Le Monde was launched on de Gaulle's wish, then spent decades defying him
In late 1944 Charles de Gaulle wanted France to have a prestigious paper speaking to the world, almost an unofficial voice of the Republic. The man chosen to run it, Hubert Beuve-Méry, agreed only after long hesitation, determined to stay independent of every power. That tension shaped France's most-read paid daily.
Finding an editor was hard, since many press veterans had either collaborated with the occupiers or already led Resistance papers. Georges Bidault, head of the National Council of the Resistance, suggested Beuve-Méry, who registered the company on 11 December 1944 with 200,000 francs of capital. The first issue, a single sheet printed on both sides, appeared on 18 December bearing the next day's date. It took over from Le Temps, closed under press ordinances aimed at papers that had kept publishing during the occupation, inheriting its layout, much of its staff and its offices on the Rue des Italiens, where it stayed for 44 years.
Aimed at elites like its predecessor, it sold 150,000 copies by 1945. Beuve-Méry steadily loosened its ties to the state, and in 1951 journalists formed a society to protect editorial independence, initially holding just over 28 percent of the shares; staff, managers and eventually readers later gained stakes too. The paper leaned toward Christian democracy at home and moderate anti-colonialism abroad, supported de Gaulle's foreign policy in the Fifth Republic while criticising his domestic record, and in 1954 launched Le Monde diplomatique. Not every choice aged well: in 1957 it declined to run a piece by Jean-Paul Sartre on torture in the Algerian War.
After Beuve-Méry retired in 1969, the paper drifted toward the Union of the Left and pursued scandals under President Giscard d'Estaing, including the Diamonds Affair; a 2014 investigation by Raphaëlle Bacqué described intense newsroom hostility to him. Its sympathy for revolutionary movements led to the notorious April 1975 headline hailing the Khmer Rouge capture of Phnom Penh as a liberation.
Today Le Monde calls itself a newspaper of record and is widely seen as one. It is the last French daily described as an evening paper, coming off the Paris presses soon after lunch already dated for tomorrow. It counted 2.44 million readers in 2021. Owners include a holding company controlled by Xavier Niel and Matthieu Pigasse alongside an independence group of employees and associations.
Source: Le Monde
