Following the sale of the country's best-known newspaper, fears are growing over the future of the French press, writes David Tresilian in Paris In the wake of years of declining sales and despite multiple redesigns to attract new readers, Le Monde, France's best-known newspaper and the only one to play a national and international role, finally accepted the inevitable last month when its board accepted a takeover bid from a consortium of businessmen that was hailed as providing the paper with much-needed funds, while at the same time preserving its traditional editorial independence. The bid, also accepted by a vote of the paper's staff who up till now have had a controlling stake in the paper's management, was orchestrated by French businessmen Pierre Bergé, Xavier Niel and Matthieu Pigasse, whose background is in fashion (Bergé), telecommunications (Niel) and banking (Pigasse). Le Monde is believed to have lost some 25 million euros last year alone, the tenth year in a row in which it has made a loss, and it has debts of some 125 million, including 25 million that have to be repaid next year. In exchange for handing a controlling stake to the Bergé-Niel-Pigasse consortium, the paper hopes to bring its debts under control and to raise the capital necessary for further attempts at slowing its declining sales and the hemorrhaging of its readers. This latest crisis in Le Monde's fortunes comes in the wake of years of falling circulation figures, with the paper now reaching some 320,000 readers, down from 398,000 in 2003, and of the decline in advertising revenues that has affected the French press as a whole and has been exacerbated by the current financial crisis. In response, Le Monde has experimented with multiple redesigns over the last decade or so, abandoning its famously austere lay-out of no pictures and long articles for new designs that have brought colour photography to the newspaper's front page and have cut back on much of the more turgid editorialising and reporting. The paper launched a weekend colour supplement some years ago, four decades after similar supplements were launched by British and American Sunday papers, and it has multiplied daily pull-out sections, designed both to serve the interests of particular constituencies of readers and to function as vehicles for advertising. The redesigns and new sections were associated with the editorship of Jean-Marie Colombani, whose strategy for Le Monde involved a period of expansion, necessary, it was thought, if the paper were not to be swallowed by a larger rival. Under Colombani, Le Monde acquired a set of subsidiary titles, including the popular cultural magazine Télérama, the film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma and the international weekly Courrier international, with the aim of positioning itself as one of France's major media players. It is this strategy that now seems to have come unstuck with last month's vote to sell a controlling stake in the paper to the Bergé- Niel-Pigasse consortium. Colombani himself was voted out by staff in 2007, presumably the last time that this can happen now that the paper's staff are to lose their controlling stake, and his successors were left with the problem of how to service the paper's debts and cover mounting losses When the paper's current editor, Eric Fottorino, suggested compulsory redundancies in April, Le Monde was hit by strikes. Shortly afterwards, it was announced that the paper would be looking for external sources of funding, leading to the acceptance of the Bergé- Niel-Pigasse bid two weeks ago. However, an institution of Le Monde 's standing can scarcely be sold off without questions being asked about what this means both for the media and for French society as a whole. Personally founded by General de Gaulle in 1944 on the ruins of the pre-war French press, Le Monde was intended to serve as a flagship of French journalism and an expression of the new society to be built after the country's liberation from German wartime occupation. While foreign readers used to the lighter editorial style, or frank emphasis on entertainment, of English-language newspapers could sometimes be left feeling bewildered by Le Monde 's famously long articles and apparent contempt for advertising, no one doubted the paper's seriousness or its commitment to high standards of reporting. However, the paper's fortunes over the last decade may indicate that it has not only been foreign readers that have been turned off by Le Monde. France is unusual among European countries in that it has only three national newspapers, one of them, the left-wing daily Libération, in an even worse situation than Le Monde. The largest selling national daily in France is L'Equipe, a sports paper aimed at a male readership, and the country's regional press far outstrips the national papers in circulation and revenue. Ouest France, the largest regional daily which specialises in a mix of entertainment and regional news, currently sells more than twice as many copies as Le Monde. This leaves the only other national daily, Le Figaro, which targets an upper-middle-class Parisian readership, providing content to match. With the country's major national papers apparently no longer attracting either readers or advertising, could France soon find itself without a newspaper of record, the role hitherto played by Le Monde ? Many commentators think so, with an editorial in the British newspaper The Guardian commenting on 29 June that "if there is one small consolation for a British press faced with declining sales, a generation going through schools and universities which is reading fewer newspapers, falling advertising revenues, and an uncertain Internet future -- it is that things are worse in France. The flagship of French journalism, Le Monde, would not have been able to pay the wages next month unless a buyer was found." According to The Guardian, the Bergé-Niels-Pigasse takeover means that while the "newspaper is not yet secure, a good start has been made." However, in the same article it reported that of Le Monde 's assets, its website and printing press were valued at 67 and 63 million euros, respectively, while the flagship paper itself was valued at only 10 million -- hardly a vote of confidence in Le Monde's efforts to regain the loyalty of its readers. While The Guardian is cushioned by its famously abundant advertising revenue, other European and international papers may be more worried by the sense of gloom that hangs over Le Monde. In France, meanwhile, the success of the Bergé-Niels-Pigasse bid has at least been greeted with a sigh of relief by the opposition Socialist Party.
