Citoyen Hersant

Front-page electioneering

A politically ambitious publisher with an unsavory past buys the New York Times and uses its front pages to win the upcoming election for the Administration and himself. It can't happen here, perhaps, though William Randolph Hearst did use his chain of dailies in an unsuccessful attempt to win the 1904 Democratic presidential nomination. It could happen this month in France, where a Hearstian press lord named Robert Hersant is marshaling his paper's political coverage to help the ruling center-right coalition in the March parliamentary elections, and to help keep himself in the National Assembly as well.

Hersant. whose dozen dailies reach one of every five French readers, has become a major power in French politics with his 1975 takeover of Le Figaro (circ. 222,900), Paris' largest morning paper. A studiously centrist bible of the bourgeoisie for its first 150 years, Figaro has under Hersant become blatantly conservative. The publisher took personal charge of Figaro's pre-election coverage, which omitted any mention of his assembly district opponent--even when the paper carried a rundown of every major party candidate--until an outcry in other papers forced Figaro to relent. Last month Hersant invited 2,000 Figaro subscribers in Neuilly, the Paris suburb he wants to represent in the assembly, to a lavish champagne buffet. In protest against Hersant's abuse of Figaro, Raymond Aron and Jean d'Ormesson, two pillars of the French intellectual establishment, resigned as top editors of the paper and criticized the publisher in print.

The scourge of Neuilly was born 58 years ago near Nantes. He went to Paris during World War II and was jailed briefly for ration-law violations and collaborationist activities, offenses for which he was later banned from holding office or owning any publication. Amnestied in 1952, he built an automotive magazine into a press empire that now embraces 27 publications. Hersant's purchase of Figaro, and in 1976, of France Soir (circ. 443,100), Paris' largest afternoon daily, doubled the size of his holdings. It has been widely reported that leading right-of-center politicians, including former Premier Jacques Chirac and National Assembly President Edgar Faure, helped arrange the sales to keep the papers firmly in the hands of the governing camp. Whatever happened, Hersant has become the majority's most important daily journalistic defender, and all the coalition parties have supported his attempt to unseat a fellow Gaullist in Neuilly.

Hersant has held an assembly seat from the Oise region just north of Paris since the 1950s, though a 1976 study by the newsmagazine Le Point found him to be the least effective of 228 majority members of the legislature. His Oise constituency's steady march leftward prompted Hersant to seek election this time from solidly conservative Neuilly. The incumbent, Gaullist Florence d'Harcourt, was expected to drop out of the race.

She did not. Most of the non-Hersant papers in Paris favor her, and she has been waging a vigorous shoestring campaign with personal letters to voters. Despite Hersant's superior financial and propaganda assets, late polls show D'Harcourt running slightly ahead of Hersant. Many French journalists still hope that after the elections they too will be able to say, it can't happen here.

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