Hubert Beuve-Méry

Hubert Beuve - Méry ( born January 5, 1902 in Paris; † August 6, 1989 in Fontainebleau ) was a French journalist and founding editor of the newspaper Le Monde.

Life

Beuve - Méry came from a modest and experienced due to the First World War a difficult childhood. Nevertheless, he was able to visit a high school and study law. He gained his first journalistic experience in the newspaper Les Nouvelles Religieuses, a Catholic and conservative journal, and experienced in 1925 his first political experience when he participated in demonstrations of the monarchist- nationalist organization Camelot du roi, which against the appointment of pacifists Georges Scelle the Faculty of Law, University of Paris protested. In 1925 he became a member of Le Faisceau, the first fascist party in France for a short time.

After completing his doctorate, he taught as a lawyer at the Institut français de Prague, where he was Technical Advisor to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the First Czechoslovak Republic. He observed there, the rising dangers of militarism in Europe and was also a correspondent of several Parisian newspapers, including Le Temps, the official daily newspaper of the French Foreign Ministry. In 1938 he left the editorial staff to protest against the task of Czechoslovakia.

Hubert Beuve - Méry supported after the surrender of France to the German Wehrmacht, the collaborationist government under General Philippe Pétain and their policy of " national revolution ". 1940-1941 he served as Director of Studies at the Ecole des cadres d' Uriage Uriage in the thermal resort -les- Bains, near Grenoble, a training center for future leaders within the meaning of the Vichy regime, works.

After Pierre Laval, the school closed in December 1942, moved Beuve - Méry with some of his colleagues the page and joined the Résistance. 1943 to 1944 he was a lieutenant of the Forces françaises de l' intérieur, and together with the Maquis fighters involved in the liberation of the Tarn department. This Beuve - Méry is one of the examples that describes Simon Epstein in his book on the paradox français: representatives of the nationalist right who engaged in the Resistance, while also providing a whole range of left anti-fascist, anti-racists and pacifists in the interwar period to the rows collaboration included.

1944, after the Allied landings in Normandy, wrote Beuve - Méry, the U.S. and its materialism were " a real danger for France," a testimony to the widespread anti-Americanism among French intellectuals of the post-war period.

In October 1944 he was editor of the Catholic weekly Temps présent before he was instructed by General de Gaulle to publish a quality newspaper that was to replace Le Temps. So the newspaper Le Monde, whose first issue appeared on 18 December 1944, and its director Beuve - Méry remained until 1969 was formed. He had meanwhile turned to the political left and was in his editorials, which he wrote under the pseudonym of Sirius, a constant critic of the Gaullist.

He was with the Golden Pen of Freedom Award, an award for journalists of the World Newspaper Association, honored in 1972. In 1954, he also founded the weekly newspaper Le Monde diplomatique.