As LE MONDE Turns

ALMOST visibly breaking a blush all over its front page, that austere Paris newspaper Le Monde, which makes the New York Times look like a mere tabloid and the London Times like a full-blown one, announced recently that it intends to publish photographs for the first time in its history. Its readers, however, were asked not to panic (they were addressed solemnly in the singular as “Cher Lecteur, Chere Lcctrice’’), for the photos would not disfigure the news pages of the publication but only two of its recently founded supplements—one devoted to leisure and the other to light weekend reading.

Le Monde was founded forty years ago on the initiative of General De Gaulle. Under its first editor, Hubert BcuveMery, handpicked by De Gaulle, the newspaper became neutralist, anti-American, and fiercely anti-De Gaulle. It quickly established itself as a kind of antiestablishment establishment newspaper. The recipe was a sensational success. Le Monde also broke new ground by becoming a newspaper owned, in part, by its staff. This reinforced both its reputation for independence and its circulation, which reached almost the million mark during the 1968 student uprisings in Paris. The newspaper contributed heavily to the Socialists’victory in the 1981 elections, but oddly enough it has been in decline ever since. This is due partly to the suspicionunjustified I would say—that it has become something of a government organ and partly to the drop of its popularity among the young. But it now finds itself in considerable financial difficulty, along with much of the rest of the Paris press.

—Sam White