Word: l
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...months, one in seven of the country's 164 dailies had folded, including four out of ten Communist mouthpieces. In Paris, the Socialist Party's Le Populaire, its circulation down from 350,000 to 93,000, was publicly begging for funds. The M.R.P.'s L'Aube (down from 200,000 to 80,000) was living from week to week on party handouts. Said a panicky government official: "A general crackup ... is feared. We don't know how many papers will close or merge in the next few weeks...
Most of the prewar press worked for the Nazis during the occupation. When they fled, the 1,000 "tainted" publications were seized and their sullied titles banned. Today no Paris paper may bear the name of Le Matin, Le Petit Parisien, Le Temps, L'Oeuvre or Paris-Soir, among others. Some 300 publishers have still to stand trial...
...only 19 left (plus 170 weeklies). Most likely survivors of the present crisis: the mildly Socialist France-Soir* edited by hard-boiled Pierre Lazareff (TIME, June 23) and now France's biggest paper (circ. 641,000); the Communist Humanite; the Catholic Figaro, famed for its high literary standards; L'Aurore, which rides the De Gaulle bandwagon; the witty, leftist (but not quite Commie) Franc-Tireur; sober Le Monde, the businessman's bible; and Parisien Libere, favorite of the petit bourgeoisie...
...wobbly French press is no longer either powerful or corrupt. No foreign power can plant a campaign, for a price, in a French paper-except, of course, in L'Humanite, which sometimes reads as if it were edited in the Kremlin. Nor can government ministers phone editors, as they did before the war, and tell them what to print and what to kill...
White-haired Georges Cogniot, editor in chief of L'Humanite (circ. 450,000), insists that "the press is now venal in a different way from before the war. It still gets money from [big business] trusts, publicity or the government's secret funds." But the charge can neither be proved nor disproved. The government allots newsprint, pegs its price, and subsidizes the news service A.F.P. (which could not exist otherwise), but expression is free...