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This profile considers the Socpresse group of France,
associated with the Hersant and Dassault families.
It covers -
introduction
Socpresse encompasses around 80 daily/weekly newspapers
and magazines in Belgium and metropolitan France and its
territories (including New Caledonia and French Polynesia),
along with minor radio and television interests - including
some in the US.
It at one time had around 30% of French newspaper circulation
and was thought to be poised to expand from television
into other sectors and nations. After the death of its
founder it spent time downsizing - selling stakes in ailing
publications and disposing of units - before passing under
the control of Serge Dassault.
Hersant and Socpresse
The group - centred on national newspaper Le Figaro
- was founded by Robert Hersant. He had gained mild notoriety
as an enthusiastic young editor for far-right publications
in Paris during the German occupation and creator of the
Jeune Front political party but benefitted from the collective
amnesia that swept France from 1952.
In the mid 1950s he began buying provincial newspapers,
particularly in the industrialised north and founded the
best-selling magazine L'Auto Journal. His election
to the French National Assembly in 1956 was disallowed
but he subsequently became both a French MP and a Euro
MP.
In the 1970s he bought Le Figaro and subsequently
acquired Le Progrès de Lyon before buying papers
in the French colonies and moving in and out of papers
in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Figaro
had earlier come under the sway of perfumier, horse owner
and rightist François Coty and the textiles & publishing
(Sept Jours, Paris-Match, Paris-Soir, Paris-Midi,
Marie-Claire) magnate Jean Prouvost.
In 1980 he acquired L'Aurore from textiles &
property magnate Marcel Boussac (1889-1980), now best
known as the sponsor of Dior.
The ebbing of the Hersant tide - he had survived legislation
designed to restrict his market share - apparently resulted
from major losses relating to the La Cinq commercial
television channel, meant to challenge Franco-Belgian
broadcaster CLT.
La Cinq had initially been awarded to Silvio Berlusconi
and Jérôme Seydoux's
Pathé group. Hersant gained the Pathé stake
in 1986 after a change of government.
Neither Hersant nor Berlusconi were able to make La
Cinq into a licence to print money or indeed to stop
it eating their funds. They eventually surrendered the
licence. (It went to Havas, later
a Vivendi subsidiary, which
was equally unsuccessful.) US investor Carlyle took a
stake in Le Figaro and associated publications.
absorption by Dassault
In 2002 a restructure saw acquisition by Groupe Industriel
Marcel Dassault (GIMD) - the Dassault family's holding
vehicle - of a 30% stake in Socpresse (now the main Hersant
family vehicle) and the sale to Socpresse of Carlyle's
stake in that group.
That was followed by acquisition from Vivendi
of its Groupe Express-Expansion (inc l'Express
and l'Expansion) and Groupe l'Etudiant consumer
press units and Comareg for €330 million. That acquisition
was largely funded by a €230 million loan from Dassault.
In March 2004 that loan was converted into equity, following
Socpresse's failure to make the repayment. That took Dassault's
stake to around 50%. Several of the Hersant heirs then
sold their Socpresse holdings to Dassault, which thereby
increased its stake to around 82%. Le Monde,
in noting that French newspaper publishing was now dominated
by two aeospace giants - Dassault and Lagardère
- asked
Is
France returning to the bad old days [before the 1939-45
War] when newspapers were the dancing girls of billionaires?
Dassault dated from the airframe and avionics manufacturer
established by entrepreneur Marcel Dassault (1892-1986)
in 1945 after his return from Buchenwald. The group enjoyed
considerable government support as a national champion
under its founder and under his son Serge (1925- ). In
contrast to other champions Dassault fended off full nationalisation;
the French government sold its 46% stake in Dassault Aviation
to state-owned defense group Aerospatiale in the 1990s.
In 1998 Belgium's highest court convicted Serge for paying
a bribe in a 6.5 billion franc contract to re-equip Belgian
F-16 fighters with new electronics. The affair included
conviction of former NATO secretary-general, Willy Claes,
to a three-year suspended prison term, with similar suspended
sentences for former Socialist president Guy Spitaels
and former Defense Minister Guy Coeme.
Serge Dassault had unsuccessfully sought to buy L'Express
in 1997 and France Soir and Le Figaro
in 1999. At that time he told the LCI cable channel
It
is important for me to be the owner of a newspaper to
express my opinion but also to respond to those journalists
that write anything they want.
In
2001, in conjunction with his campaign for a seat in the
French parliament, Serge's Spif publishing house acquired
three newspapers from Semif, a subsidiary of Hersant's
France Antilles group. Those titles were the Republicain
de l’Essonne, Toutes les nouvelles de Versailles
and Gazette du Val d’Oisein. Spif included
the financial daily Le Journal de Finances, economic
weekly magazine Valeurs Actuelles and film magazine
Spectacle du Monde. The family also had multimedia
interests.
The Dassaults acquired a substantial stake in the influential
but low-profit Socpresse in 2002 and acquired a further
50% in 2004 when Hersant's heirs cashed in their holdings.
13% apparently remains in the hands of Hersant heir Aude
Ruettard, with 5% held by Yves de Chaisemartin, the Socpresse
CEO.
A chronology is here.
structure
An indication of Socpresse holdings is here.
studies
There is no major English-language biography of Robert
Hersant or Marcel Dassault and his son Serge.
The major French works are Nicolas Brimo's Le Dossier
Hersant (Paris: Maspero 1977), Marcel Dassault:
la légende d'un siècle (Paris: Perrin)
and Serge Dassault: 50 ans de defies (Paris:
Perrin), both by Claude Carlier. Marcel’s autobiography
- The Talisman (London: Arlington House 1971)
- is triumphalist, offset by works such as Emmanuel Chadeau’s
more searching De Bleriot a Dassault Histoire de l'industrie
aeronautique en France, 1900-1950 (Paris: Fayard
1987).
Hersant appears in a short and positive profile by Nicholas
Coleridge in Paper Tigers (London: Heinemann 1993)
and in the intelligent, elegant The Vichy Sydrome
(Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1994) by Henry Rousso.
Richard Barbrook's Media Freedom: The Contradictions
of Communications in the Age of Modernity (London:
Pluto Press 1995) and Marc Martin's Medias et journalistes
de la Republique (Paris: Editions Odile Jacob 1997)
consider the French regulatory environment and media concentration.
There is a more detailed account in the five volume Histoire
Générale de la Presse Française (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France 1969-1976) by Claude Bellanger, Jacques Godechot,
Pierre Guiral & Fernand Terrou. Raymond Kuhn's concise
The Media in France (London: Routledge 1995) is
also of value.
Dan Briody's The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret
World of the Carlyle Group (New York: Wiley 2003)
offers a journalistic and at times conspiracist account
of Hersant's US private equity partner. Prouvost was profiled
by Marcel Haedrich in Citizen Prouvost: le portrait
incontournable d'un grand patron de la presse française
(Paris: Filipacchi 1995).
 next
page (Hersant holdings)
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