On May 16, 1953, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber and Françoise Giroud launched L’Express as a weekly supplement to Les Echos. Françoise Giroud confided in our 2,500th issue: “L’Express was born of anger. The anger in which we were, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber and I, against the way France was then governed, in particular in the of the war in Indochina. This event did not interest the French at all. The contingent did not take part in it and they were therefore indifferent to this conflict. Only one politician dared to say that this war which was ruining the country had to be stopped in every way, it was Pierre Mendès France.”
This anger, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber formulates it as follows: “We must tell the truth, as we see it, about the stagnation of our economy, the obsolescence of our army, the silence of our diplomacy”.
In the twelve pages of this first issue, Françoise Giroud and Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber give the floor to Pierre Mendès France in an uncompromising interview: “France can bear the truth” while an article deciphers the mechanics of Russian diplomacy and another questions the political value of strikes.
In her first editorial, Françoise Giroud addresses the reader, “The man who will read us”, as the times would have it, with exacting standards: “Our reader does not claim to be more intelligent than the others, but more aware of his responsibility.”
For seven decades, our newspaper has covered and analyzed all the highlights of our contemporary history between decolonization, the Cold War, European construction, the advent of the Fifth Republic… It is committed to social struggles such as abolition of the death sentence Or the emancipation of women and hosted great feathers like François Mauriac, Albert Camus or Jean-Paul Sartre.
In 2023, L’Express, faithful to the principle of commitment dear to its founders, defends Ukraine against the dictatorial drift of the Russian regime and carries the battles of his time like defense of rationality and of laicity And the fight against scientific conspiracy.
In L’Express of May 16, 1953
The man who will read us
The man who will read us does not yet exist, but we know him well, he says to himself: “If they have courage, they will not have readers. And if they want to have readers, they will not be able to not have courage.”
The man who will read us is not pessimistic, he is a little discouraged because he feels alone.
All he sees around him are young old men, more occupied in brooding over the past than in constructing the future.
If he speaks ill of Mr. Pinay, he is taken back as if he had pronounced an incongruity in connection with an old uncle respected in the family.
He often meets men who show judgment, courage and energy in the exercise of their profession. But when it comes to the affairs of their country, these same men are torn between indignation and indifference. A lark, a horse.
If they are reproached for this, they reply that they have enough trouble with their own affairs and that they have entrusted those of France to parliamentarians, whom they speak of as inevitable mothers-in-law.
They give the sad impression of maintaining old liaisons with politicians that go on and on, from replastering to replastering, unconcerned with bringing about the rupture that they nevertheless desire. It’s because they don’t like drama and would prefer a newcomer to rid them of the old ones without their having to intervene.
When the man who will read us pushes his friends a little on the ground of the discussion, he suddenly feels transported to the Café du Commerce and hears with amazement intelligent men uttering sentences such as: “Me, if I were President of the Advice, I would tell the Americans…”
So he finds himself in the strange situation of having to defend him, the President of the Council, whose action he disapproves of.
Cover of issue 1 of L’Express, May 16, 1953.
© / THE EXPRESS
The man who will read us has sometimes had fun watching how other people read the newspapers. He realized that the average reader glances at the headlines of the daily newspapers, scans ten lines here and there, between two telephone rings, registers the events and throws them into his memory like coins. ‘a puzzle that he never takes the time to piece together. While he reads: “Crime Doesn’t Pay”, real crimes do happen.
While he dwells on the torments of conscience of M. François Mauriac, he forgets that the real dramas of conscience are played out in the Council of Ministers.
While listening to the radio with one ear and his wife with the other, he tries to get through the first three lines of an important article and, failing to do so, thinks to himself: “I’ll save it for the read with a clear head…”
One morning, his wife asks: “Do you really want to keep these old papers?” And the average reader will have once again missed the opportunity to find out what the Potsdam agreements contain, what the European army would be, what expressions such as the “neutralisation of Germany” or the “convertibility of currencies” with which history is written.
Our reader does not claim to be more intelligent than the others, but more aware of his responsibility.
He knows that if the world starts playing ping-pong with atomic bombs, he will serve as a net if he no longer has the strength to serve as a referee. So, instead of waiting for the start of the match, he believes that we could try to convince the opponents to put it off indefinitely.
Editorial by Françoise Giroud in the first issue of L’Express published on May 16, 1953
© / The Express
But who to talk to? Where to make his voice heard? Where to find the echo? He only meets padded men. It evolves among eiderdowns. He lives in a universe of ostriches.
When he hears or reads phrases such as “the safeguard of democratic freedoms”, or “the desire for recovery that drives us”, or even “the spiritual radiance of France”, he wonders, with a heavy heart, what terrible haemorrhage emptied these words of their meaning.
He does not want the death of the majority fisherman, nor that of those who prevent voting in circles. He would settle for their resignation.
He doesn’t vote communist, but there are days when he pretends he wants to. These are not election days. These are the evenings when he hears, in a dinner, a lady exclaiming, for example, in connection with a strike: “With family allowances, these people live like princes.”
The man who will read us would perhaps naturalize himself as a Tahitian or an Eskimo, he would perhaps have resigned himself to being no more than the lucid spectator of the deterioration of a country which was his and which he loved, if it only happened to him, from time to time, to meet another man who will read us.
So he regains confidence and says to himself: “Since there are two of us, we are perhaps two million.”
But he still cannot insert classified ads indicating that “Mr. well in all respects wishes to know, with a view to French recovery, people’s corresponding expectations”.
This is why he continues to feel lonely and sometimes discouraged.
By our existence, we will try to prove him wrong.
We believe that the man who will read us is not alone. And we even dare to say that we hope so!