Né en 1952, journaliste professionnel depuis 1976. D’abord à Rouge (1976-1978), puis quelques mois au Matin de Paris et, surtout, au Monde pendant vingt-cinq ans (1980-2005).
Cofondateur de Mediapart, j’en ai assuré la présidence et la direction de publication de mars 2008 à mars 2024.
Auteur d’une trentaine d’ouvrages (bibliographie disponible sur Wikipedia en français).
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.
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.
The battle against the French government's pension reform is not simply just another protest movement. Three crucial issues are at stake here: social, democratic and civilisational, as shown by the exceptional unity among trade unions opposed to the changes, argues Mediapart’s publishing editor Edwy Plenel in this op-ed article. All the more reason, he writes, to put all our energy into supporting this combat.
A Paris judge has imposed a gagging order on Mediapart which prohibits it from publishing new revelations in its investigation into the highly questionable political practices of Gaël Perdriau, mayor of Saint-Étienne. The Mediapart investigation has previously revealed the blackmailing of the town’s deputy mayor, a rival of Perdriau's, using a compromising ‘sex tape’ video. As Mediapart’s publishing editor Edwy Plenel details here, the gagging order, which was made at the request of Perdriau and without allowing Mediapart any legal opportunity to oppose it, is an unprecedented attack against the freedom of the press in France.
All his blog posts
The Mediapart Club
Join the discussion
Mediapart’s journalists also use their blogs, and participate in their own name to this space of debates, by confiding behind the scenes of investigations or reports, doubts or personal reactions to the news.
“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.
Le cinéaste Marcel Ophüls, décédé le 24 mai à 97 ans, fut un compagnon de route de Mediapart. Un compagnonnage commencé bien avant, en 1994, à l’occasion de son film Veillées d’armes : histoire du journalisme en temps de guerre.
Avec Olivier Martin, dit Olive, mort le 26 avril après quinze ans de lutte contre la maladie, c’est une haute et belle figure de l’engagement antifasciste qui s’en est allée. Le combat vital de toute une génération.
