My love letter to Libération

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/13/liberation-france-newspaper-sartre-intellectual

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I knew I liked my literature high school teacher, Monsieur Maître, the second I saw his socks. They were adorned with the red losange of my favourite newspaper, Libération; I immediately knew we were part of the same club. As the politically minded, slightly naive granddaughter of a lifelong socialist voter, it made sense for me to identify with Libé (as readers affectionally call it). Monsieur Maître and I therefore probably shared a lot of the values espoused by the centre-left paper: pluralism, tolerance, compassion and political activism.

Older readers will know what I'm referring to. There's a delicious territoriality associated with your reading habits; they are shorthand for what you believe in, and what you stand for. Crudely put and translated into UK terms, you're either a public services-loving, environmentally concerned Guardian reader or a Conservative Telegraph reader (or, worse, you fall in the middle and read the Times). This allegiance may no longer apply to digital natives, who are offered an array of websites that blur political lines, but in 1990s France my choices were fairly limited. Libé it was.

So the growing concern for the future of the newspaper breaks my heart. The story is familiar: it is not keeping up with an industry that is gutting newsrooms, demanding redundancies and more work for less pay. A bitter battle is taking place between stakeholders, journalists and management.

Libé's editor-in-chief, Nicolas Demorand, honourably resigned last February, leaving a trail of uncertainty behind him. The paper published a blazing front page striking back at the management's plans for diversification, with the headline: "We are a newspaper (and not a restaurant, a social network, a cultural space, a TV set, a bar, or a start-up incubator)".

To lose Libé would be to lose a colossus of France's intellectual life. The paper, founded in 1973 by Jean-Paul Sartre and Serge July, started as an extreme-left publication born of the chaos that followed 1968's waves of student protests. Its original motto was: "People, take the right to speak and keep it." Under Serge July, in the decades that followed, the paper slowly moved to become centre left. But throughout the many financial and editorial storms it weathered, it largely maintained what it was always famous for: sharp and elegant writing, intimate portraits of artists and politicians, an unapologetic will to cover both serious political issues and the arts, and, most of all, hard-hitting, single-issue front pages.

Take this one, published after Steve Jobs' death – what sober grace. Or this cheerful one ("Adventure, at last!"), after France elected François Mitterrand as president. Or this one, published just before the election of François Hollande, which leaves no doubt as to where the editorial line lies. And a recent favourite, showing the national icon, Marianne, screaming with anger at the recent success in the polls of the Front National. Cover after cover, Libération painstakingly recorded France's, and the world's, key moments, the good and the bad.

The paper also published some of the best blogs in French. Years later, I still find myself often thinking about Marie-Dominique Arrighi's cancer blog, in which she detailed her battle with the disease with unimaginable candour, or the very clever 400 culs, which looks at sexuality from every possible angle. To think of a media landscape without this kind of talent would truly mark the end of an era.

Editors recently took a brave step and asked readers what they wanted more of, and what steps the newspaper should take to save itself. Suggestions poured in: more in-depth investigative pieces, less frivolities, better local and regional coverage, a possible end to its print version, a renewed focus on the working classes and the issues that affect them. There's no easy way out of this quagmire, but for the sake of France's rigorous intellectual life I hope readers don't give up on Libé – and vice versa.