French press lacks baronial archetypes

Huw Richards reports from the Institute of Contemporary History conference on A Century of the Popular Press. Anglo-American journalism provides immense scope for connoisseurs of the Great Man theory of history. Names like Gordon Bennett, Alfred Pulitzer, Northcliffe and Beaverbrook dominate many accounts of the trade's development.

Yet the parallel story of the French press is singularly lacking in such figures, said Jean Chalaby, a research associate at the London School of Economics, who argued that only Robert Hersant, who died early this year, came anywhere near to matching the Anglo-American archetype.

Dr Chalaby suggested that the differences were rooted in the hugely different socio-economic structures and journalistic culture of France. The consequence was that French press owners of the 19th and 20th centuries differed from their Anglo-American counterparts in the same way as the French and English aristocrats differed in the 18th. "The French were not interested in exploiting their estates and preferred to stay at court. The English stayed on their land and behaved as capitalists. The pattern is the same, only with words instead of crops."

The archetypal Anglo-American baron who exploited the development of print technology, advertising and rapid urbanisation to "sell the cheapest possible paper to the largest number of people" combined "capital, entrepreneurial ability, managerial capability and journalistic skills". Men like Bennett and Northcliffe were as obsessed with the editorial content of their papers as with their balance sheets and were journalistic as well as business innovators.

Not so the French. Dr Chalaby said that the motivation of the French owner was entirely different: "The main reason was the desire to acquire political influence. In 1914 there were 46 newspapers in Paris and 40 had a definite political line. Vanity was also important. Paris society valued cultural products. Newspapers were not an investment, but an expense for symbolic benefit which one commentator likened to owning a racehorse".

He added that most journalists were aspirant poets, essayists or novelists rather than seeing their trade as a purpose in itself.

The need to be politically specific limited the potential appeal of any individual paper. But even if there had been owners with the vision of a Bennett or a Northcliffe, Dr Chalaby pointed to social and economic conditions that would have limited their prospects. "Advertising was central to the economics of the Anglo-American model. It was reckoned in the 1870s that two-thirds of the income of The Times came from advertising. Between 1871 and 1914 Le Petit Parisien, which was the most commercially successful French paper, took only 13.1 per cent of its income from adverts.

"As late as 1962 per capita expenditure on advertising was seven times higher in the United States, three times greater in the United Kingdom, than in France. Britain and the US urbanised much more rapidly, which meant there were more large concentrated markets in which distribution was relatively simple and cheap, large sales could be built up and fixed costs driven down".

Paris papers like Le Petit Journal had to reckon on distribution taking 20 to 30 per cent of their production costs as they tried to reach a more widely dispersed, rural population.