialist newspaper Republica. These strik

ing examples of dishonest reporting can be

multiplied a hundredfold from the files of Le Monde over recent years. Even examples

of downright invention are not lacking. The strongest impression one gets from the newspaper is a kind of all-pervading hypocrisy.

Le Monde does not go in for investigative reporting as such for it is notoriously Willing to wound and yet afraid to strike'. One of its favourite gambits in such matters

is to repeat the allegations of others—the

Canard Enchaine for example is a favourite one—and to do so without comment. When

occasionally it does cover something resembling an exposé it is quick to wash its hands of it. Take for example the front page Piece it wrote some time ago on President 91scard's wayward nocturnal habits, when It revealed among other things that Giscard often disappeared for weekends leaving a sealed envelope containing a phone number at which he might be contacted in an emergency. The story was published every

where quoting Le Monde as the source. The next day under the headline: 'What the world is saying about the President', Le Monde reproduced several of these playbacks of its own story without mentioning that they all named Le Monde as the source. Nor is suppression an unpractised art at Le Monde. For example its political editor Viansson-Ponte has recently published a

book making very damaging allegations against prominent left-wing politicians none of which has ever appeared in the columns of his own newspaper.

M. Legris in his book describes Le Monde as a `crypto-Tartuffe' after Moliere's Tartuffe who is the embodiment of selfserving hypocrisy. There is a great deal to that charge.