How Le Monde, ‘The Paper Everyone Reads,’ Discusses Israel and the Palestinians
T. Belman. Fitzgerald does great work.. Here, he reviews the role Le Monde has played in international affairs. Then he discusses a major article of theirs “Palestine, de la colonisation à l’apartheid.” Because Le Monde is such an influential paper he wanted us to know “what the French elite are being fed about the Jewish state and the Palestinians.”
BY
Le Monde is the paper read by the French elite. It was founded in 1944 by the distinguished journalist Hubert Beuve-Méry at the behest of Charles De Gaulle. For a long time it deserved its reputation, for the excellence of its reporting and the elevated language (langue soutenue) in which it was written. But starting in the 1960s, it began its gradual leftwing turn in tone and content. De Gaulle himself, who had pushed for Le Monde’s creation, had deeply resented both the U.S. and the U.K. for having, in his view, paid insufficient attention both to him and to the interests of France. It was Churchill and FDR who met with Stalin in Tehran in 1943, to discuss the conduct of the war; it was again Churchill and FDR who met with Stalin at Yalta in the Crimea in 1945, to discuss how to manage the postwar world. De Gaulle was not invited to attend either conference. The Gaullist anti-Americanism metamorphosed into leftwing anti-Americanism in the pages of Le Monde.
