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.
The French government is rushing through a bill which will give wide-ranging powers to security and intelligence officials to snoop on the nation's citizens. The measure, dubbed by some the French version of America's Patriot Act, will allow spies to tap phones and emails without obtaining permission from judges. It will also allow agents to bug suspects’ homes with microphones and cameras and add covert software to their computers to track every letter and word they type. France's lower house of Parliament, the National Assembly, will hold its final vote on the draft legislation on May 5th. Though the government has sought to justify the proposed law as a necessary tool in the fight against terrorism, the surveillance bill has met with unanimous opposition from civil liberties groups, administrative bodies and the internet community. Editor-in-chief Edwy Plenel here explains why Mediapart is so passionately opposed to this “wicked” law and urges people to join the public protest against it which is planned for Monday May 4th.
The death was announced this week of the French publisher, writer, translator and poet François Maspero, at the age of 83. In this homage to Maspero, Mediapart editor-in-chief Edwy Plenel recounts, in words and video recordings, the extraordinary life of a man who was characterized by his unflagging combat against injustice and imposture, and also how he became an inspirational and tutelary figure for Mediapart itself.
Mediapart celebrates its seventh anniversary on March 16th, writes Mediapart editor-in-chief Edwy Plenel. As always at this period, we are publishing our accounts for the last financial year, in a process of transparency that should be the rule for all the press whose mission is to inform in the name of public interest.
On Wednesday February 25th, lawyers representing the French billionaire and senator Serge Dassault announced they were withdrawing an appeal against a ruling that Mediapart had been justified in publishing details of secretly-made tape recordings involving the industrialist. In those recordings Dassault, who also owns a newspaper group, appears to confess to handing out large sums of cash to ensure his preferred candidate won an election. As Mediapart's editor-in-chief Edwy Plenel points out, not only is Dassault's decision to stop the appeal a victory for press freedom in France, the outcome also makes a mockery of the decision by another court to ban Mediapart from using any content from the tapes at the heart of the Bettencourt affair.
The terrorist attacks in Paris in early January demand an awakening of French society, writes Mediapart editor-in-chief Edwy Plenel. Not one driven by the politics of fear that put the country at war, but one of democratic and social aspirations that demand equality for every member of the population and which, he argues here, is the only solution for eradicating the necrosis of hope that fuels the ‘identity’ conflict blighting France today.
On November 14th, Mediapart revealed that a judicial investigation had authenticated key evidence that the regime of late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi had agreed to secretly finance the 2007 election campaign of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy. Yet this information of important public interest has remained ignored by French news agencies and rolling news broadcasters. To stifle news it suffices to not report it, writes Mediapart editor-in-chief Edwy Plenel. He explains here why this website has now decided to publish in full the contents of the judicial report which confirms as genuine an official Libyan document detailing the plans for the funding scam - and which was first published by Mediapart in 2012.
Earlier this month, Mediapart organised a public debate on the issue of corruption and how to fight this scourge of democracy. The honorary guest and speaker at this rich evening of discussion was Roberto Scarpinato, a senior Italian magistrate and veteran anti-Mafia investigator who since February 2013 has served as public prosecutor in Palermo, Sicily. Scarpinato has regularly denounced, and prosecuted, the hidden corruption and collusion with the Mafia among the Italian establishment. Here, Mediapart editor-in-chief Edwy Plenel analyses the political sense this tireless and courageous figure gives to his mission, and which offers inspiration to all those who seek to eradicate both the corrupt practices that have gangrened society, and the oligarchs that feed off them.
The Iraqi army, Shia militia and Kurdish Peshmerga this weekend launched a combined assault to free the town of Amerli in northern Iraq from a two-month siege by forces of the jihadist Islamic State (IS). But while the jihadists, who have overrun swathes of Iraq and Syria, have suffered recent setbacks in their military campaign, notably after the launching in mid-August of US air strikes against them, they remain a formidable threat in their ambition of establishing a vast caliphate in the region. “Over the quarter of a century that I have been working on this phenomenon, I have never seen this,” says French historian Jean-Pierre Filiu, an internationally-recognised authority on Arabic affairs, in this interview with Mediapart. “The degree of jihadist mobilisation, its coverage in space and time, is without precedent,” he adds, warning that the group’s war chest of more than a billion dollars “now has the resources to perpetrate the equivalent of a thousand 9/11 attacks.” But Filiu also argues that “the key to the jihadist defeat lies much more in Syria than in Iraq”, in the form of the non-Islamist opponents fighting the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.
In an interview with Mediapart the French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve has justified his controversial decision to ban a number of planned protests over the Israeli war against Gaza. In doing so Cazeneuve insisted that it was his decision to ban those demonstrations, and not that of the president François Hollande or prime minister Manuel Valls. The interior minister insisted his ministry had “concrete evidence” that synagogues and Jewish businesses were going to be singled out in those protests. During the interview Cazeneuve also said he had often joined marches in the Palestinian cause in the past and “would have done so again” had he not been in office. Fabrice Arfi, Louise Fessard and Mediapart's editor-in-chief Edwy Plenel report.
From his alignment with the Israeli far-right to the banning of demonstrations in solidarity with the Palestinian people, and the suggestion that this show of solidarity is in fact anti-Semitism disguised as anti-Zionism, French President François Hollande has lost his way, writes Mediapart editor-in-chief Edwy Plenel. In this opinion article presented as an open letter to the head of state, he argues that Hollande has adopted a position of incoherence and hypocrisy that will bring him no political gain and which ignores the lessons of history.
The French government pulled out of the commemorations on Monday April 7th that marked the twentieth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. This abrupt decision was provoked by the recent comments of Rwandan president Paul Kagamé about “the direct role of Belgium and France in the political preparation of the genocide, and the participation of the latter in its actual execution”, remarks which have sparked outrage in France. But though France's reaction was in line with former foreign minister Alain Juppé's demand that the government should “defend France's honour”, Mediapart's Editor-in-Chief Edwy Plenel argues that the decision not to attend the commemorations is instead a sign of France's dishonour over the tragic affair.
Last Saturday, January 25th, President François Hollande announced via the French news agency AFP that he had separated from his partner and 'First Lady' the journalist Valérie Trierweiler, two weeks after the revelation of his relationship with the actress Julie Gayet. Inevitably the issue has raised questions about whether the status of First Lady should exist at all in France. In June 2012 Mediapart's Editor-in-Chief Edwy Plenel wrote an article on this issue in the wake of the row caused by Valérie Trierweiler's Tweet supporting an election rival of Hollande's former partner Ségolène Royal. He argued then that it was time for the Hollande presidency to bid farewell to the fictitious notion of a First Lady or risk falling prey to the same blurring of public and private interests that characterised the Sarkozy years. Republished now, Edwy Plenel's words have a prophetic ring to them.
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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.
