Last July, in the green expanse of her property in the Pays de Caux, the nonagenarian welcomed us cheerfully: “I can put you to bed tonight!” A few words delivered with a smile, a brilliant look, an astonishing liveliness of mind and, at almost 93 years old, a taste still intact for journalism. Christiane Collange, journalist and writer, but also sister of the founder of L’Express Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, died this Wednesday, October 25.
70 years ago, Christiane Collange attended the very first steps of L’Express as editorial secretary. Inside the printing house, rue Réaumur, she was the one who supervised the printing of the very first issue. She was only 22 years old at the time and had just graduated from Sciences Po. Meticulously, for hours, she reread everything, corrected the articles by hand and rearranged the breaks, those little lead cylinders that we used to ink the newspaper. Despite his application, we came close to disaster: “the workers did not want to obey me because I was a 20-year-old woman and, what’s more, I was 7 months pregnant.” His brother, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, will have to intervene so that the newspaper comes out on time. “At the end, when they sang ‘A la!’, this song of the book workers, I was so proud, she told us. It remains one of the great moments of my life… Because it was a ‘Here!’ In my opinion.”
Not just a “sister”, a journalist
Christiane Collange was the daughter of Emile Servan-Schreiber, the co-founder of Echoes, but she had chosen the surname “Collange” because she did not want to use the name of her father and her brothers. At L’Express, she worked closely with Françoise Giroud, whom she convinced to create a “Feminine” page. This page very quickly became a notebook called “Madame Express” which, from issue to issue, grew to become a 40-page section. “It was bubbling with ideas!”, Christiane Collange marveled again a few weeks ago: “we experienced what so many women experienced during the 60s and 70s, with all the difficulties and all the progress that It represented. It was exciting…”
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Christiane Collange left L’Express during the 1970s and continued her journalistic career on the radio, and in particular at Europe 1 where she was the first woman to work as a journalist behind a microphone, then on television. At the end of her career, she even attended the launch of LCI, the very first French continuous news channel. A feminist activist, Christiane Collange has also published 19 works dedicated to new sociological and behavioral trends among women. She was also made a knight of the Legion of Honor, and in 2011, she was appointed to the rank of officer in the Order of Arts and Letters for the title of “journalist, writer”.
She now lived in the family home in Normandy, from where she always followed the news very closely. In particular the evolution of the war in Ukraine. Speaking of the “fantastic” war reporters, she confided, her eyes sparkling: “I really liked this job, you know.”