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This profile deals with the Bayard publishing group of
France.
It covers -
introduction
The French Bayard group encompasses
newspaper, magazine and book publishing in Europe and
the Americas. It is of interest as an example of the religious
press, albeit with a less stellar reputation than the
CS Monitor.
The Bayard corporate site is here.
the group
Paris-based Bayard is the fifth largest press group in
France in terms of circulation. It publishes over 95 newspapers
and magazines in Europe, North America and other regions.
It is owned by the Roman Catholic Assumptionist order.
The order was established in France by the Venerable Emmanuel
d'Alzon (1810-1880) during the middle of the 19th century,
gaining some notoriety for its strident opposition to
modernism, the antisemitic tenor of its flagship publications
under the Bonne Presse umbrella - in particular La
Croix and Pelerin - and the vehemence of its
attacks on Alfred Dreyfus.
In the 1890s it was perhaps the largest press group in
France, with well over 100 papers and a circulation of
several hundred thousand for the flagships, with operations
in Belgium (the Societe Belge de Libraire) and Geneva
through Victor Palme's Societe Generale de Librairie Catholique.
Bayard has shifted focus from that time, when it became
known as the publisher of paranoid tracts such as Edouard
Drumont's La France juive and La fin d'un monde
and boasts that it was "proudly the most anti-semitic
publisher in France".
Bayard has an alliance with the Belgian Roularta
group, particularly for publishing seniors magazines in
Belgium, Germany and Norway (eg Lenz, Plus
and Vi Over 60).
It is the French leader in four markets: children's publications,
the "over-50's press", hunting and fishing magazines
and the religious press. Bayard Editions, Bayard Poche
and Terrail have a catalogue of over 1,200 titles, with
around 8 million books sold in 1999 (up from 4.5m in 1996).
Bayard Presse International - directly and through licensees
- publishes 28 magazines for children in Canada, Australia,
Francophone Africa, Germany, China, Belgium and the Netherlands,
Spain, the US, UK, Hong Kong, Italy, Poland and Korea.
The group has been expanding its interests in North America
through commercial acquisitions (it now owns the best-selling
parochial publication Catholic Digest, 23rd Publications
and Canadian publisher Novalis).
studies
The literature on Bayard and the Assumptionists is
uneven, ranging from hagiography to equally emphatic denunciations
of their early history.
For publication activity prior to 1900 see Pierre Sorlin's
lacerating La Croix et les Juifs (Paris: Grasset
1967) and volume II of Theodore Zeldin's superb France
1848-1945 (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 1977). Jean-Denis
Bredin's The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus
(New York: Braziller 1986) offers sobering quotations
from La Croix and Pelerin.
Michel Winock's Nationalism, Anti-Semitism & Fascism
in France (Stanford: Stanford Uni Press 1998), David
Kertzer's The Pope Against The Jews (New York:
Knopf 2001) and Roger Williams' Henri Rochefort: Prince
of the Gutter Press (New York: Scribners 1966) offer
a view of Drumont and clerical publishing in his era.
Like many institutions the Order has glided past an apology
for its activities during the belle epoque; we note that
it wasn't until 1995 that the French Army formally admitted
that Dreyfus had been framed as part of
a
military conspiracy which ended in the deportation of
an innocent man and was partly founded on a false document
There are perspectives in the
Histoire Générale de la Presse Française (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France 1969-1976) by Claude
Bellanger, Jacques Godechot, Pierre Guiral & Fernand
Terrou and in The Government
& the Newspaper Press in France, 1814-1881 (Oxford:
Oxford
Uni Press 1959) by
Irene Collins.
Josef Altholz' The Religious Press in Britain 1760-1900
(New York: Greenwood 1989) and Bernard Palmer's Gadfly
for God: a History of the Church Times (London: Hodder
& Stoughton 1991) offer a point of reference.
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