France Soir

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France Soir (French; German  France [am] evening) was a national French daily newspaper from Paris . Since December 14, 2011, there has only been an online edition; on July 23, 2012 the company was dissolved.

history

France Soir was founded in November 1944 after the end of the German occupation of the country by Robert Salmon and Philippe Viannay, two founders of the Défense de la France resistance group . Pierre Lazareff became head of her historical department. It was particularly successful in the 1950s and 1960s as the successor to the Défense de la France newspaper, which had a large circulation in the underground, and reached a circulation of two million in its prime.

This made France Soir the largest French daily newspaper at the time. For a quarter of a century, however, the popular tabloid has been steadily losing readers and money. Most recently, the paper also faced major competition from free newspapers such as 20 minutes and Metro . Most recently, France Soir only sold 36,000 times a day. On October 27, 2005, bankruptcy was filed.

In bankruptcy proceedings against “France Soir”, a commercial court in Lille, northern France , accepted the takeover offer made by businessman Jean-Pierre Brunois and journalist Olivier Rey on April 12, 2006. The court preferred the offer to that of the Russian media group Moscow News and that of entrepreneur Jean-Raphael Fernandez. Moscow News wanted to invest ten million euros and not lay off any employees in the following year. However, the head of Moscow News, the Israeli Arcadi Gaydamak , was suspected by the French authorities of being involved in arms deals with Angola and of wanting to launder black money at "France Soir". Therefore, he was threatened with an international arrest warrant . The works council had nevertheless approved the takeover by him. Insolvency proceedings were of Bobigny published by Paris to Lille after the former owner, the Franco-Egyptian businessman Raymond Lakah the dismissal of the first Commercial Court because of bias had requested.

There was a restart. The new owners wanted to turn “France Soir” into a tabloid with a “shock formula”, according to Rey, modeled on the British tabloid newspapers “ The Daily Mirror ” or “ The Sun ”. The employees announced at the time that they would oppose Brunois and Rey's offer by going on strike, especially since only 51 of the 115 employees were to keep their jobs.

In October 2011 it was announced that the print edition of “France Soir” would be discontinued in December 2011. After that, the newspaper only appeared online.

On July 23, 2012 the company was dissolved.

Mohammed cartoons

On February 1, 2006, the newspaper made a name for itself by being the only French newspaper to reprint twelve controversial caricatures of the prophet Mohammed from the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten , in order to set an example for freedom of expression. “Oui, on a le droit de caricaturer Dieu” (“Yes, one has the right to caricature God”) was the title on the front page. The cartoons had led to massive protests by Muslims against Jyllands-Posten and Denmark in general. Because of the reprint, Raymond Lakah , the Catholic, Egyptian-born owner of the newspaper, dismissed the paper's head, Jacques Lefranc , that same day . The next day the newspaper headlined “Au secours, Voltaire, ils sont devenus fous” (“Help, Voltaire , you have gone mad”).

Former Employees

Web links

swell

  1. ↑ a b Michael Kläsgen: newspaper closed overnight . In: sueddeutsche.de, December 15, 2011, accessed on December 15, 2011.
  2. ↑ Change in «France-Soir»: Online instead of print. (No longer available online.) Dpa / sueddeutsche.de, October 11, 2011, archived from the original on October 12, 2011 ; Retrieved October 11, 2011 .
  3. ↑ Stefan Simons: Out for "France Soir". The tabloid Sartre wrote for. In: Spiegel Online . December 15, 2011, accessed December 15, 2011.
  4. ↑ Xavier Ternisien: "France Soir" mis en liquidation. In: lemonde.fr, July 24, 2012, accessed April 11, 2019.
  5. ^ Kerstin Pokorny: Stéphane Roussel: From Berlin via London to Bonn. In: This: The French foreign correspondents in Bonn and Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer 1949–1963. Inaugural dissertation, Philosophical Faculty of the Rheinische Friedrich Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Bonn 2009, pp. 62–64 ( deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de ( memento of March 26, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) [PDF; 2.6 MB, accessed on March 25, 2017]).