founder with Jean-Paul Sartre of the Left daily newspaper, the 80-year-old journalist, famous to the point of having had his puppet at the “Guignols de l’Info”, will write tickets for the title he had left Seventeen years ago.
MO12345lemonde with AFP
A very symbolic return to Liberation: its co-founder and one of its historical figures, Serge July, 80, returns to the left daily as a political columnist, seventeen years after leaving it, announced the management Friday January 6.
“Central figure of French journalism, great observer of the political scene for decades, author of passionate and exciting biographies, multipressed documentary maker, Serge will write tickets on the Editos page from January 23”, writes the director of Libé , Dov Alfon, in an internal message consulted by the France-Presse agency.
pushed towards the release in 2006
Large mouth, faubourien accent, black wick and glasses, Mr. July co-founded Liberation with the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in 1973 and embodied him for more than thirty years. First spokesperson for social struggles, the newspaper becomes, under the influence of its charismatic director, the decryptor of many social phenomena and the reference daily life. He adopts a more informative tone for this and moves away from the leftism of his beginnings. Character of the politico-media world, Mr. July even was entitled to his puppet with the “Guignols” of Canal+ in the 1990s.
After the glory period of the late 1980s, when sales bordered on the 200,000 daily copies, Serge July was forced to leave Libe in June 2006, pushed towards the release by the reference shareholder of the time , Edouard de Rothschild. He is criticized for having delayed on a revival of the newspaper. “The conductor that I was told goodbye, the journalist so, infinitely sad to no longer be able to write here,” he said before his writing.
Dov Alfon announces other arrivals at Libé, including those of the writer and singer Lola Lafon and the geographer Magali Reghezza-Zitt, now columnists at the Ideas service.
From 2014 to 2020, the newspaper lived under the aegis of the Altice group, led by billionaire Patrick Drahi, who then transferred it to a fund intended to guarantee its independence, the endowment fund for an independent press (FDPI). In September 2022, the Czech magnate Daniel Kretinsky (also an indirect shareholder in the world) bailed up release of 15 million euros to help him regain his balance, planned in 2026. According to the ACPM (Alliance for Press and media figures), Libé has sold 93,000 copies per day over the period 2021-2022, an increase of 11.14 % compared to 2020-2021.