Né en 1952, journaliste professionnel depuis 1976. Après des débuts à Rouge (1976-1978), puis au Matin de Paris (1979-1980) au retour du service militaire, j’ai longtemps travaillé au Monde (1980-2005) dont je fus directeur de la rédaction. Cofondateur de Mediapart en 2008, j’en ai assuré la présidence et la direction de publication de sa création à 2024. Depuis, je continue à y contribuer, notamment avec L’échappée. Je suis l’auteur d’une quarantaine d’ouvrages (bibliographie complète disponible sur Wikipedia en français), dont les suivants concernent directement le journalisme : Le journaliste et le président (2006), Combat pour une presse libre (2009), Le droit de savoir (2013), La troisième équipe (2015), La valeur de l’information (2018), La sauvegarde du peuple (2020). J’ai donné des enseignements aux universités de Montpellier et de Neuchâtel et à l’ENS de Paris.
Declaration of interest
In the interest of transparency towards its readers, Mediapart’s journalists fill out and make public since 2018 a declaration of interests on the model of the one filled out by members of parliament and senior civil servants with the High Authority for Transparency and Public Life (HATVP), a body created in 2014 after Mediapart’s revelations on the Cahuzac affair.
After playing an active role in the Mediapart adventure since its creation 16 years ago, Carine Fouteau, who was joint editor from 2018 to 2023, has been elected, on my proposal, as its new president and publishing editor, writes Edwy Plenel.
President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday led a national ceremony of homage to Robert Badinter who, when justice minister, led the abolition of capital punishment in France and decriminalised homosexuality. Since his death on February 9th at the age of 95, there has been apparent unanimity in the cross-party tributes paid to Badinter, but they cannot hide the violence of the attacks he received from the far-right over his championing of rights and his combat against injustices, writes Mediapart publishing editor Edwy Plenel in this profile of the reformist.
Europe's and North America's claims to support the universality of human rights are constantly contradicted by their actions. As they stand by and do nothing while the state of Israel destroys Palestine, it is instead South Africa that is today defending these universal values, argues Mediapart's publishing editor Edwy Plenel in this op-ed article.
France’s new legislation “to control immigration”, approved by a vote in parliament on Tuesday, transforms the xenophobic programme of the far-right into law, making the foreigner a public enemy and attacking the universal principle of the equality of rights, argues Mediapart publishing editor Edwy Plenel in this op-ed article. History, he writes, will record that the person responsible for this disgrace is the very president who was elected by voters who took to the urns to prevent his far-right rival from gaining power.
It is not just the physical reality of humanity, of lives lost forever, that is dying in the Middle East, writes Mediapart publishing editor Edwy Plenel in this op-ed article. It is, he argues, the very idea of humanity itself that is being destroyed by the unrestrained and limitless vengeance of the Israeli state against the Palestinian population of Gaza in response to the massacre carried out by Hamas.
Democracy depends on factual truths being placed at the heart of public debate rather than the relativity of opinions, writes Mediapart publishing editor Edwy Plenel in this op-ed article. Beyond the urgent need to free the media from the control of monied interests, this was the key political question that was raised at a recent national convention on the independent press, in which Mediapart took part.
Far-right groups in France are carrying out more and more attacks against migrants, people of North African origin and Muslims, writes Mediapart publishing editor Edwy Plenel in this op-ed article. Yet, he argues, this racist and Islamophobic violence has not prompted the kind of political and media reaction warranted by such a dangerous situation.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict presents a moral issue of universal importance, that of the equality of rights, says Mediapart publishing editor Edwy Plenel in this op-ed article. In parallel to Israel’s international legitimacy is a denial of the rights of Palestinians. Alarmed spectators, we discover the horror of the Hamas terrorist attack and the killing of Israeli civilians, and follow the slaughter, under the bombs of the Israeli military, of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. All these human lives have the same value, the same cost, he writes, and we cannot accept this escalade of terror in which the crimes of one camp supposedly justify the crimes of another.
Last week, following a series of violent but unrelated incidents in the country, French president Emmanuel Macron told ministers that the government needed to “counter this process of decivilisation”. The expression immediately provoked controversy. In this analysis, Mediapart’s publishing editor Edwy Plenel says that despite what his supporters claim, the president's choice of the word “decivilisation” owes nothing to the late German sociologist Norbert Elias and instead owes everything to the normalisation of far-right ideas.
On the Indian Ocean archipelago of Mayotte, a French overseas territory and département (county), a police operation launched by Paris and codenamed Wuambushu has begun a crackdown against Comoran "illegal immigrants" who face eviction from their shanty town homes and deportation back to the nearby Comoro islands. The decision to launch the roundup is a political monstrosity and the prolongation of a crime, argues Mediapart’s publishing editor Edwy Plenel in this op-ed article. While maintaining its sovereignty over Mayotte in flagrant violation of international law, he writes, France is staging a massive expulsion of human beings on the pretext that they are foreigners, whereas they are of the same people as Mayotte’s native population.
President Emmanuel Macron, according to his entourage, said he had “no scruples” about walking over the rights of Parliament by using an article of the French constitution to force his reform of the pensions system through the chamber, which was denied a vote on the legislation because he knew it would be rejected. In this op-ed article, Mediapart’s publishing editor Edwy Plenel argues that the move shines a clear light on a presidency which, far from acting as a barrage against the far-right, opens up a path for it by accustoming France to its anti-democratic violence and anti-egalitarian ideology.
If one single proof were needed of the justness of the environmental cause, then this is provided by the frenzied repression regularly deployed against it, writes Mediapart’s publishing editor Edwy Plenel in this op-ed article. From the anti-nuclear protests at Creys-Malville on the Franco-Swiss border in the 1970s to the recent demonstrations against agricultural water reservoirs at Sainte-Soline in west France, and including the sinking of the 'Rainbow Warrior' in Auckland harbour in 1985 and the anti-dam protests at Sivens in south-west France in 2014, the movement's martyrs have stood up against its opponents in France. These opponents are, he argues, proponents of a calamitous capitalism that is now paving the way for carbo-fascism.
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Un año después de su publicación en Francia, mi mensaje para Europa, «Le jardin et la jungle» (El jardín y la jungla), aparece en español en la editorial Edhasa, dentro de una colección de nuestro socio infoLibre. Con un prólogo de su fundador, Jesús Maraña, que publico aquí con mi más sincero agradecimiento.
Invité pour le livre « Palestine, notre blessure » au Festival international de géographie (FIG) de Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, j’y ai appris qu’un juge des référés avait invoqué ma présence pour justifier un arrêté préfectoral instaurant un périmètre de sécurité policière.
“How the West Sees the World”: I examine this question in “The Garden and the Jungle”, which is published this week in the United States by Other Press, one year after its original publication in French. Here I present my introduction to this American edition, written at the beginning of Trump’s second term, in the shadow of the genocide in Gaza.
À quoi sert l’archéologie ? Pourquoi dérange-t-elle nos politiques au point que l’actuelle ministre de la Culture s’en est prise aux chantiers d’archéologie préventive ? Réponse dans trois émissions de « L’Échappée » dont les invités sont des historiens incarnant cette discipline qui oblige à regarder notre passé, et donc la France, en face, sans mythes ni fadaises.
L’association unitaire Visa (Vigilance et initiatives syndicales antifascistes) publie chez Syllepse un remarquable manuel internationaliste de résistance aux nouveaux fascismes que j’ai volontiers accepté de préfacer.
