le monde

Volume 2 No 2 - 1998

Le Monde, Past, Present and Future: A Vehicle for the Transmission of the Cultural Values of the French Elite

John Fletcher

(University of East Anglia)

SUMMARY

For historical reasons going back to the Revolution, the élite or establishment In France is defined by educational attainment rather than by wealth or birth (although the three are of course not unconnected). France's leading quality national daily Le Monde transmits the cultural values of this élite by reinforcement: it sets a standard of literacy and assumes a level of seriousness and sophistication in its readers that automatically defines them as an educated elite and locates them securely within the establishment. (For the purposes of this paper the term "elite" Is used interchangeably with the term 'establishment' to mean decision makers, managers, professionals and the like of baccalaureate standard or above, the equivalent of socio-economic groups A and B.)

On 18 December 1994, with issue no. 15,519, Le Monde celebrated its fiftieth birthday. On 10 January 1995 the paper, which had hardly changed in look and layout since 1944, was given a thorough face-lift to make it more logical in presentation, elegant in appearance and easier to read. (In what follows I use the shorthand "new style" to refer to this redesigned format as opposed to the "old style" of the former layout.)

Official figures show that Le Monde is the newspaper which France's decision-makers and opinion-formers are most likely to buy: that is why Plantu's cartoon in the fiftieth anniversary number is such a telling in-joke: the paper knows very well that the President of the Republic is about the last person who can afford to ignore it (and is unlikely to: a fair number of copies are ordered by government offices, including the presidential palace, and by French embassies abroad).

Le Monde was launched at the Liberation. Along with such members of staff as had not collaborated with the Germans, the new evening paper took over the offices, plant and gothic masthead of Le Temps, the leading Paris daily (or "quality broadsheet" as we would say), which had committed the error of not ceasing publication when passively-endured Occupation in France turned to active Resistance.

Le Monde's founder and first editor was Hubert Beuve-Méry (1902-1989). Taciturn, austere and deeply serious - his famous editorial pseudonym "Sirius" was a misprint that arose from a proof-reader's failure to recognise the English word "serious", which fitted Beuve more aptly than did the name of the firmament's brightest star - he was part of the Emmanuel Mounier circle associated with the review Esprit. The Paris publishing house Le Seuil, the weekly news magazine L'Express and the evening paper Le Monde were all founded in the wake of the Liberation by people who were friends and who, as members of Mounier's entourage, were strongly influenced by his brand of social catholicism; Christian Democracy in politics and the worker-priest movement in the Roman Catholic church were parallel manifestations.

Beuve-Méry planned from the outset that his title should be the French newspaper of reference and record. He succeeded brilliantly in his ambition to "faire dense" ("make compact"). There are other serious national newspapers in France, of course, most notably Libération on the left and the venerable Le Figaro on the right, but they cannot vie with Le Monde for the number one position.

Although its daily print-run, at around the half-million mark, is not particularly large by international standards, each issue is read by over 800,000 cadres, of whom 100,000 are hard-core subscribers and get the paper regularly with the mail. For example, in our own field, I notice that colleagues of maître de conférences (lecturer) grade and above tend to be subscribers. As for future cadres, Le Monde has the highest youth readership of any major French daily, which means that it is read by tomorrow's élite as well as today's. I am assured by grandes écoles candidates, for instance, that Le Monde is the only newspaper they feel it indispensable to read, though they may well look at Libération too. There is no British equivalent: students here tend to read The Guardian, The Independent or (to a lesser extent) The Times: no one title enjoys their more or less exclusive allegiance. It is significant, too, that Le Monde SA exports 14% of all the copies it prints. Some of these are read by French expatriates, of course, but the bulk are purchased by opinion-formers and decision-makers around the world, people for whom Le Monde is the voice of France par excellence.

Just as the élite read Le Monde, Le Monde gathers in the élite, both as writers and as subjects of features. For example, top politicians - most recently Jacques Chirac - are only too happy to contribute articles, and Cardinal Lustiger, leading cleric and long-time reader, was the subject of a full-length feature in March 1991. In the world of literature and ideas, the Friday books pages not only serve as an indispensable source of information about new books and literary events, they actually set the agenda: no writer feels secure until Le Monde has given its opinion of his/her new work. Neither the TLS nor the London Review of Books occupies that position in our intellectual life.

The same is true of foreign affairs (to which the paper, for the first 50 years of its existence, always devoted the bulletin in the far left-hand column of the front page), economic analysis, and political commentary. The paper's tone is supremely confident and authoritative, because it is secure in the knowledge that it speaks to and for the liberal educated elite whose values it shares and projects. In other words, it is both the informant of, and the voice of, the grande école graduate and people of similar education and background. Although it endorses no particular political party, it makes it quite clear that there is one tendency it abhors, the extreme right in general and Le Pen's Front National in particular. This is because the FN is viewed as having placed itself beyond the pale, not so much by virtue of its opinions but of the fact that it appeals not to reason but to emotion and prejudice. If there is one thing Le Monde never has any truck with, it is irrationality. Its readers concur with it on that central point, even where they may disagree with its broadly left-of-centre line and may feel themselves out of sympathy with its sometimes rather Guardianish tone of self-righteousness.

The present contribution looks at the way the newspaper preserves, transmits and defends the values of this liberal establishment. Although I am sympathetic to Le Monde, believing it

to be a great newspaper, one of the best in the world, and certainly better than anything on British news-stands, my contribution (based an a close reading of randomly-selected issues published over the last few years) seeks to prepare the ground for a critical assessment of the paper and especially of the unconscious assumptions about values revealed by such a scrutiny. Is it snug, or guilty of intellectual snobbery? Does it ever get it wrong? If it does, what is it in its value-system that blinkers it? These are some of the issues my contribution seeks to raise, in the hope that in the subsequent discussion answers to some of these questions will be forthcoming.

A good place to start the investigation is the births, marriages and deaths section, known as the Carnet du Monde, printed towards the end of the paper (old style) or near the middle (new style). In the issue dated 13 January 1995, the death notices were typical. The liberal professions predominated that day as on every other day. The first entry (the order is strictly alphabetical) concerned a former polytechnicien (i.e. graduate of the top engineering school) who at the time of his death was head of IBM France and a chevalier of the Legion of Honour. The next person had a nom à particule, i.e. a name with "de" in it, signifying noble, or at least gentle, birth. The third featured an engineer, a veteran of the Free French forces in World War II (Resistance medal, croix de guerre) and officer of the Legion of Honour. The sixth was a former journalist and gallery owner, the seventh another polytechnicien, and the eleventh a former lycée teacher. With the others no profession was specified, but prestigious addresses were given.

Subscribers and shareholders get a discount on entries published in the Carnet du Monde (though at about £10 a line before VAT the service does not exactly come cheap), so the half-page (which also lists forthcoming doctoral vivas, for which a special low student rate is charged) serves in effect as the notice board of the French establishment. This is typified by an entry in which Mme Simone Cino del Duca thanked the many people who had written to congratulate her on her elevation to the rank of commander of the Legion of Honour, and promised to reply to each of then personally in the near future.

If the carnet makes it abundantly clear that readers of Le Monde are predominately members of the (upper) middle class and of the professions the sort of people whom British media professionals classify AB - the rest of the paper does not exactly conceal the fact either. The typical reader is - and always has been - assumed to have a strong interest in foreign affairs, to which the new-style 13 January issue devoted pages 1 to 7 inclusive. Coverage of home affairs (mainly politics) comes next - four pages of it - followed by a section headed "Société" which deals with cases of all kinds currently before the courts, ranging from political corruption (the French version of sleaze) to murder trials.

The bland neutrality of this Société section can be deceptive: the paper's high-mided seriousness, stamped indelibly on it by the founder, inclines it to report not just "all the news that's fit to print" but some items, too, that the squeamish might jib at; Le Monde's restrained, unemotional but exact reporting of particularly gruesome crimes brings out the full horror of such cases in a way that shows up for the prurient humbug it is the hypocritical expression of outrage beloved of British tabloids.

This section is followed by the carnet and three pages entitled "Horizons". The first of these pages is taken up with the sort of investigation that the Sunday Times "Insight" team have become well-known for in this country; the second consists of a (very few) letters to the editor and of "débats", opinion pieces presented by people with special expertise in the topic (for example, on 11 January, a member of the Italian senate put forward his solution to the lire crisis); the third is given over to editorials, the first of which, like the old-style bulletin de l'étranger on page one, is devoted to foreign affairs, and the second to domestic issues, followed by other "in-house" opinion essays.

The paper divides roughly at this point. The second half begins (in the 11 January issue) with six pages of company, financial and stockmarket news. Three pages are then devoted to science (a recent deal with Nature makes possible the rapid translation in these pages of major discoveries reported in scientific literature in English), to sport (one page only; as Martin Kettle once wittily observed, it is a waste of time looking in Le Monde for the cricket scores); and one page to leisure (including gastronomy) and, such eminently respectable pastimes as stamp-collecting, a hobby which Le Monde has always taken seriously.

There follows a "diary" page with the weather, a new-style column headed "50 years ago in Le Monde" the crossword, miscellaneous announcements and various pieces of general information. The paper ends with no less than five pages devoted to "culture", including an entertainments' guide and radio and TV listings. Where the back page is not taken up with a full page ad, it contains further news items.

The whole thing is as unashamedly "dense" as Beuve-Méry could have wished. There are virtually no photographs (Beuve considered then an unnecessary indulgence, and his successors have hardly wavered in the zeal with which they have upheld the tradition he established), the (excellent) cartoons and line-drawings are on a modest scale, and the ads/text ratio is much lower than in British broadsheets.

In fact, Le Monde can make even the wordy Guardian look like a lightweight tabloid. Beuve-Méry used to say that it took two to three hours to read his paper in its entirety; since his editorship the number of pages has increased considerably, and it would now take a conscientious reader much longer. But of course nobody attempts to read everything. What people do decide to read, however, is well-researched, authoritative, and dealt with at sufficient length to satisfy all but the most demanding specialist.

As can be seen from all this, Le Monde's writers make no concessions. Like Oxbridge tutors of the old school, they can never be suspected of talking down to their readers/pupils. I will never forget my first philosophy supervision at Cambridge in 1957. My tutor, an eminent philosopher, told me to come along the following week with an essay on Descartes' proofs of the existence of Gad. He did not say how I was to set about it: that was what books were for, and he assumed I knew my way round the university library. I dread to think how the TQA inspectorate would deal with him if he were alive today: that approach to university teaching only worked with students who possessed the rare combination of high intelligence and unshakeable self-confidence: most us, of course, floundered for months before we found our feet.

Just as Oxbridge in those days was quite unashamedly élitist, Le Monde is too, even nowadays, although élitism is no longer politically correct. If its readers cannot follow the long, syntactically complex sentences, appreciate the ironic understatements, negotiate their way through the double negatives, and pick up the not infrequent learned allusions, that, as my philosophy don might have said, is just too bad. Le Monde will not alter its style to please then. Not that the paper always "talks posh": far from it. A foreign reader like myself is sometimes thrown by the freshly-minted slang its sophisticated writers deploy with such aplomb; and I suspect that not a few (as you can see, the paper's fondness for double negatives is catching) native speakers too find that their vocabulary is being stretched.

In other words, in purely linguistic terns (of register, lexical range and syntactical complexity) alone, Le Monde assumes a high level of education, the baccalaureate at least. Not surprisingly, the majority of its readers have gone well beyond high-school leaving certificate standard. In France, where status is determined less by birth or by wealth than by level of education (though the three are of course not unconnected), the elite tends to be defined by cultural values rather than by socio-economic considerations. When one adds to this that in French state secondary schools, the lycées (there is no independent fee-paying sector remotely comparable, in either size or importance, to our own) teaching is still highly academic, indeed strongly literary, then one begins to see why the élite in France is defined to a large extent culturally.

This cultural construction of the élite explains a number of characteristic features of French society and institutions, such as the honoured status of the intellectual, so very different from the situation in this country. Foucault would have been a barely-noticed and little-read sociology don if he had been born British (there are one or two proto-Foucaults knocking around our departments in the lecturer grade), Lacan would have been an obscure registrar in a psychiatric hospital of which no one would have heard, and Barthes might have made it - just - to some dim niche in an Oxbridge college or a cathedral deanery. The terrible triplets would never have been noticed even by the TLS, let alone by the wider world.

For France is that (to us) incomprehensible country where the philosophy question in the baccalaureate - philosophy is a compulsory subject in the French national curriculum - makes the front page of the daily papers, and where there is every year an examination, theconcours général, which serves no other purpose than to find out who is the cleverest of all the millions of pupils attending lycées the length and breadth of France and in its far-flung overseas territories. The super-brilliant youngster who comes top then Sets the sort of media attention we pay to a schoolchild who finds a winning a £100,000 ticket in her packet of crisps. Try to imagine for a moment an examination conferring nothing but prestige in which, to national acclaim, a Port Stanley pupil scored the highest marks: that gives you an idea why, in France, Le Monde can assume a high standard of literacy in its readers and not be thought pretentious.

Such are - to return to my preamble - the unconscious assumptions about values that underlie the project of Beuve-Méry's brainchild. Is It ever smug or guilty of intellectual snobbery? Not, I think, if you bear in mind that its cultural assumptions are widely, even universally, shared by the French educated élite. It is axiomatic to then that a newspaper worthy of the name should have the kind of emphases revealed by my analysis of the contents of Le Monde: heavy concentration on world news, followed by slightly less on domestic matters, with a lot of space then devoted to socio-judicial issues, market information and cultural events, and only a little to sport and leisure. So they are unlikely to think that Le Monde gets it badly wrong. They are in any case a fiercely loyal group, whose fidelity is not rewarded solely by discounts on small ads but also recognised in the company's statutes, which grant to readers' representatives a say in the running of the paper.

My last question was: does it ever get it wrong? Sometimes. The paper's perhaps over-developed sense that it is permanently engaged an a mission of high moral seriousness can make it pugnacious, and this in turn can result in it being sued for libel, not always unsuccessfully. And occasionally one feels that Le Monde is being unfair. The hounding, in June 1991, of Jacques Corrèze, a prominent figure in the Oréal cosmetics group, for alleged membership of an extreme right-wing secret society before the last war, for alleged acts of collaboration during it, and for alleged anti-semitism afterwards, still leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, especially as he died of cancer when the hue and cry was at its height. The paper's impeccably liberal outlook does not incline it to embrace the virtue of charity: it is at such moments - to take up the question I posed at the outset - that it is, undoubtedly, blinkered by its own value-system. But when it does get it right, Le Monde can be magnificent, as in this withering denunciation, published at the time of the Gulf War, of Saddam Hussein: "To parade a dozen allied pilots an Iraqi television last Monday was loathsome enough, but as for sending these men to strategic sites to serve as human shields, that amounts to a cold-blooded, sadistic and cynically premeditated crime. Not since the Nazis has anyone been as inventive as this cruel buffoon in adding to the already long list of the horrors of war" (23 January 1991).

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