Historic French Communist newspaper falls victim to facts of capitalism

The French Communist newspaper L'Humanité is unable to pay its bills and has been placed under judiciary supervision.

A commercial court will decide on Wednesday whether to liquidate it.

"We have placed L'Humanité under the protection of the populace and the citizenry," said its director, Patrick Le Hyaric, who is also a member of the European Parliament.

L'Humanité was established 115 years ago by Jean Jaurès, the founder of the French Socialist party, who was assassinated on the eve of the first World War.

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When the party split at the Congress of Tours in 1920, the newspaper followed the majority, who set up the French Communist party (PCF).

It was the official organ of the party until 1994.

L'Humanité withered in tandem with the former Soviet Union, the PCF and its affiliated trade union, the CGT.

A global shift towards right-wing populism and from print to social media further weakened it.

The paper employs 175 people, including 124 journalists.

Their salaries are now being paid by AGS, an insurance fund established by French employers.

L'Humanité has collected €1 million in readers' donations, but it needs €3 million by mid-February to survive.

Mr Le Hyaric, the director, published a desperate plea in Monday's paper – General Mobilisation for L'Humanité.

No bank will loan money to the newspaper, Mr Le Hyaric complained.

And the ministry of culture has withdrawn €1 million in subsidies.

In 2016, L'Humanité received €3.6 million in public funding, making it one of the most heavily publicly supported titles in France.

The newspaper’s circulation peaked at 400,000 at the end of the second World War, when a quarter of the French voted Communist. Its current circulation is 32,000.

L'Humanité was long a fixture of French political life. Until the 1960s, Communist party volunteers sold the newspaper at the entrance to metro stations.

The survival of L'Humanité "is not a question of accounting", Mr Le Hyaric wrote. "It is a political question of the first order, about the pluralistic expression of ideas and democracy."

Le Hyaric noted the "constant engagement of L'Humanité alongside workers, popular milieus, the 'invisibles', thinkers who contest the system".

He urged supporters to collect money in public; hold debates; and organise banquets and street entertainment to raise funds for the paper. L'Humanité will organise "a grand soirée of mobilisation and solidarity" in an auditorium in northeastern Paris on February 22nd.

Journalism "would be seriously amputated if L'Humanité disappeared, at a time when we must fight obscurantism, fundamentalism, nationalism and false information that aims to pervert our democracies", L Hyaric told the Catholic newspaper La Croix.

Jean-Emmanuel Ducoin, an editor, said L'Huma, as the paper is known to fans, "will probably not disappear, but because of the economic crisis, we risk being bought by a capitalist group which would transform its content and reconcile it with the market".

A perusal of Monday’s issue seemed to indicate little risk of “reconciliation with the market”.

There was not a single advertisement in 24 pages. A graphic front-page photograph showed a youth with a bloodied face who was allegedly wounded in police violence.

The other cover story announced the Communist list for European parliamentary elections on May 26th, under the title A Europe of people, not money.

L'Humanité stood for pacificism in the first World War and labelled Hitler "the chief Fascist murderer" in the 1930s.

It supported the Republican side in the Spanish civil war.

But when Stalin died in 1953, it published the headline “Mourning for all peoples, the great Stalin is dead.”

And when Soviet tanks quashed an insurrection in Hungary three years later, L'Humanité announced that "Budapest is smiling again".