Founded in 1915, French weekly Le Canard enchaîné built a solid reputation as a fearless, irreverent, nonconformist journal, and as a successful model of an independent press, mixing satire with revealing investigations that have recurrently shaken the political class. But in what is a surprising move for such an anti-establishment journal, it has now turned to the government for help in sacking one of its investigative journalists.
On September 29th, the weekly’s publishers, les éditions Maréchal, wrote to labour minister Olivier Dussopt seeking his official intervention to approve the dismissal – hitherto blocked by the labour ministry’s work inspectorate administration – of journalist Christophe Nobili. The move to sack Nobili follows his actions in alerting both his editorial colleagues and the justice system to the journal’s alleged fraudulent payment over several years of a salary for the personal partner of one of its cartoonists.
Ironically, Nobili was one of the weekly’s journalists who in 2017 first revealed the scandal surrounding former French prime minister François Fillon’s suspected fraudulent employment, out of public funds, of his wife Penelope as a parliamentary assistant. The couple were subsequently tried and found guilty of the scam, and their convictions were upheld on appeal last year when they received prison sentences and fines. The case is now pending an ultimate appeal.
The move by the management of Le Canard enchaîné to seek the labour minister’s official approval of its intention to dismiss Nobili follows the conclusions, on two recent occasions, by the labour ministry’s work inspectors that, under French labour laws, it cannot arbitrarily sack the journalist notably because of his status as an editorial staff union official and elected member of the weekly’s joint staff and management consultative committee (CSE).
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In their second conclusion reached in early August, the work inspectors in effect argued that the dismissal of Nobili may be interpreted as a retaliation towards an employee who is an active trade unionist. But beyond that consideration is the fact that Nobili, who became a full-time member of the weekly’s staff in 2005, exposed a scandal within Le Canard enchaîné itself, one that bore a striking similarity to the case of the Fillons, and which scuttled François Fillon’s presidential bid and ended his political career.
On October 9th, the 25 staff at the weekly who are members of its SNJ-CGT union branch issued a statement deploring the attempt to gain the labour minister’s approval to sack Nobili. “Maurice and Jeanne Maréchal, who founded Le Canard enchaîné in 1915, must be turning in their graves,” it began. “To appeal to a minister to settle an internal conflict within the journal can be seen as surprising coming from a satirical organ whose vocation, since a century, is to mock the failings and faux pas of those who govern,” read the statement. “In normal times, this kind of acrobatic exercise, which runs against the proclaimed values and independence, would deserve a scathing paragraph in the Canard’s columns… Ridicule, apparently, is not the unmaking of anyone.”
“The management of Le Canard enchaîné has once again exposed itself to public humiliation, and runs the risk of emerging with yet fewer feathers, if not tarred, from this test of strength. Above all at a time when some of the management are themselves targeted by an in-depth investigation by the [police] financial brigade.”
It was almost by accident that Nobili discovered that Édith V., the partner of André Escaro, a veteran cartoonist of Le Canard, which he began working for in 1949 and who sat on the journal’s board of governors, was between 1996 and 2022 a salaried member of the weekly’s journalistic staff. It is alleged that she simply passed on messages between Escaro, now aged 95, and the journal. According to Nobili’s calculations, Édith V. was paid over that period a total of close to 1.5 million euros which, when adding the obligatory employer’s social security contributions, cost Le Canard almost 3 million euros.
The revelations of the arrangement in August last year prompted Escaro, whose cartooning illustrated Le Canard’s weekly, page-long columns of snippets of the confidential conversations and manoeuvrings of politicians, to stand down from its governing board.
Meanwhile, the editorial management of the weekly published an explanation for the salary paid to Escaro’s wife, claiming that she was tasked with “reading the press” for her retired husband and helping him to find “the clever” angle that makes up “the salt” of his cartoons. “That is how Édith was hired, as a back-up for André who obviously no longer received a penny”.
While admitting that the arrangement “could, certainly, appear somewhat acrobatic”, the weekly’s management insisted that this did “not involve public money” and that “no-one was cheated, neither the tax authorities, nor the Urssaf [social contributions system], nor the pension funds”.
Earlier this year, Nobili published a book, called Cher Canard and written in the first person, detailing his investigation into the case, which he says he could never have previously imagined embarking upon, and which led from a throwaway comment during a casual chat with a colleague at the journal’s photocopying machine. In his book, Nobili, who has received support from a section of the weekly’s staff, and notably that of Claude Angeli, a celebrated former editor of Le Canard, explains the reasons behind his decision to lodge a formal complaint over the affair in May 2022.
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After the successive objections from the work inspectors over its move to dismiss Nobili, the weekly’s management had two possible recourses for his sacking. One was to take the case before an administrative tribunal, the other was to take it directly before the labour minister who has the power to overrule the work inspectors’ decisions. It chose the latter route given, it explained to staff in a recent internal message, what it described as the “very lengthy delays in rulings, which amount to years in the case of recourse before administrative jurisdictions”.
In that message, the board said it “can only strongly contest the terms of the decision” by the work inspectorate which “places in question in an unfounded manner the validity of the code of ethics of Le Canard” and which does not recognise the “grave discredit publicly launched” by Nobili’s book.
Beyond the battle it has engaged to sack Nobili, the weekly’s management now awaits the conclusions of a preliminary investigation opened by the Paris public prosecution services, which Mediapart understands are imminent, into suspected “misuse of company assets” and “receiving” of the proceeds. The probe directly followed Nobili’s formal complaint lodged last year when he also established before a judicial tribunal his protective legal status as a whistleblower.
Mediapart questioned Le Canard’s publishing editor Jean-François Julliard about the surprising decision to seek the support, in an internal dispute, of labour minister Olivier Dussopt (who is to stand trial in late November for alleged favouritism over the awarding of a water supply contract when he was mayor of a small town in southern France). “Is this a journalistic question or a moral question that you are putting to me?” asked Julliard, who insisted that the move was “a normal hierarchical recourse, in conformity with the legislation voted by Parliament”.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse