Le Monde and the United States, what a story! Fascination, repulsion, admiration, circumspection: Everything is reflected in the gaze constantly cast on the other side of the Atlantic over nearly 80 years. Culture, diplomacy, economics, politics – all is scrutinized. Where to begin, if not at the beginning? According to his biographer Laurent Greilsamer, the newspaper’s founder, Hubert Beuve-Méry, returned cautious from his first trip there, in the spring of 1945, just a few months after the publication of the paper’s first issue.
He had traveled there for the conference in San Francisco that was to launch the United Nations. As a European, he saw the decline of his continent, and as a man, reputed to be austere, he discovered a world bursting with abundance, having left a Paris still under the yoke of rationing. The Jansenist was not comfortable with the ostentatious materialism of the US, and it didn’t help that he had little knowledge of English. He was firmly convinced that this represented a double threat to France, both economically and morally. Not exactly a sentiment to be trumpeted, however, when the new superpower still enjoyed the status of liberator among Le Monde’s first readers.
Yet, it is in this vision that we find the source of the neutralist temptation of Le Monde’s chief in the early years of the Cold War, though he never went so far as to equate Washington and Moscow. Beuve-Méry was not certain that the US would again come to the aid of Europeans if threatened. This doubt earned the newspaper an embarrassing setback on June 28, 1950, when it peremptorily proclaimed on its front page that “the United States will not go to war over Korea.” The next day, the front page announced that “the naval air forces of General MacArthur,” the head of American troops in Asia, were “going into action” on the peninsula.
This distrust of the US even provoked an attempted takeover, hatched a year later by another Le Monde founding member, René Courtin, who was a staunch Atlanticist. Courtin acted after the publication of an article by a contributor to the newspaper, future member of the Académie Française Pierre Emmanuel, whose pen name was Noël Mathieu, announcing the arrival of fascism in Washington on the back of the anti-communism that prevailed there. Summoned to step down, the paper’s editor was saved by his staff. In the course of the battle, the editorial team won its place in the company’s capital with the creation of the Société des Rédacteurs, Le Monde’s association of shareholding journalists, a first in the French national press.
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Publish date : 2024-11-01 14:00:00
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