Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber

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Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, 1968

Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber (born February 13, 1924 in Paris as Jean-Jacques Schreiber ; † November 7, 2006 in Fécamp ), usually called JJSS for short in France , was a French journalist , essayist , media manager and politician . From 1953 to 1977 he was (co-) editor of the news magazine L'Express ; 1971–75 and 1977–79 chairman of the Parti radical (valoisien) .

Life

Jean-Jacques Schreiber was born in 1924 as the eldest son of Emile Servan-Schreiber, a journalist and co-founder of the financial newspaper Les Échos , and Denise Brésard. The Servan-Schreiber family comes from Prussian Jews who emigrated to France in 1877. His siblings were the former senator of the Yvelines department and mayor of Meulan , Brigitte Gros, as well as Christiane Collange and Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber, both of whom work as journalists. The Senator Suzanne Crémieux was his aunt, the Gaullist politician Jean-Claude Servan-Schreiber his cousin.

He attended the Lycée Janson de Sailly in Paris and the Lycée in Grenoble . In 1943 he was accepted as a student at the École polytechnique , but shortly afterwards he and his father joined the Free French Armed Forces ( Forces Françaises Libres , FFL) of Charles de Gaulle to fight against the German occupation and the Vichy regime . In Alabama , USA , he was trained as a fighter pilot, but was no longer used in combat.

After the liberation of France, he continued his studies at the École polytechnique and graduated in 1947. In the same year he married the journalist and author Madeleine Chapsal . His interests lay in both science and politics, and he began to work as a journalist himself. In 1949 he was hired by Hubert Beuve-Méry to write for the left-liberal daily Le Monde , which he founded. There he initially wrote editorials in the Foreign Policy section. His personal connection to the USA led him to focus on " Cold War " issues.

Servan-Schreiber was one of the first French journalists to recognize the inevitability of the end of colonialism . He wrote a series of articles on the Indochina conflict , which led to his meeting the future Prime Minister Pierre Mendès France ( Parti radical ), who was already at that time a vehement opponent of French colonial policy in general and the related military operations Was special. From 1957 Mendès France was also in a relationship with Servan-Schreiber's cousin Marie-Claire de Fleurieu (née Schreiber) and later married her.

L'Express

1953 Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber co-founded with Françoise Giroud - who also was his lover - and his cousin Jean-Claude Servan-Schreiber , the weekly, first as a Saturday supplement to Les Echos published news magazine L'Express . The magazine, which openly supported the politics of Mendès-France, soon found widespread acceptance among younger readers and prominent intellectuals in France in the 1950s and 60s. Guest authors included Albert Camus , Jean-Paul Sartre , André Malraux and François Mauriac .

When Mendès-France first formed a government in 1954 and ended the Indochina War as Foreign Minister at the Indochina Conference , Servan-Schreiber was one of his most important advisors.

In 1956 he was called up as a soldier and, contrary to his convictions, had to take part in the Algerian war. Based on his experiences in this war, he wrote his first book Lieutenant en Algérie (in German: Leutnant in Algerien ). His account of the brutal crackdown on the French army and the repression of the Algerians sparked controversy over whether the book would have a negative effect on soldiers' morale.

When General de Gaulle was tasked with forming a government in 1958, Servan-Schreiber, and thus L'Express , was among the opponents of this development. The political changes in France now led to a decline in the magazine's popularity. In addition, his family lost influence in the newspaper Les Échos founded by his father , and it came to a break between him and Mendès-France as well as with Françoise Giroud. His marriage to Madeleine Chapsal was divorced in 1960, and he was second married to Sabine Becq de Fouquières. Their four sons, David (1961–2011; a well-known physician and bestselling author), Émile, Franklin and Edouard come from the connection .

In 1964, he transformed L'Express from a supplement into an independent weekly magazine based on the TIME magazine. The restart was successful. Thanks to a broader range of topics, such as new technologies and the women's movement , L'Express has become a mouthpiece for changing French society.

As an opponent of de Gaulle's politics and a successful editor and journalist, Servan-Schreiber was looking for ways to realize his political convictions even more sustainably. In Michel Albert he found a colleague who supported him with background information on political events. One of Albert's dossiers dealt with the secret economic war in which he saw the United States and Europe embroiled. According to his analysis, Europe was inferior in every respect, from management methods to technologies and research. Servan-Schreiber took up this thesis, added his ideas to counter this situation, and wrote the book Le Défi Américain (in German: The American Challenge ). In France alone 600,000 copies were sold in a short period of time and it was translated into 15 languages, an unexpected and great success for a political non-fiction book. The book contributed significantly to a return to national requirements within France as well as to the recognition of the need for Europe-wide cross-border cooperation. Servan-Schreiber traveled through Europe, read from his book and gave lectures to a large audience in which he advocated a federal Europe with a common currency and a decentralized France.

Political career

When Charles de Gaulle resigned in 1969, Servan-Schreiber decided to actively devote himself to politics. In October of the same year he became general secretary of the left-wing Parti radical . He was involved in the reform of the party and formulated the party program. For the Parti radical he was a member of the National Assembly for several legislative periods . In his political activities he advocated changes in conservative French society. He refused to work with the French Communist Party (PCF) under Georges Marchais . He also campaigned for the decentralization of the unified state , a shift of funding from the Concorde to the Airbus program, the end of French nuclear weapons tests and the promotion of modern technologies - especially computers.

In the by-election in the constituency of Nancy ( Département Meurthe-et-Moselle ) in 1970 he successfully competed against the incumbent of the ruling Gaullist UDR , which had previously been generally considered hopeless. Even as L'Express publisher, Servan-Schreiber had often polemically criticized the UDR and accused it of creating a "UDR state" (État UDR) . Inspired by the success, Servan-Schreiber took up office in Bordeaux a few months after his election in Nancy in order to steal his constituency from the then Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas from the UDR. But there he failed with only 16% of the vote, whereby he lost his nimbus of success again (he was able to keep the parliamentary seat for Nancy).

JJSS (left) with Marcel Ruby and Jean Lecanuet at the congress des Mouvement réformateur 1973

Nevertheless, he was elected chairman of the Parti radical in 1971. His alliance with the Christian Democrat Jean Lecanuet under the name Mouvement réformateur ("reform movement") - as an alternative to both the left and the Gaullist right - led to the split in the party that same year. The left wing, which wanted to work with socialists and communists, founded the Mouvement de la gauche radicale-socialiste (later renamed Parti radical de gauche ). The rump of the party that remained under the leadership of JJSS has since then been called Parti radical valoisien (after the party's headquarters on the Parisian Place de Valois) to distinguish it and it has moved closer to the center-right camp.

Servan-Schreiber and his party supported the election of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing as president in 1974 , who had also taken up the cause of the liberalization of French society and was personally friends with the JJSS. In the first cabinet installed by Giscard , which was headed by Jacques Chirac as Prime Minister, Servan-Schreiber got the post of Minister for Reforms (Ministre des Réformes) . After only 13 days in office, he was dismissed at Chirac's instigation because he spoke out against the French nuclear weapon tests and was very unpopular with the UDR, the largest coalition party, due to the often hostile attitude of his Express towards the Gaullists. The UDR also prevented the appointment of Servan-Schreiber's colleague Françoise Giroud as Minister for Women. From 1976 to 1978 he was elected President of the Lorraine Region .

In 1977 he sold L'Express to Jimmy Goldsmith in order to be able to devote more time to his political activities. The loss of this mouthpiece and the failure of his efforts to reform the centralized organization of the state meant that he and his party, which he had led into the alliance Union pour la démocratie française (UDF), increasingly lost influence. In 1979 he left the Parti radical and, together with Françoise Giroud, entered the European elections with his own list “Emploi, Egalité, Europe” (German: “Employment, Equality, Europe”) . The list received only 1.84% of the vote and he withdrew from active political life.

According to politics

Servan-Schreiber devoted himself again to writing and published Le Défi mondial (in German: The total challenge. The decision of the eighties ) in 1980 , in which he dealt in particular with the economic rise of Japan and its technological basis. In addition, he worked as a consultant for François Mitterrand and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, whom he had known since his student days. His initiative to set up a center to promote information technology failed and was dissolved in 1984. He then moved with his family to Pittsburgh ( Pennsylvania , USA), where his four sons attended the private Carnegie Mellon University , which specializes in research . He taught there himself and was head of the international relations department at the university.

After returning to France he devoted himself to writing again and wrote his memoirs , among other things . He spent the last years of his life, suffering from a degenerative disease similar to Alzheimer's , cared for by his wife Sabine de Fouquières, near Paris. In November 2006 Servant-Schreiber died in Fécamp in Normandy of pneumonia .

Works (selection)

Web links

Commons : Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Alain Rustenholz, Sandrine Treiner: La saga Servan-Schreiber. Le temps des initials. Le Seuil, Paris 1993, p. 7.
  2. ^ Jean-Claude Servan-Schreiber: Tête haute. Pygmalion, Paris 2010, p. 17.
  3. ↑ JR Frears: Political Parties and Elections in the French Fifth Republic. C. Hurst, 1977, p. 51.
  4. ^ Robert W. Parson: Every Word You Write… Vichy Will Be Watching You. Surveillance of Public Opinion in the Gard Département 1940-1944. Wheatmark, 2013, p. 361.
  5. ↑ Carsten Hueck: Françoise Giroud "I am a free woman" - Merciless self-contemplation. Deutschlandradio Kultur, broadcast book review April 5, 2016.
  6. ^ RW Johnson: The Long March of the French Left Macmillan, London / Basingstoke 1981, p. 265
  7. ↑ Michel Lascombe: Le droit constitutionnel de la Ve République. Douzième édition. L'Harmattan, Paris 2012.
  8. ↑ Giscard: Disorder and happy suffering. In: Der Spiegel , No. 25/1974, p. 76.
personal data
SURNAME Servan-Schreiber, Jean-Jacques
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schreiber, Jean-Jacques (maiden name); JJSS (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French journalist, essayist, media manager, left-wing intellectual and politician
DATE OF BIRTH February 13, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH November 7, 2006
Place of death Fécamp