Le Monde, France's journal of record, was nearly bankrupt when Jean-Marie Colombani became director in 1994. "Everyone said we'd be taken over, that we'd have to cut staff, spending and pages," Mr Colombani says, recalling the paper's dark days . "There were no savings left; we were running up a 100 million francs deficit (€15.24m) on an annual turnover of around one billion francs."
Today, the Le Monde group has more than doubled its turnover to €381.12 million. Circulation has risen from 300,000 to over 400,000. Staff too have doubled, from 1,200 in 1994 to 2,500 at present; the number of journalists increased from 220 to 350. The group made record profits of €25.92 million in 2000.
Like other French newspapers, it now faces what Mr Colombani calls "the hurdle of 2001 and 2002". A €30.43 million shortfall in projected advertising revenue, combined with spending on a third rotary press and a new lay-out to be unveiled in January, mean earnings this year will be a modest €6.10 million. But Mr Colombani's strategy of raising outside capital to develop and diversify the group - all the while maintaining editorial independence - has paid off. Le Monde is faring better than other national media in the advertising drought. Over the next two years, Mr Colombani intends to raise €100 million by floating 25 per cent of the company on the Paris Bourse.
Mr Colombani was a political journalist until he took over in 1994, but he says he'd spent a decade planning the newspaper's recovery. Le Monde was still 80 per cent owned by its employees and descendants of the newspaper's founders when he took the revolutionary step of selling shares to an array of French and European banks, businesses and media companies.
"We escaped the fate that everyone predicted for us," he says. "Not only were we not taken over, but we recovered on our own, and became more independent. Instead of reducing steam in 1994-1995, I did the opposite. We didn't cut staff or the number of pages; we saved the paper by launching a new lay-out.
"Initially it dug the deficit deeper, but sales took off and the following year the advertising came back. It was only once we'd got the paper moving, once our house was in order, that we cut back on spending and restructured - in 1996, when we were breaking even, not in 1994 or 1995."
Outside shareholders - none of whom owns more than 3 per cent of the capital - brought €33.54 million to the newspaper, of which €11.74 million had to be reimbursed within five years.
"If not, the debt was to be automatically transformed into shares, and the outsiders could have taken over," explains Mr Michel Noblecourt, who heads the SociΘtΘ civile les RΘdacteurs du Monde (SRM), the journalists' group that owns nearly one third of the newspaper.
"It was a daring thing to do. The paper was in such desperate shape that we journalists had no choice. But there were safety nets: internal shareholders still had a 52 per cent majority, and the SRM kept its minoritΘ de blocage."
This veto power used to require a threshold of 33 per cent ownership. But the journalists' share in Le Monde has diminished in repeated financial operations since 1994. To avoid forcing the SRM to buy shares each time capital is raised, new statutes approved this month permanently enshrine the journalists' power within the paper, whatever their percentage of ownership.
"Our veto is engraved in stone," Mr Noblecourt says. "We cannot be eaten up; we cannot be taken over."
Although the SRM has lost the right to nominate the paper's director, it can veto anyone chosen by the 14-member board, on which it has two seats.
For the time being, the director's job is not an issue. As the newspaper's saviour, Mr Colombani is a popular figure, recently re-elected by 76 per cent of the journalists and the entire board to a second term that will end in 2008, when he is 60.
But privately, some of Le Monde's old guard have reservations about the stock market flotation and the paper's expansion. The Le Monde group now includes more than 10 publications, including the Cahiers du Cinema and Courrier International, and Le Monde is about to increase its participation in the Montpellier-based Midi libre from 38 per cent to 51 per cent.
Half of Le Monde's revenue now comes from diversification. Mr Colombani won't reveal which other regional newspapers he has in his sights, but he says the drop in advertising this year vindicated his strategy.
"The regional press is much more predictable," he says. "They didn't speed up in 2000, and they hardly slowed down in 2001 - it's a good stabiliser."
Mr Colombani jokes that those who accuse him of empire-building suffer from anti-Corsican prejudice. He has no qualms about taking advantage of the capitalist system for the benefit of the newspaper.
"To finance our development, there's the Bourse. Why should we deprive ourself of this instrument, which is normal and natural in a market economy?"
Le Monde's independence is, Mr Colombani says, "our motto, our obsession and our greatest asset". But independence from French political and economic interests can only be guaranteed through healthy finances, he argues. The paper's statutes will prevent those who buy shares on the Bourse from intervening.
"The balance of power is frozen," he explains. "New shareholders will have no vote, no representation in the management." A half dozen administrators - the chairmen of companies who are already shareholders - fulfill that role, he says.
"They've been involved with the paper for eight years. If they wanted to question its independence, we'd know it by now."
Independence was the by-word of Hubert Beuve-MΘry , the courageous journalist who was Le Monde's first director from 1944 until he retired in 1969.
It was Beuve-MΘry who created the SRM in December 1951, giving the newspaper's journalists 40 per cent of the capital to thank them for siding with him in a battle to preserve editorial neutrality vis-a-vis NATO and the US.
Although the satirical magazine, Le Canard enchaȨnΘ, and LibΘration , the left-wing daily newspaper, are also partly owned by employees, the influence enjoyed by Le Monde's journalists is unique in French journalism - and probably in the world.
"Beuve-MΘry wanted Le Monde to be the journal of reference for left and right alike," says Prof Patrick Eveno, of the Sorbonne, who has written two books on the history of the newspaper.
"He wanted to let both right and left express themselves, and he treated readers as adults."
The 1954-1962 Algerian war "made Le Monde", Prof Eveno says. Circulation shot up when Beuve-MΘry began criticising French government policy in north Africa. His essay against torture became a classic of French journalism, and today Beuve-MΘry's old pedestal desk sits in a corner of the assembly hall on the sixth floor of the soulless, modern building the newspaper rents at the southern edge of the 5th arrondissement.
Aside from a gilded antique clock in Mr Colombani's office, there is nothing else in the stark interior to remind you of the paper's illustrious reputation.
Pre-fabricated panels between offices cannot be moved for fear of asbestos contamination. In the corridors, old posters demand justice for the Mumia Abu Jamal and promote the switch to the euro. Le Monde had to sell its original home, in the Rue des Italiens, during a financial crisis in the 1980s.
President Francois Mitterrand had turned on the paper because it revealed, among other scandals, that his "security cell" at the ElysΘe framed several Irish people living in Vincennes. Mr Mitterrand persuaded the chairman of the Banque Nationale de Paris to stop paying journalists' salaries. That led to the creation of the SociΘtΘ des lecteurs du Monde in 1985.
Nearly 12,000 readers still own 10.4 per cent of the paper. The readers have been ideal shareholders because they demand neither profit nor editorial power.
But Mitterrand subdued the paper for a time. Readership plummeted in the early 1990s. Mr Colombani says Le Monde has now been "vaccinated" against partisan politics and it strives to separate information from opinion, "even if we don't succeed every day."
The number of meetings and "open councils" at Le Monde would probably drive an English-language editor to distraction, but journalists describe it is a comfortable place to work, where they feel consulted. If left to their own devices, Mr Colombani says, most of his staff would be "on the left of the left".
But he tries "to prevent them being as militant as in the past" because Le Monde's readers have, on average, five years' university education and will not tolerate being preached to.
Mr Colombani is proud of the first seven years of his editorship. "We put Le Monde back where it belongs, as the leading newspaper in the francophone world."
A recent survey concluded that Le Monde was the most influential newspaper in Europe after the Financial Times.
"For a French language newspaper in a world dominated by English, that's not bad," he adds.
"There's no greater challenge in the French press than Le Monde. The idea of having saved Le Monde and remade Le Monde is enough for me."
Lara Marlowe is Paris Correspondent of The Irish Times.