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 interior minister Manuel Valls has sent out tough new instructions to regional prefects encouraging them to ban shows in the imminent nation-wide tour by controversial comedian Dieudonné who stands accused of virulent anti-Semitism. The French president François Hollande has joined the debate, urging the prefects to be 'vigilant and inflexible' in the way they treat the comic. Some have now banned shows in their areas. Mediapart has been warning of Dieudonné's obsessive anti-Semitism for five years. But, as editor-in-chief Edwy Plenel here argues, banning the comedian's shows runs the risks of the socialist government falling into the age-old trap of democracies who undermine their own fundamental freedoms in the name of law and order. This politics of fear, he says, which uses the threat of chaos to undermine democracy, belongs to governments of the Right.
In France, the online press is officially subject to a VAT rate of 19.6%, while the printed press is subject to a VAT rate of 2.1%. This discriminatory tax on the online press has been dismissed as an injustice by successive governments over the past five years, leading to a suspension of its collection by the tax authorities. Mediapart, which with other online press organizations has led a high-profile campaign to have it removed, has for several years openly adopted the same VAT rate as the printed press. But suddenly, the tax authorities this month demanded that Mediapart pay the VAT rate of 19.6%, with backpayments due on every year since it launched in 2008. It has now been informed of the first tax adjustment, concerning the years from 2008 to 2010. Here, editor-in-chief Edwy Plenel details the gigantic sums demanded, and why this sudden and rushed move is plainly designed to put this wholly independent online journal, whose revelatory investigations have shaken administrations past and present, to the sword.
After earlier racist jibes aimed at justice minister Christiane Taubira, an extreme-right weekly news magazine has now published a front cover containing a racial slur against her. Here Mediapart's editor-in-chief Edwy Plenel attacks the growing tide of racism in France, arguing that the main casualty is the French Republic itself. He traces the immediate roots of its resurgence and calls for a protest march on December 3rd against racism - and for equality.
In a significant legal ruling that upholds the rights and freedom of the press, a Paris court has thrown out a lawsuit for invasion of privacy launched against Mediapart by French industrialist, media tycoon and Senator Serge Dassault (pictured left). The billionaire had attempted to obtain the censorship of recordings published by Mediapart and which reveal his complicity, in his own words, in funding electoral fraud. As Mediapart editor-in-chief Edwy Plenel writes here, the court’s ruling announces a halt to the attacks on press freedom witnessed in two remarkable and absurd judgments concerning this website's reporting in the Bettencourt affair.
US Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Paris late on Saturday to discuss what increasingly appears to be an imminent US-led military attack, with the active support of France, upon the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad. Kerry said the international community was now before a "Munich moment", referring to the appeasement that failed to stop Nazi Germany in the 1930s. "We in the United States know, and our French partners know, that this is not the time to be silent spectators to slaughter," he said. The present crisis will, whatever the outcome, be recorded as a turning point for French President François Hollande. Mediapart editor-in-chief Edwy Plenel argues here that Hollande has alone decided to lead his country to war in a simplistic and precipitated manner, while turning his back on the two challenges left by his predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy, namely a renewal of the democratic process in France and the establishment of a new approach to international relations.
The game of diplomatic bluff played out in the row between the Unites States and Russia over the asylum offered to former NSA computer analyst-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden disguises an essential issue that concerns all of us, writes Mediapart editor-in-chief Edwy Plenel. That issue, he argues here, is how a ‘state of exception’, symbolized by the US Patriot Act and which cites supposed security concerns above the just rule of law, is surreptitiously extending its already vast power amid hitherto widespread indifference. A battle is on to force its retreat, and it is being fought here, on the internet.
The court of appeal at Versailles has ordered Mediapart to remove all quotes from the recordings whose publication transformed the Bettencourt affair into a major public scandal. Three years after Mediapart first revealed the content of these tapes, this decision is more than just an attack on the freedom of information, says editor-in-chief Edwy Plenel: it is an act of censorship.
France's Fifth Republic is reeling after the impact of the Cahuzac scandal. As François Hollande becomes isolated and shuts himself away inside an out-of-date presidential system that has always been fatal for the Left, the Right has been underlining its drift towards extremism, calling for a 'new 1958'. In other words, a coup d'état. Mediapart's Editor-in-Chief Edwy Plenel says it is now up to the people to produce the boldness that the country's leaders lack; to force a much-needed and democratic refounding of the Republic.
The latest twists in the Cahuzac affair show that money, when it becomes an end in itself, is like crime in its desire to escape the law. Here Mediapart republishes an article by Editor-in-Chief Edwy Plenel in which he sets out how tax evasion has become a colossal and institutionalised business at the centre of the economy. Fighting it has never been more urgent, he argues, yet little effort - if any - is being made to prevent it or to sanction those who are bleeding society of vital resources.
In this second and final part of his exclusive interview with Mediapart, French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault answers the suggestion that he is railroading the democratic process with the adoption of the European Treaty on Stability, Cooperation and Governance (TSCG), sets out his position on the widespread use of tax havens by big banks and corporations, and for greater representation of national parliaments in EU decision-making. He also answers questions on recent domestic issues, including his government's decision to ban demonstrations in protest at the publication by a French magazine of cartoon caricatures of Prophet Mohammed, and the calling to book of his interior minister over his out-of-step comments on racial profiling and the right to vote of of non-EU nationals.
In this first part of a wide-ranging exclusive interview with Mediapart, French Prime Minister Jean-Marc pledges his government will do its all to keep the euro alive, argues that a delay should be given to Greece to meet its deficit target and answers mounting criticism that he and President François Hollande have capitulated their pro-growth policies with the adoption, without any compromise, of the austerity-promoting European Treaty on Stability, Cooperation and Governance, the TSCG. The French Prime Minister, in an interview conducted in French and translated here into English, calls on the treaty’s opponents to come clean that they want to leave the euro, and claims the election of President Hollande has announced a re-orientation of European policy-making. “I am convinced there has been an enormous degree of political weakness and lack of vision since the start of the crisis,” he comments, adding that European leaders are “beginning to be conscious of the major risks into which we will be plunged if Greece leaves the euro.”
Earlier this month it was revealed that French tycoon Bernard Arnault, chief executive of luxury goods firm LVMH, the wealthiest person in France and the fourth wealthiest worldwide, has applied for dual Belgian nationality. The French conservative opposition was quick to cite it as an example of the flight of capital that will follow higher taxes the government is to impose on the country’s top income earners, while President François Hollande decried Arnault's lack of patriotism. Mediapart Editor-in-Chief Edwy Plenel sets out here how tax evasion has become a colossal and insitutionalised business at the centre of the economy. Fighting it has never been more urgent, yet little effort - if any - is being made to prevent it or to sanction those who are bleeding society of vital resources.
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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.
