L Équipe
L’Équipe
L’Équipe (pronounced [leˈkip] , French for “the team”) is a French nationwide daily newspaper loyal to sport, possessed by Éditions Philippe Amaury. The paper is noted for coverage of football (soccer), rugby, motorsport and cycling. Its ancestor was L’Auto, a general sports paper, whose name reflected not any narrow interest but the excitement of the time in car racing.
L’Auto originated the Tour de France cycling stage race in one thousand nine hundred three as a circulation booster. The race leader’s yellow jersey (maillot jaune) was instituted in 1919, most likely to reflect the distinctive yellow newsprint on which L’Auto was published. The competition that would eventually become the UEFA Champions League was also the brainchild of a l’Équipe journalist, Gabriel Hanot.
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L’Auto-Vélo Edit
L’Auto and therefore L’Équipe owed its life to a 19th-century French scandal involving soldier Alfred Dreyfus – the Dreyfus affair. With overtones of antisemitism and post-war paranoia, Dreyfus was accused of selling secrets to France’s old enemy, the Germans.
As different sides of society insisted he was guilty or virginal – he was eventually cleared but only after rigged trials had banished him to an island prison camp – the split came close to civil war and still have their echoes in modern French society.
France’s largest sports paper, Le Vélo, mixed sports coverage with political comment. Its editor, Pierre Giffard, believed Dreyfus virginal and said so, leading to acrid disagreement with his main advertisers. Among them were the automobile-maker the Comte de Dion and the industrialists Adolphe Clément and Édouard Michelin.
Frustrated at Giffard’s politics, they planned a rival paper. The editor was a prominent racing cyclist, Henri Desgrange, who had published a book of cycling tactics and training and was working as a publicity writer for Clément. Desgrange was a strong character but lacked confidence, so much doubting the Tour de France founded in his name that he stayed away from the pioneering race in one thousand nine hundred three until it looked like being a success.
L’Auto Edit
Three years after the foundation of L’Auto-Vélo in 1900, a court in Paris determined that the title was too close to its main competitor, Giffard’s Le Vélo. Thus reference to ‘Vélo’ was dropped and the fresh paper became simply L’Auto. It was printed on yellow paper because Giffard used green.
Circulation was sluggish, however, and only a crisis meeting called “to pulverize Giffard’s beak shut”, as Desgrange phrased it, came to its rescue. Then, on the very first floor of the paper’s offices in the rue du Faubourg-Montmartre in Paris, a 26-year-old cycling and rugby writer called Géo Lefèvre suggested a race round France, thicker than any other paper could rival and akin to six-day races on the track.
The Tour de France proved a success for the newspaper; circulation leapt from 25,000 before the one thousand nine hundred three Tour to 65,000 after it; in one thousand nine hundred eight the race boosted circulation past a quarter of a million, and during the one thousand nine hundred twenty three Tour it was selling 500,000 copies a day. The record circulation claimed by Desgrange was 854,000, achieved during the one thousand nine hundred thirty three Tour.
Desgrange died in one thousand nine hundred forty and ownership passed to a consortium of Germans. [1] The paper began printing comment not unfavourable to the occupying Nazis and its doors were plumbed shut with the comeback of peace. [Two] No paper having printed under the Germans was permitted to proceed.
L’Équipe Edit
In one thousand nine hundred forty Jacques Goddet succeeded Desgrange as editor and nominal organiser of the Tour de France (albeit he refused German requests to run it during the war, see Tour de France during the 2nd World War). Jacques Goddet was the son of L’Auto’s very first financial director, Victor Goddet. Goddet defended his paper’s role in a court case brought by the French government but was never wholly cleared in the public mind of being close if not to the Germans then to the puppet president, Philippe Pétain. [Two]
Goddet could point, however, to clandestine printing of Resistance newspapers and pamphlets in the L’Auto print room [1] and he was permitted to publish a successor paper called L’Équipe. It occupied premises across the road from where L’Auto had been, in a building in fact possessed by L’Auto, albeit the original paper’s assets had been sequestrated by the state. One condition of publication imposed by the state was that L’Équipe was to use white paper rather than yellow, which was too closely affixed to L’Auto. [1]
The fresh paper published three times a week from twenty eight February 1946. [Trio] Since one thousand nine hundred forty eight it has been published daily. The paper benefitted from the demise of its competitors, L’Élan, and Le Sport. Its coverage of car racing hints at the paper’s ancestry by printing the words L’Auto at the head of the page in the gothic print used in the main title of the pre-war paper.
Émilien Amaury Edit
In one thousand nine hundred sixty eight L’Équipe was bought by Émilien Amaury, founder of the Amaury publishing empire. Among L’Équipe’s most respected writers have been Pierre Chany, Antoine Blondin and Gabriel Hanot.
Philippe Amaury – Éditions Philippe Amaury Edit
The death of Émilien Amaury in one thousand nine hundred seventy seven led to a six-year legal battle over inheritance inbetween his son and daughter. This was eventually lodged amicably with Philippe Amaury possessing the dailies while his sister possessed magazines such as Marie-France and Point de Vue. Philippe then founded Éditions Philippe Amaury (EPA), which included L’Équipe, Le Parisien and Aujourd’hui. At Philippe’s death in 2006, the group passed to his widow, Marie-Odile, and their children.