Shortly afterwards, the GP announced its decision to break up. They'd pretty much gone through the options in five years. Remained... Er, more bourgeois methods that did not state the revolution specifically as goal. Like attempting to raise mass consciousness using modern methods of communication.

The GP had a newspaper, La Cause du peuple. Jean-Paul Sartre was its figurehead. Sartre agreed with Pierre Victor (who was to become his personal secretary), and another GP leader, Serge July, that a popular daily newspaper, not a tabloid but smaller than a broadsheet so it could become "the daily of the Métro", was the kind of new initiative that was needed. A fairly large group of former GPists got behind the idea.

The official N° 1 of Libération appeared on the 18th April, 1973, with Sartre's name on the front page as director (legally responsible/liable for the publication under French law). It states themes that would be Libé's throughout the seventies. It shows the student, the intellectual, standing with the ordinary people of France (including immigrants). It says (main headline) Take your newspaper in hand. It says France is on the move, let's free the press. It appeals for money, since it will have no advertising and has no bank behind it. It announces Towards a new journalism. Of this new journalism it says that it will serve a new movement of ideas that is emerging: "... around a common refusal of an authoritarian conception of life, and around a common hope for a democracy that rejects the exploitation of labour, daily violence in the name of profit, the violence of men against women, repressed sexuality, racism, the sullied environment..."

There are more hints here of social democracy of a New Left kind than of Marxist-Leninist ideology. Yet Libé in the early years hung on to a dual grassroots approach that no doubt owed a lot to earlier factory-floor activism (though not everyone working on the paper was a former GPist):

• this was a newspaper for and by its readers. Local "Libération committees" were set up across France, with volunteer stringers to forward stories, and there was supposed to be constant contact between the committees and the editorial staff in Paris. Parisianism was to be actively resisted by use of the committees and the creation of regional editions of the paper (one was attempted in Marseille, another, in Lyon, lasted for some time);
• it would be a transparent newspaper in terms of its accounts, management, internal disputes - nothing would be hidden. The buzzword at the time was "auto-gestion" or workers' control. Libé would be run by everyone who worked there. Debates, meetings, general assemblies - everyone could speak there. Decisions would be taken collectively.
• it was important to have an open, transparent, grassroots daily, because it would be a tool for direct democracy. Through it, the people would exercise greater control over their elected representatives, and call them to account throughout their mandates, not just once every five years.

Money, Honey

Starting up without money was hard, and on many days the paper didn't make it to the press. By the end of the first year it was all the same up and running, if not smoothly. There were frequent appeals for money, and discussions of whether there should be advertising or whether a bank should be approached for finance. Sartre writes: We have refused to become a commercial and industrial enterprise.

Anti-advertising feelings ran high. A discussion page was illustrated with graffiti-adorned advertising posters from the Métro. This one, from a famous 1970s series of ads for BNP bank, says:

"Don't worry about disturbing me, I like to talk money" (official slogan) "In the Kingdom of Rotten Bastards, it's the bankers who are Kings" (graffiti).

Libération Version I was published for years with no ads.

How It Went

Many of the journalists were not professionals, and learned the job as they went along. It didn't seem to matter as long as there was the collective ethos, and the grassroots contact with the readers. The "Libération committees" in fact came into being, and most of the readership felt committed to the paper. There was no Internet, so interactivity was cumbersome. Letters were published, at least a full page a day, sometimes more. An original kind of interactivity arose spontaneously when the typographers and correctors - all young women, Libé published feminist texts and musings by Sartre on sexual relations as rape, but seemed to have missed something when it came to division of labour <cough> - began adding brief comments to journalists' copy or small ads. Sometimes facetious, these were most often wry requests for a return to earth, or debunking irony. Appreciated by readers and considered to be part of l'esprit Libé, the note de la claviste (NDLC), was a feature of the newspaper in its early years.

Another "open" feature was the development of free small ads. On a full page or two, not hidden away in small print, these were read by all readers and came to be a kind of bulletin board (in which the typographers joined with many NDLC). Messages were sent and announcements made, invitations put out and problems shared. Romantic and sexual encounters were sought under the heading Chéri(e)s, and the paper's interest in prison conditions led to a Taulards section for prisoners.

Internal debates were brought up, under the transparency rule. They concerned (apart from finance) organisation and methods, ethics, and questions thrown up by international events - dialogue on Israel/Palestine/Lebanon was difficult - and by the liberation movements of the time, women's lib, gay lib, everyone's sexual lib. Here the differences were sharpest, between the more ideological leftists and the counter-culture freaks, those who had hopes of Libé becoming the daily of the working class and the libertarians (European sense). Not to omit the ambitious social democrats...

And tension grew later in the seventies as the paper's journalism became more professional (in-depth exploration of social themes, excellent special correspondent work on the international scene), while the libertarian, alternative, punk-revisited side boiled over in inventive graphics and lay-out, and the expression of fairly extreme points of view on sexuality, in particular. That might have gone on working. It certainly produced an original newspaper. The problem was that it betrayed a lack of vision of where the paper was heading, and, worse still, irreconcilable opposition of beliefs about what the paper was all about.

The fighting got worse. There were problems with the courts over obscenity and incitement to immoral behaviour and to violence. Leading figures of the paper argued bitterly over the limits of sexual freedom and the famous il est interdit d'interdire (it is forbidden to forbid). Meanwhile worker's control gradually lost its original glimmer. Libé was selling, and, though still beset by financial problems, kept adding pages and testing supplements. The enthusiasm of the start-up, that made people willing to accept crowded conditions, inadequate technical means, and a heavy workload, quickly wore off. Supposedly open structures were in fact compartmentalised: there was no official hierarchy, but there was a power system all the same. A woman typographer did not equal a woman journalist did not equal a male journalist did not equal a member of the "direction" (which all the same had no formal power to direct...) The day-to-day production of the newspaper became more and more difficult. Tensions grew till no one really wanted to try any more. There was quite a bit of this:

Serge July and a few others had their take on a new way forward for Libé. Possibly he let things get worse so the crash would become inevitable. (July was always sure he was right: in 1969 he wrote a book called Towards Civil War, a title not everyone would have felt rock-solid about signing...).

Communications within Libé were so bad by that time, anyway, that there was no concerted opposition. In February 1981, publication ground to a halt.

The first period, the newspaper as a social experiment, was over.

:: :: :: ::

Part Three, with the history of Libé from this point up to today, will follow.

See Crisis at Libération - Part One for the current state of the newspaper.