Financial groups and politicians tampering with the media is not an issue that is becoming less relevant. Yet the amount of historical investigation devoted to this subject remains thin. The reasons for this are varied. There is a reluctance to engage with the history of information manipulation. Sources are typically difficult to come by, impact is hard to measure and concerns about being perceived as a conspiracy theorist are widespread. Above all, there is an ‘orientalist’ tendency, well-illustrated by punditry during the Asian financial crisis of 1997, to suggest that political meddling and insider tampering with finance and information production are features of the post-colony. Yet a number of events that have subsequently taken place in Anglo-Saxon democracies (including information manipulation before the US invasion of Iraq in the early 2000s, the subprime crisis, the material ‘revealed’ by the Levenson Report in Britain on the abuses of Press Tycoon Murdoch and the NSA Hacking Scandal of the summer of 2013) suggest that there is scope for a yet to be written history of informational criminality in the West.
Exploring more carefully the logic of media corruption as a phenomenon in its own right might be very valuable indeed. In the specific context of British India, one is reminded of C. A. Bayly's path-breaking book Information and Empire, which articulated the concept of ‘information panic’ and used it to explain the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, thus making information a historical actor. A panic developed when it became clear that the East India Company's traditional sources of information had failed to identify escalating tensions within the colony.Footnote 1 There is no reason why ‘information panics’ should confine themselves to certain historical settings. Indeed a good place to observe the sheer relevance of information production and information suppression is the interwar period. Historian Richard Cockett's Twilight of Truth has described in minute detail the techniques of media manipulation developed by the British Government under Chamberlain, underscoring how manipulation began when the Prime Minister took effective control over the reporting system of the Foreign Office.Footnote 2
Interwar France – the subject of this paper – is emblematic of an information panic in the ‘developed’, democratic state. Earlier studies have highlighted the activities of political, corporate and foreign diplomatic interests in bribing the French media.Footnote 3 Media corruption was a major theme in both contemporary ‘tell-all’ exposés and books written during the Second World War aimed at explaining France's defeat. The theme was also emphasised by credible and informed observers, such as member of the Resistance Marc Bloch, a famous leader of the Annales School of history who was to be murdered by the Nazis, or by French refugees in New York who had been French media insiders before 1940, including Henri de Kerillis, Paul Lazareff or Pertinax.Footnote 4 Marc Bloch's famous essay, ‘The strange defeat’ (L’étrange défaite) explicitly blamed France's poor information context for the country's utter collapse at Hitler's hands. He suggested that mistrust in official communications sent French people on to France's roads in a desperate attempt to escape Germany's tank divisions – inadvertently blocking the French army's ability to move around and launch a counter-attack, the perfect illustration of an ‘information panic’ if there ever was one. Marxist historian Annie Lacroix-Riz's narrative of the origins of France's debacle argues that there was in fact a more systematic purpose behind information manipulation. During the 1930s French elites used their control of important media to promote a bourgeois alliance with Nazi Germany. By singing to the French public the sweet lullaby of the-not-so-aggressive Monsieur Hitler, the French media put public opinion to sleep and when it woke up it was too late.Footnote 5
Lacroix-Riz was violently criticised in France for being a conspiracy theorist.Footnote 6 One point escaped the ensuing dispute: neither Lacroix-Riz nor her critics elaborated on the logic – the political economy, so to speak – of information manipulation. Each side discussed the corruption of French media as a mechanism whereby the distortion in coverage was simply ‘purchased’ without reflecting on the causes and consequences of a system that made such purchases possible. As a result conservative historians have pictured corruption as a way of being, a fact of life, attested by myriad traces – an almost ethnographical trait, according to the arguments of historians Jean-Noël Jeanneney or Paul Jankovsky.Footnote 7 Little allowance is made for the way distortions were effected and the consequences this had, and no room is provided for a political economy of corruption. And yet, underscoring that not all attempts at manipulating information are equivalent, we have appeasement Britain, where Conservatives also sought to avoid confrontation with the Nazis, where the Government also resorted to outright attempts at suppressing or manipulating information. In other words, what we argue here is that while a consensus exists that information played a major role in the debacle of France, we lack a good understanding of the nature of the country's information system.Footnote 8
In this article we contribute to this discussion by studying media cronyism in interwar France. Our contribution is substantive and methodological. First, we shall argue that focusing on the information system yields a novel perspective on interwar politics. In particular, while the interwar period saw governments toppled one after the other, the country's information system exhibited a striking amount of continuity. The history of France's media during the interwar period provides a novel reading of the chronology of interwar politics and, in particular, underscores the relevance of factional competition for the control of the information system as opposed to the conventional emphasis on political competition through elections. Competition for the control of the information system has not been properly highlighted thus far. Rather, it has been treated both as addition to more conventional forms of political competition, and as an element of dysfunction. We suggest that focus on information may provide a novel starting point. Second, we wish to show that, despite the assumption that the history of information control is impossible to write for want of evidential traces, existing business archives may be used in a quite straightforward way to document such manipulations. In other words, one can read political history between the lines of information history.
Specifically, we analyse the records of a French investment bank, Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas, or ‘Paribas’ in shorthand, after the bank's telegraphic address. This focus is justified by the fact that Paribas has been implicated as the cornerstone of political trafficking and the corruption of journals and journalists during the interwar period in both rumour and historical discourse. It was the largest French investment bank, had close connections with the state apparatus of the Third Republic (1870–1940) and enjoyed tight links with banking elites abroad – in particular, in Geneva.Footnote 9 There was (and still is) a tradition for high ranking civil servants to move in to senior positions in Paribas (now part of BNP-Paribas group, a titan universal bank), thus fostering links between business and government. For the period under study, a character of special importance was Horace Finaly, the bank's acting executive between 1919 and 1937, conventionally portrayed as the person in charge of distributing the bribes.Footnote 10 Finaly was a Jew from Hungary, and this stimulated and keeps stimulating the imagination of contemporary anti-Semite and anti-Capitalist conspiracy theorists. He was also a classmate of novelist Marcel Proust, who patterned one of his characters after Finaly. Contemporaries told fantastic stories about Finaly's quasi-magical powers. The subject remains slippery when it is not nauseating.
Although Paribas's own archive would seem to be a natural place to start an investigation of interwar information manipulation, we are the first to pursue this route. Of course, long before Paribas's archive reached the public, much of the relevant material had been purged. This was done by a number of individuals, including Finaly himself, or his protégé Jean Cabet, who later became secretary general of the bank and gave his name to Paribas's archive's catalogue, ‘le Cabet’. Subsequently Paribas filtered access to its records and sought to set the tone of history writing by commissioning the only extant biography of Horace Finaly.Footnote 11 The latest obstacle thrown into the way of researching the topic was an attempt in 2008 by the then chief executive of BNP-Paribas Group, Michel Pébereau, to destroy the entire archive, a decision later presented as an ‘error’. On this occasion the records of Comptoir d'Escompte (BNP-Paribas Group's predecessor universal bank and France's oldest commercial bank) were thoroughly obliterated and the destruction of Paribas's archive was only narrowly averted by a public opinion campaign in which one of the authors of this article participated. The archive is now under the supervision of a competent and open-minded archivist who granted us access to the material.Footnote 12
The evidence relied upon in this paper consists of both quantitative and qualitative material from this surviving source. The quantitative material comprises a series of handwritten ledgers detailing overhead expenses – or ‘cash books’ as similar material is known in British merchant banks.Footnote 13 There we found evidence of large cash distributions to newspapers and politicians by Finaly and his staff. Working with this material, we produce a time series for influence expenditure 1917–1926, the period for which ledgers are available.
The qualitative evidence comprises new material on the position of Paribas in what we call France's ‘media complex’. As others have emphasised, France's media machinery during the interwar period was highly cartelised. Politically connected newspapers enjoyed political support and supported political insiders. Rival factions of insiders colluded against new entrants with the help of two powerful quasi-monopolies: Havas, which combined wholesale information with advertising, and Hachette, a major publisher of books and magazines which had cornered the market of newspaper deliveries through its unrivalled network of distribution points and its large fleet of motor vehicles that criss-crossed France. Through exploring forms of control and interconnections between Paribas on the one hand and Havas and Hachette on the other, we are able to provide a new sketch of Paribas's location in the flow chart of informational power in interwar France, ending around 1937 when organisational changes occurred in Paribas's board. This leaves to future research the task of analysing the subsequent dynamics of France's media system – dynamics that eventually coincided, as said, with France's own information crisis and the debacle of 1940.
This evidence on the information corruption technologies in use at Paribas during the interwar years permits ambitious inferences, making clear that Paribas was involved in France's influence machine in intriguing ways. The links we uncover also reveal something about the structure of the machine itself, permitting novel hypotheses on the relationship between information and information suppression or manipulation in contemporary polities. In short, our evidence explains why it fell upon Paribas to play such a singular role during the interwar period and why it became such a powerful stakeholder in the remarkable concentration of media power which characterised France. In the end, none of this supports soothing accounts which have suggested that Paribas's role in bribing the press was trivial or that France's interwar experience was simple ethnological folklore.
In the rest of this paper, we guide readers towards this conclusion in four steps. First, as background, we survey the interwar mythology and subsequent historiography on Paribas and Finaly. Next, we move to our story and begin by describing the emergence of a non-competitive landscape in France's media industry during the First World War. We then produce our time series for influence expenditure. Last, we provide new evidence on Paribas's links with the two powerful media giants (Havas and Hachette) and use this to sketch out the interlock system on which France's media complex rested. This, we argue, opens new ways of thinking about the relations between information and history.
I. Citizen Finaly
In 1900 Horace Finaly joined Paribas, where he experienced a stellar ascent that accelerated during the First World War. He became Executive Director in October 1919.Footnote 14 This ushered in a twenty-year reign at the helm of Paribas until 1937, when a boardroom ‘coup’ ousted him. During this period contemporaries used superlatives to characterise the influence of Finaly – or Paribas – over the press. Public allegations concerning Finaly's prominence at the helm of France's information system began following the launch in 1927 by one François Coty, a millionaire of Corsican origin (he was the founder of Coty, Inc. that still exists as a leading ‘global beauty products’ brand), of a new mass daily, L'Ami du peuple. Coty had populist and royalist leanings, and his journal cultivated a style whereby his editorials spoke directly to the people in the guise of Jean-Paul Marat's eponymous publication during the French Revolution. According to ‘revelations’ Coty distilled through those editorials, L'Ami du peuple was the victim of an entity designated as the ‘Consortium’. Hachette was part of the Consortium, Coty claimed, and as such it refused to distribute Coty's newspaper. Another member of the conspiracy, Havas, withheld advertising, thus depriving Coty's newspaper of financial resources. Coty sued Hachette and eventually received a large award from the court. Finaly, Coty claimed, was the invisible hand behind the conspiracy.Footnote 15 In one letter kept in Finaly's file at Paribas, Finaly assures his correspondent that he could neither understand why Coty should hold him responsible for the actions of the ‘Consortium’ nor why he was Coty's ‘bête noire’.Footnote 16
A frequent claim at the time was that Paribas ‘controlled’ Havas. One source is a contemporary tell-all blockbuster by Augustin Hamon, who justified his account by having found a Paribas representative on Havas's board of directors.Footnote 17 The existence of links between Paribas and Havas was a favourite theme for other editorial authors in the populist vein, including Georges Valois. His Nouvel Age claimed that Havas board members were really Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas's dummies: Havas had ‘always’ been controlled by Paribas. Likewise socialist-pacifist René Modiano asserted that whoever ran Paribas controlled an entity he described as the ‘Havas press’, comprising the 240 or so newspapers, left and right, whose publicity Havas managed.Footnote 18
Another theme was the good relationship Finaly was alleged to have had with left of centre governments, such as the short-lived ‘Cartel des Gauches’ (1924–1926) and the Front Populaire (1936–1937). As Jeanneney put it, it was ‘a mystery for no gossip columnist that Horace Finaly, the master of Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas. . .had a soft spot for the Cartel’.Footnote 19 Finaly's imagined or real left of centre inclinations gained considerable publicity with Finaly's forced resignation on 4 June 1937. The boardroom putsch had been led by Emile Moreau, a known Conservative and former Governor of the Bank of France, who was sympathetic to France's powerful steel and mining industry lobby, the Comité des Forges.
The episode was hard to interpret and no contemporary editorialists agreed on its meaning, as is made clear by the rich collection of press clippings that the Paribas archive has kept. It was as if the magnetic north had shifted: the political compass had spun around. Some suggested that the ousting of Finaly was a Conservative response to Blum's government's seizure of control over the Bank of France (in 1936, the statutes of the Bank of France had been modified to increase the influence of the government). The ‘pacifist, socialist [and] feminist’ La Vague explained the sacking of Finaly as reflecting the outbreak of a conflict within French financial and industrial elites. L'Oeuvre worried that, now that Finaly was gone, the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas might ‘become a genuine centre of political influence’. La Vague sneered: had not Paribas always been such a centre? It further accused L'Oeuvre of belonging to the group of newspapers that were owned by interests sympathetic to Finaly. The Times summarised well the impressions of an external observer when it argued that the ‘resignation [of Horace Finaly] is viewed with anxiety in circles friendly to the present [Front Populaire] Government where it is remembered that Moreau was Governor of the Bank of France during the financial crisis of 1926, which ended in the overthrow of the Cartel des Gauches’.Footnote 20
Stories also circulated suggesting that Finaly's office at Paribas was an important dispensary of bribes (and thus implying the value of controlling it). One such story found its way into the memoirs of women's rights campaigner Louise Weiss. Instructed by a ‘common friend’ (journalist Elie-Joseph Bois from Petit Parisien) to visit Finaly and secure advertising for her struggling L'Europe nouvelle, Weiss worried about being ‘bought’. ‘No nonsense please’, Bois told her, ‘Horace does not need you’. ‘His help won't commit you. Not even towards him’ (although she was ‘moved to tears’ when she learnt the extent of Finaly's generosity, she would later discover that there were strings attached: newspapers on the payroll were expected to provide political support).Footnote 21
Perhaps the most substantial piece of ‘evidence’ extant on Finaly's influence over French media is an article by Jean-Noël Jeanneney on the Banque Industrielle de Chine (BIC) ‘affair’ of 1921–1923. Jeanneney, a leading contributor to the history of interwar corruption, is also heir to a dynasty of centrist politicians (his grandfather Jules presided the French legislature's meeting which gave full powers to Marshal Pétain in 1940). For much of his research Jeanneney has been able to inspect still inaccessible private papers. His work on the BIC affair uses a number of such sources to narrate a convoluted political and financial scandal involving businessman and MP André Berthelot and his brother Philippe Berthelot, who was in charge of the Asia desk at the French Foreign Office (‘Quai d'Orsay’). The BIC bore the hallmark of an insider project, and in 1921, as BIC's prospects were becoming bleak, André Berthelot turned to his brother for a bail-out.Footnote 22 The political and financial establishment were split over the issue. In the ensuing dispute, Paribas played a key role, leading various rescue packages, pledging its own money and producing favourable audits, though it could not prevent the eventual liquidation.
Jeanneney argues that the episode ‘patently’ underscored the ‘overarching dominance of Finaly on the press’, evidence of which could be garnered from the way leading Parisian newspapers either sided with Finaly, attacked the political enemies of the Berthelot brothers or were cajoled into observing a ‘religious silence’. Finaly personally intervened to deal with recalcitrant journalists. When Journal des Débats printed a series of articles hostile to the BIC, Finaly sent the message that ‘if money is the matter, out with it and let us be done with it’.Footnote 23
‘Friendship’ is often invoked in historians’ narratives. Oddly enough, such stories go back to a theory popularised by collaborationist and anti-Semite Georges Bonnet, who would allege in his memoirs that the influence of Paribas on Havas would have operated through Pierre Guimier, Havas's number two and Finaly's ‘most intimate friend’.Footnote 24 Likewise, when discussing Finaly's left of centre inclinations, Jeanneney attributes them to Finaly's friendship with Paul Painlevé, a Cartel minister, mathematician and ‘chess companion’ of the financier. The importance of interpersonal networks is also emphasised by Lefébure's work on Havas, in which this author refers to a highly influential ‘Finaly connection’ (réseau Finaly). Drawing on the testimony of Bonnet, Lefébure argues that Guimier was ‘Finaly's right hand man’ (homme de confiance).Footnote 25 Lefébure also associates this network of individuals with the infamous ‘Consortium’ and writes that, after the First World War, control of the Consortium was coveted by a ‘number of members of parliament and several bankers’, who would have ‘understood the considerable power which dealing in press and publicity confers’. This group, he suggests, was characterised by individuals such as Member of Parliament Anatole de Monzie.Footnote 26
Lefébure's book seeks to explore what other mechanisms besides personal contact might have enabled Finaly to ‘control’ the media, including through contractual dependency, for example. Lefébure argues that Paribas did participate as underwriter in ‘every single share issue’, held Havas's bank account and documents one instance in which Paribas would have been the ‘largest’ subscriber to a new rights issue, in 1930. In summary, Lefébure conjectures that ‘Finaly’ (i.e. Paribas) was a ‘powerful shareholder of Hachette and Havas’. Lefébure stands apart from other historians by substantiating existing narratives with hard evidence. This is particularly noteworthy because he is not a professional historian but a journalist. However, as we shall emphasise later, the rights issue of 1930 was for so-called ‘B shares’, which came with reduced voting rights, and the situation was more complex than Lefébure suggests.Footnote 27
Eric Bussière's commissioned biography of Finaly describes elements of a kind of ‘media corruption bureau’ (not his expression, but our characterisation of his description) at Paribas whose creation coincided with Finaly's elevation to the position of chief executive in 1919. Finaly worked with a team that included Commandant Nusillard, famous head of newspaper censorship during the war. Bussière states that Nusillard would have been ‘hired because of his human qualities’.Footnote 28 Another important person in Finaly's corruption bureau was Choppin de Janvry, who was in charge of publicity. The team would work with Finaly until his departure in 1937.Footnote 29 However, Bussière goes on to argue that corruption was occasional, contradicting his own description. Finding evidence of what he refers to as ‘cash withdrawals’ by Finaly amounting to FFr 845,000 in 1924, an election year, and reportedly unable to find similar withdrawals in 1923 and 1925, Bussière conjectures that Finaly might have been ‘supporting financially some of his friends’ on the left during the election year. It is unclear from the narrative which sources he consulted, however.Footnote 30
Bussière borrows from Lefébure the idea of a ‘Finaly connection’. According to Bussière, the connection consisted of a broad network of acquaintances in politics and the media. Like others, Bussière argues that one pillar of this network was Pierre Guimier, a ‘good friend’ of Horace, and he narrates Guimier's visit to Finaly's villa in Florence, where Finaly's mother provided Guimier with a warm welcome. We are led to imagine the orange juice served by Madame Finaly under the Villa's gazebo. (Finaly took advantage of this to ask Guimier to publish an interview of First World War hero Marshal Joffre on the advantages of keeping BIC in operation).Footnote 31
Despite this, however, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Bussière's assessment of Paribas's control of Havas and Hachette opposes Lefébure's in that he claims that Paribas was never a powerful shareholder in the two media companies. In contrast to Jeanneney, Bussière also plays down the role or influence of both Finaly and Paribas in the press and politics. He argues that Paribas's influence in the two companies would have been similar and, in both cases, modest. In the final reckoning Finaly is portrayed as an economic expert, ‘advising’ ‘a political class ill-equipped to deal with problems that were new to it and that had it rather disoriented’ (possibly meaning that politicians did not understand inflation, a widespread myth among French historians).Footnote 32
Thus the existing literature presents itself as an accumulation of vague, general, contradictory and ultimately unsatisfying conjectures regarding Paribas's ‘overarching influence on France's media’ (as per Jeanneney). Many questions (methodological and substantial) remain open. The ‘conspiracy’ narratives are all very well but the question that comes to mind when reading such stories is that if Paribas and the ‘Consortium’ had so much power then how was it that newspapers such as Nouvel Age existed at all and could make their ‘revelations’? And if such revelations could be made and attract interest (otherwise, how would they have made their way to a frequently superficial historiography?) then what happened to the powers of the conspiracy? Likewise, arguments invoking the existence of networks or clusters of personal affinity as driving forces of the interwar history of the media stumble on their own contradictions as illustrated by the Salengro case, in which a minister of Léon Blum's Front Populaire was pushed to suicide by a particularly defamatory press campaign. Finaly had his good friend Guimier with whom he shared an orange juice under the Florence Villa gazebo, and Finaly the left-leaning financier had his good friend Léon Blum, the Socialist Premier of the Front Populaire. Now this did not prevent Guimier's ‘Havas Press’ from going after Salengro in 1936: suddenly, there was blood in the orange juice, and ‘personal’ explanations were in jeopardy.
II. Media Competition before the First World War, Media Repression after the First World War
This article suggests taking a new perspective on the subject – proposing a story of propaganda in which the focus is the fight over the control of media outlets rather than the control of newspaper contents. In order to understand the logic of information control and manipulation during the interwar period it is useful to use existing research to develop a sketch of the ‘industrial organisation’ of the media market, beginning with the pre-war situation and continuing the narrative into the aftermath of the First World War. This flashback is indispensable for understanding the informational ecology in which Paribas found itself and the meaning of its encounters with the media system.Footnote 33
As many historians have noted, a major difference between the pre-First World War situation and the interwar period is the earlier period's vibrant economic performance in contrast to the later one. Seven digit circulations were reached by dailies such as Le Petit Parisien, Le Petit Journal and Le Matin. Leading newspapers were extremely influential. The flamboyant Bunau-Varilla, owner and editor of Le Matin, argued that his seat was ‘worth two thrones’. This was the case in part because the Law of 1881 had permitted a considerable amount of libel against political and corporate leaders (it had been argued that this would have a cleansing effect), with the result that freedom of speech turned into an instrument of extortion, siphoning resources to the media. Using negative coverage as a threat, newspapers sought to coerce companies, banks and domestic and foreign governments into buying publicity. The French situation differed from Britain with its tighter restrictions against commercial libel, and was perhaps more similar to the US context, which saw the emergence of so-called ‘muckraking’ journalism. Like in the US muckraking journalism à la française was Janus-faced: major scandals such as the Panama scandal can be read as a tale either of the underlying corruption of politicians or of the power of the press and the resilience of democracy.
One mechanism helped to mitigate the extent of rackets. Free market entry meant that incumbent newspapers operated under the constant threat of competitors. The exposure of corruption would be detrimental to one's reputation, and this provided some motivation for newspapers to be careful, as imperfect as the mechanism was. François-Ignace Mouthon, a former employee of Bunau-Varilla at Le Matin, demonstated how the circulation of Le Matin had plummeted when a racket attempt that targeted wine producers union had been exposed. Given this, it was preferable to try and display good will. Nurturing an ethos that emphasised the ‘public interest’ was a frequent response by leading newspapers, which undertook (again like their counterparts in the United States) vigorous campaigns on such issues as the defence of public health, hygiene and the like.
Of course, given the permissive libel system, potential prey also had to devise strategies to cope with lingering threats. A key difficulty for them was to gather information about their predators: who they were and how to price the threats adequately. This led to the emergence of a specific institution. It consisted of the growth of what we would today call ‘public relations’ specialists. Before the First World War two groups were involved in this trade. The first were the so-called publicity brokers – ‘agents de publicité financière’. Publicity being the main instrument to channel payments to media, it is no wonder that such intermediaries were named after it. Publicity brokers sold information on predators to targets and helped them price each predator's nuisance factor, in effect advising in the purchase of publicity. Next, they monitored the behaviour of recipients of publicity payments. According to Eugène Letailleur, a muckraking journalist, the political power of publicity brokers was enormous.
The other group of media specialists were leading financial institutions, including both commercial banks and a few prominent investment banks who took questions of reputation very seriously (as historians involved in the campaign to prevent BNP-Paribas from destroying the archive of Paribas recently learned). Because they issued the securities of their corporate clients, underwriting banks constantly had to deal with such rackets and thus became quite knowledgeable about the ecology of the media market. Paribas was privy to this system, being from its inception both an investment bank and a political agent. When this bank was created in 1872, the aim of Republican politicians had been to secure the help of a friendly investment bank willing to support the regime through thick and thin. To achieve this, the age-old template of the ‘chartered company’ was reinvented: Paribas enjoyed privileges and was expected to reciprocate. For instance, Paribas was favoured with quasi-automatic participation in government debt underwriting syndicates, domestic and colonial. This two-way relationship was observed when Paribas underwrote foreign debts but worked closely with the Foreign Office;Footnote 34 when, in the aftermath of the Versailles Treaty, it became involved with France's attempts at projecting economic power in Germany's former hunting preserves and, again, during the 1930s, when it was in charge of the promotion of the French colonial Empire.
Therefore, as a result of its essentially political and financial nature, Paribas was in the business of dealing with information. The best documented pre-war example is that of 1904, when Arthur Raffalovitch, Paris's representative of the Russian Minister of Finance, was approached by financiers and media agents in the wake of Russia's defeat at Tsushima. Speculators who shorted Russian securities were said to be seeking to induce fire sales among savers, and the story went that media spending was needed to avoid prolonging the panic. To handle the situation Raffalovitch received advice from André Bénac, a former head of the French Treasury and adviser to Finance Minister Maurice Rouvier, who had recently been appointed an Administrateur (member of the board of directors) of Paribas.Footnote 35 Bénac could tell Raffalovitch the amounts paid in ‘similar cases’ and helped him reduce the bill. Publicity distributed by the Russian government on this occasion was paid for through an anonymous Paribas ‘K’ account.Footnote 36 However, it is crucial to distinguish information and control: that Paribas knew how the system operated does not mean that it controlled it. Its frustration with blackmailing journals is illustrated by an episode in 1909 when Albert Turrettini (Finaly's predecessor at Paribas) divulged information on payments to individual newspapers – perhaps to disclose the extent of the corruption.Footnote 37
A key feature of the pre-First World War information system's industrial organisation in France was its competitiveness. A cartel of publicity brokers would have eliminated petty racketeers only to replace them with its own more powerful extortioners. Early attempts at doing so were met by banks switching to new intermediaries.Footnote 38 However, in the last years before the First World War, French media insiders, under the leadership of Léon Rénier, who ran Société Générale des Annonces, the ‘publicity arm’ and sister company of wholesale news provider Havas, began creating a complex web of interlocking publicity and media companies. The principal targets of such efforts at combining information and publicity were the large commercial and investment banks such as Paribas, which might, a contemporary police report warned, have to come to terms with the conditions set by ‘le Trust Rénier’ each time they issued a new security. The report emphasised the ‘enormous’ implications of this development and the risk that ‘in the very near future, it will not be possible, for even the most important credit houses to make successful securities issues without complying with le Trust Rénier’.Footnote 39
The outbreak of the war quashed any reservation the executive may have had towards the development noted in the police report. The creation of a coalition government (Union Sacrée) limited political competition between media. War also made the French government anxious to secure access to the capital market and to control information flows – propaganda was needed to induce investors to lend their savings to the government. Reflecting this new congruence between finance, media and the state, the censorship bureau was located, suggestively, at the Paris Stock Exchange.Footnote 40 Havas, and thus the Société Générale des Annonces, were enrolled in the war effort, with the consequence that press campaigns intended to encourage private lending to the government were supervised by the same Pierre Guimier that we came across in the previous section.
Rather than combating the tendency towards an information cartel, then, the government assisted it, and the press ‘Consortium’, a coalition of the ‘big five’ Paris newspapers with Havas and Hachette emerged. References to ‘Le Consortium’ would take on the aura of a conspiracy during the interwar period, but as historian Richard Kuisel reminds us, the call for ‘consortiums’ during the First World War was neither limited to the media nor looked down upon. During the Great War consortia grew out of governmental ‘concerns’ with efficiently administering prices and production in strategic sectors. The rhetoric that surrounded their promotion emphasised their more ‘rational’ and ‘efficient’ managerial capacities.Footnote 41
Cartelisation of the press became an instrument of ideological control in the hands of Union Sacrée, while the Consortium provided the necessary technologies to ensure the cooperation of the media. On the one hand, newspapers sold their advertising space to Havas at a guaranteed price. Havas used its market power to secure higher prices from corporate advertisers. As previous authors have noted, publicity became Havas's main source of revenue. Havas and Société Générale des Annonces merged in 1920 and, reflecting the new balance of power between information and publicity, Rénier became Chairman of Havas's executive board in 1924.Footnote 42 On the other hand, Hachette (already a powerful distributor of newspapers before the First World War) reinforced its market dominance during the First World War as several leading newspapers signed distribution contracts with it.Footnote 43
Mirroring Havas's evolution, Hachette had established its hold by 1919. It rewarded those who cooperated with swift deliveries. The efforts of competitors were thwarted by pressure on distributors. Those distributors not owned by Hachette were threatened with an embargo on the delivery of those journals with which Hachette was in good terms. Through these transformations, pre-First World War competition now gave rise, in the aftermath of the armistice, to a non-competitive setting at the heart of which was a group of insiders.
In summary, the First World War gave rise to a mutation of the information system in which the pre-war press brokers began to ally themselves with cartelised newspapers and politicians. Moreover, because they were associated with media service companies Havas and Hachette, the complex began to wield tremendous media market power. Despite ostensible fragmentation, the resulting jungle of interlocking cartel agreements ensured a high degree of concentration: seemingly fragmented entities made the system hard to read and, indeed, no single individual really controlled it. The end result was that French media had become even more politicised than it had been before the war, something which the leaders of Havas and Hachette publicly recognised. As Rénier would declare in the late 1930s when asked what degree of freedom Havas had with respect to the French government, ‘the company would not survive one hour if it were in conflict with the government, whatever this government’. Fouret (chairman of the board of directors of Hachette) declared in 1927 that Hachette was connected ‘in many ways with the affairs of the press and of French and foreign politics’. He used this to justify the high wages of senior executives.Footnote 44
Thus there emerged an elaborate system of information control, which relied on overlapping agencies whose cooperation was necessary to produce or suppress news. One result was that crucial aspects of political competition took the shape of a competition destined to control these agencies. Another was that insiders had a collective interest in protecting a system which was their surest defence against outsiders. New media outlets were difficult to create. Small papers could find a niche but truly ambitious attempts were met with resistance from the incumbents. Several attempts at breaking in to the media during the early 1920s were successfully repressed. The few newspapers that nonetheless managed to establish themselves either experienced eventual decline and bankruptcy (L'Ami du Peuple) or cut a formal agreement with the Cartel (Paris Soir). Given the situation, competition developed within the effective cartel over the conquest of existing agencies.
In summary, transformations in the media landscape during the First World War replaced the competitive blackmails of the French muckraking era with a new type of informational criminality that rested on a highly politicised control of the media. This represents, to some degree, the triumph of the publicity broker or, more precisely, its nationalisation through the creation of a state-supervised coalition of politicians, financiers, newspapers and their agencies.
III. Buying Influence: New Evidence
In order to illustrate the rising importance of spending on influence at Paribas during the period when the Consortium was organised, we collected data from three surviving ledgers, or cash books (‘Comptabilité générale, Frais généraux, Détail’, ABPPB, REG 0271, 0272 and 0273) covering 1917–20, 1921–23 and 1924–26 respectively. Discovery of this source took place as we were trying to understand the significance of Bussière's aforementioned statement about cash withdrawals made by Finaly in 1924 but allegedly not before or after.Footnote 45 We thus asked the archivist Roger Nougaret whether the archive held any cash books (Registres de Frais Généraux). These amazing ledgers, which we concluded had never before been seen by historians, bring to life, often in entertaining ways, the daily list of petty expenditures of a ‘non banking’ character: stationery, wages of delivery boys, tips, fire insurance, police surveillance of the bank's precincts, Finaly's box at the Paris Opera, presents, cigars or tea for Finaly's staff and the new carpet bought at Place Clichy. Among this list of odd items was evidence on influence spending, affirming beyond the shadow of reasonable doubt that large payments had been made – repeatedly – and recorded as carefully as the milk for the cat (Figure 1).
Extract from the Paribas Overhead Expenses Ledgers
The value of the cash books is not only that they provide an accountant's confirmation to Louise Weiss's anecdote. More fundamentally, they underscore the internal transparency (for members of the ‘corruption bureau’) of the process through which money was being distributed. Indeed, Finaly is not the only name that appears alongside withdrawals (although it is the main one). One also comes across Nusillard and Choppin de Janvry, who were assisting Finaly in his dealings with the press; Oudot, another member of the executive board, responsible for credit activities; Rein, in charge of the stock exchange; or Jahan, the bank's Secretary General. There are also mentions of ‘clearance’ by board members, for instance in December 1919 when a FFr 50,300 withdrawal by Finaly was marked as ‘approved by Turrettini’, the former CEO, revealing a continuity between Turrettini (a member of a powerful protestant family that belonged to the banking establishment of Geneva) and Finaly. Finaly's distribution of monies reflected the bank's policy, which everybody understood him to implement. In contrast to accounts that have tried to ‘personalise’ Finaly's influence over trafficking, we find that his activities had corporate significance: ‘friendship’ and ‘networks’ are just lazy turns of phrase, ones which hide a well-organised system behind anti-Semitic and personal insinuations.
The cash books organised expenditures by genre, in thirteen columns. Three main columns are of interest to us – publicity (publicité), subscriptions to journals and stock exchange lists (abonnements aux journaux et aux cotes de bourse) and other (autres).Footnote 46 The reasons for singling out these columns are as follows: as one contemporary publicity broker claimed, ‘publicity’ ‘exist[ed] to justify the money you give’ (as opposed to money being given to pay for publicity purchased).Footnote 47 Recording a bribe under ‘publicity’ laundered the payment and thus protected reputations.Footnote 48 ‘Subscriptions’ provided an alternative laundering device. Indeed, as we repeatedly discovered, Paribas rarely bought one subscription to a journal. Rather, newspapers subscriptions were bought in bulk, with the subscription not necessarily delivered.Footnote 49 The column ‘other’ is the most illuminating column, including because of the anecdotal glimpses it offers. It is in this column that we learn about Finaly's taste for treating his guests at Café de Paris, Café Voisin (the best Paris restaurant of the time, says contemporary Michelin) or Hôtel Ritz.Footnote 50 This column also contains a variety of payments and consulting fees to military personnel, putting the bank at the heart of the continuity between the wartime and post-war world of propaganda and censorship – a continuity which Finaly's employment of Commandant Nusillard epitomises.Footnote 51 A number of mini scoops are also to be found there. One worth mentioning is a payment of 20,000 FFr, a substantial amount of money, made in October 1921 to Anatole de Monzie, MP, noting ‘BIC affair’ (Banque Industrielle de Chine). The discovery is significant given that Jeanneney has claimed that ‘one cannot prove that any politician, minister or MP would have secured private benefits from intervening in the [BIC affair]’.Footnote 52
Working within and between the columns, we organised a time series for influence expenditure that is made up of eight different sub-items. We list them here along with the label we gave them. 1. ‘Finaly's own’, the cash withdrawals without indication of purpose’, the payments to journalists such as the one described by Louise Weiss. 2. ‘Finaly's staff’, the cash withdrawals made by senior managers (Oudot, Rein or Jahan) or Finaly's press relations team (Nusillard, Choppin de Janvry) and other payments or gifts to individuals, presents and decorations; 3. Expenditures on ‘financial research’, which primarily included large publicity budgets and payments to ‘experts’ generally journalists or politicians.Footnote 53 4. ‘Restaurants’. 5. Expenditure on ‘charities’, which begins suddenly in 1920. In some cases, such as in December 1924, they appear with an inscription that gives the game away (‘Oeuvres de bienfaisance et subventions diverses’). The political impact of certain charities such as the French Catholic Mission in China (Missions Catholiques Françaises en Chine) in the BIC affair is underscored by Jeanneney.Footnote 54 6. ‘Petty cash’, or perhaps ‘cash in hand’, which is not always petty but always unaccounted for. 7. ‘Missions’, referring to the travel expenditures of distinguished individuals which covered various generosities. A splendid example is the funding by Finaly of a trip to China by his ‘friend’ the senior politician Paul Painlevé in late 1920.Footnote 55 8. Last, we find in May 1926 a ‘voluntary contribution’ of 1,000,000 FFr for a ‘good citizenship’ gift to the French Treasury as part of a collection made to support fledgling French finances.Footnote 56
The bar chart in Figure 2 provides constant 1916 FFr annual aggregates (1917 to 1926) for publicity, subscriptions and the eight different items discussed above regrouped in three categories. Publicity and subscriptions generally provide the bulk of spending on influence, but ‘studies’ and ‘charities’ occasionally make substantial contributions. The chart displays volatility within items. For instance, Finaly's own payments and that of Finaly's staff were important during his first years as chief executive (1919–1920) and again during the Cartel des Gauches (1924–25). They were also significant in 1922, perhaps in relation to the BIC affair.
Annualised Total PR Expenditures, narrow and large definition of ‘Other PR’ - Constant French Francs 1916:1, 1917–1926
More important than the individual lines are the aggregates, for they underscore a marked tendency for influence expenditure to increase. Thus, the evidence suggests that distribution of money was not simply related to specific events or campaigns (despite conventional suggestions). Instead, the data's main message is that after the First World War there was a considerable expansion in influence expenditure. Allegations of Paribas's influence spending during specific events such as political campaigns may have provided contemporaries with the sense that the bank was involved in bribing, but these were fragments of a systematic process. Changes in expenditure items generally reflected the versatility of instruments and the substitutability of accounts and headings. But once aggregates are reconstructed, it is intriguing to see that overall influence spending steadily increased in real terms, and did so much more rapidly than the expansion of the French economy, thus reflecting some important transformation.
Two forceful conclusions emerge. The first is that previous histories emphasising the role of Paribas as a purchaser of influence were correct. There is no doubt that in the aftermath of the First World War Paribas devoted resources to buy influence. Nor should there be any doubt that the direction of the bank was associated with this process. Staff were involved in the process because, quite obviously, this spending was one of the functions of the bank. Second, rather than corresponding with specific campaigns, influence expenditures experienced a transformation. Between 1917 and 1920, when a new corruption bureau was set in place under Turettini's then Finaly's supervision, expenditure on influence drastically increased. Evidently, the bureau was created to somehow ‘rationalise’ and manage this increase in spending. The discovery that figures kept rising is only surprising when contrasted with those accounts that have sought to downplay the significance of the transformation. In 1926 the total amount of influence spending reached 4.7 million FFr (1.2 million FFr in constant 1916 FFr). To assess whether this was ‘large’, a plausible comparison can be made with the special ‘publicity’ budgets of the Bank of France for 1926, during which time Governor Moreau was waging a massive propaganda war against the government. The publicity budget of the Bank of France stood at 2.7 million FFr. Jeanneney has argued that Moreau's budget was ‘considerable’. What should we say of Finaly's?Footnote 57
IV. Paribas in the Media and Political Complex
A natural continuation of this analysis is to document the channels of control that ran from Paribas to France's media complex. In the plan envisioned by Rénier before the First World War, cartelised publicity brokers would have extracted greater resources from the country's financial system. As we have seen, the blueprint was then put to work, with the French state supervising an alliance that encompassed Havas, Hachette and the leading newspapers of the time. That Paribas was spending more on influence might mean that it was purchasing more influence, but it may have meant that it was paying more for the same amount of influence (owing to the fact, perhaps, that it was now dealing with a cartelised media machine). We lean towards the first interpretation but to prove our conjecture it is necessary to first provide a finer understanding of the way Paribas participated in the web of interlocking interests that kept France's media complex together.
In fact the available dossiers in Paribas's archive, which have not yet been meticulously dissected, shed significant light on the subject, disproving of a number of myths surprisingly easily. First, it appears that, until 1938, Paribas was not in any meaningful way a ‘powerful shareholder’ of Havas (contradicting widespread beliefs to the contrary).Footnote 58 As we found, those shares it held typically had junior voting rights (‘B’ shares as opposed to the ‘A’ shares which conferred voting power).Footnote 59 An internal memo written in 1928 (perhaps written to dispel accusations?) states that ‘the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas has been for a number of years the banker of Agence Havas. It is neither directly nor indirectly the owner of any of this company's A shares [“actions à votre plural”]. Likewise, neither the managers nor members of the board of directors own any of these shares. It has no seat on the board of this company of which it only owns a number of junior (‘ordinaire’) shares’.Footnote 60 Indeed, the evidence demonstrates that Paribas was not part of the special holding company created in 1927 with the purpose of preventing any ownership change for ten years – the Havas A-Stocks syndicate – which also established Rénier's strong grip over the company.Footnote 61
In other words, the relationship between Havas and Paribas was not one of a shareholding or interlocking directorship. It was more like the relationship between the sinner and the confessor. For instance, as Havas's banker, Paribas was aware of the existence of the holding company arrangement of 1927 (as few were) and who had power. Likewise, as the banker in charge of Havas's capital increases, which meant it occasionally intervened in the market to support the value of Havas's stock, Paribas was aware of useful details regarding the ownership of shares as well as other non-public information.Footnote 62 Paribas ran Havas's Paris account (Havas's balance with Paribas is described in one note as being ‘often massive’), and in this capacity it must have acquired valuable knowledge by being privy to Havas's cash flows. Paribas therefore knew a great deal about Havas's clients.Footnote 63 Finally, the minutes of the board show that, on several occasions during the 1920s, Paribas provided substantial personal credit lines to Havas's Léon Rénier and Pierre Guimier. That helped ‘friendship’ even more than an orange juice.Footnote 64
An important twist in this story worth narrating here although it is outside our timeframe is what happened after the Havas A-Stocks syndicate of 1927 expired in 1937, just after Finaly was deposed. Paribas's archive shows that the syndicate was replaced in February 1938 by a new arrangement in which Paribas, although a holder of only a small number of shares, was now a member of a group of ‘ten’ Havas shareholders (Groupement Actions Agence Havas) who divided control among themselves and agreed not to sell out. While this was arranged, Paribas took care to submit the statutes of the Groupement to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, a suggestive indication of the bank's political brokerage role, and further evidence that this function was in no way tied to Finaly. ‘For national interest, in order to ensure the stability of the majority of Havas shares in French hands’, the Groupement pledged to ‘submit without restriction all the operations which would result from this agreement to review by a representative of the Ministry of Foreign affairs’. As the agreement also provided members with the ability to pre-empt any sale of Havas securities, Paribas was effectively the Foreign Office's agent with Havas. It was through Paribas that the Foreign Office controlled who owned Havas and what Havas did.Footnote 65 This was a crucial connection, all the more important given that it was established a few months before the Munich Crisis, making of Paribas a fundamental stakeholder in France's subsequent ‘twilight of truth’.Footnote 66
Despite the parallel that has often been drawn in the literature between Paribas's position and that of Havas and Hachette, the two companies liaised with Paribas in distinct ways. Unlike Paribas and Havas, Paribas and Hachette were formally linked to one another through cross-shareholding and interlocking directorships.Footnote 67 These links came on the heels of a rapprochement that took place in 1913, when Paribas contracted with Hachette to take care of the ‘city article’ in magazines belonging to the Hachette group. They were formalised in 1919, during which time the government, under the iron fist of Premier Georges Clémenceau, was seeking to retain its grip over the media despite the war's end.
In 1919 Hachette, which up until that point had been a family-owned company, drastically increased its capital with the help of Paribas. The operation was carried out with support from Paribas's resources, those companies that Paribas influenced (such as La Prévoyance, an insurance company) and members of the Consortium such as Le Matin.Footnote 68 Board meetings show that during the 1920s Paribas made multiple large advances to this journal, taking Hachette Stocks as collateral.Footnote 69 Thus, when perfume tycoon François Coty argued that he saw Finaly's hand in the boycott that Hachette had inflicted on L'Ami du Peuple, he was perhaps exaggerating things, but not imagining them.
There is no detailed breakdown of the distribution of Hachette's voting rights during the 1920s. However, more complete evidence for the General Assemblies of the 1930s on the relative size of the ‘Hachette’ (family) group and the ‘Paribas’ group shows about 20 per cent for Paribas and this suggests that the banks’ holdings had decreased from the previous decade. At this point, however, Paribas was still the only significant shareholder outside the Hachette family. At the other end of the rope, reports from the 1930s described André Hachette as one of the ‘main shareholders’ of Paribas, although precise details are not known.Footnote 70
Beyond cross-shareholding, other instruments enabled Paribas to wield influence over Hachette. The statutes of Hachette enabled Paribas to hold two seats on the board, regardless of its shareholding, which indicates that the control by Paribas was somehow statutory, similar to Paribas's role in the Groupement Actions Agence Havas. Paribas was thus entrusted with a mandate to supervise this politically relevant body. Suggestively, the seats Paribas owned were held by the most senior members from Paribas's board – ‘politicians’ such as Finaly or Moreau rather than ‘technicians’.Footnote 71
There were also myriad other links through which cooperation between Paribas and Hachette was encouraged. Paribas was always willing to fund Hachette's growth. This is clear in the way Paribas generously helped with overdraft facilities and then repeatedly assisted in the securitisation of the debt through new bond issues that enabled the bank to liquidate the overdraft. Another suggestive link is the joint venture Paribas and Hachette started in 1919, when they acquired control of the Saenger Company, a cellulose conglomerate in Poland. At the time of the arrangement Hachette faced paper shortages and the two companies considered using the Saenger Company as a source of raw material. During the depreciation of the zloty in 1923–4 they set up a system whereby Hachette provided technical expertise and acted as wholesale trader while Paribas took care of funding and securing import licenses. In that year 40 per cent of Saenger's production, or 10,000 tons of cellulose, were exported from Poland.Footnote 72
All this suggests that Paribas secured influence in the media complex not by exercising formal control but rather by exploiting a web of links that were sometimes tight (Hachette), sometimes more diffuse (Havas). Most importantly, control was a two-way street. The existence of such connections, along with evidence of the millions Finaly dumped on the French press, suggest that Paribas was not the victim of an increasingly powerful media machine but rather was an actor in its own right within an ‘information revolution’ that saw the country's information system captured by an inside elite of public and semi-public actors once it was put under state control.
Conclusions
This article has presented fresh evidence on the business of influence in interwar France. In so doing it has revisited the relationship between the press, business and politics, through studying the influence expenditure of Paribas as well as its formal and informal links with the powerful media groups Havas and Hachette. The end of the Great War coincided with a substantial increase in influence spending at the same time as an information revolution took place, one characterised by the creation of a semi-formal information consortium in which state, banks and media participated. Paribas played a central role in an arrangement whose wartime origins are epitomised by the embedding of a military (the former head of wartime censorship, Commandant Nusillard) inside a media structure (Paribas's corruption bureau). After the First World War, and because of it, a new system of incestuous relationships within the media, finance and politics emerged. One centre of this new system was Paribas, France's state-sponsored bank, which helps explain why the man whose influence over the media stimulated the fantasies of contemporaries in interwar France was a banker – not a press tycoon as was the case in the United States with William Randolph Hearst.
A proper understanding of the system that resulted from the information revolution has to be contextualised within France's eventual economic, political and moral defeat in 1940. As Marc Bloch would describe it in his essay from that year, interwar attempts to control the media stumbled upon a fundamental paradox. Bloch described the typical behaviour of corporate managers as involving first complaining about the corruption of the French press but then boasting a few minutes later that they had successfully ‘bought’ an article.Footnote 73 It was the same for Paribas and other insiders: they could rejoice over their control of the French press, but by controlling it they also contributed to its depravity and eventually debased the asset they had so bought. This caused low circulation and low circulation in turn necessitated further subsidies. In sum, increased payments to the press may be seen as part of the ‘ticket’ insiders and stakeholders such as Paribas had to buy to keep a corrupt system going. The Consortium's control of the press created a cycle of information debasement that, once started, was certainly impossible to escape. The eventual disaster was written on the wall: the more money that was put in, the less effective the information system would be.
The other finding of this research is how diverse and complex the means of securing media influence were. Instead of strange stories of ‘personal connections’ and ‘networks’ unrelated to the ultimate strange defeat, we found a system of very structured relations. This is in contrast to previous, mollifying accounts by historians such as Bussière, who have portrayed Finaly as a ‘technician’ or ‘advisor’ and have refused to explore the real bases of Paribas's power. This is also in contrast to the ‘culturalist’ narrative proposed by historians such as Jeanneney or Jankowski. Despite their assertions to the contrary, the experience of France was not primarily a case of cultural oddity, and even less a case of plus ça change.
A striking feature of the system we have investigated, which deserves future investigation, is a strange, or rather devious, form of ‘separation of powers’ – a ‘distribution of powers’. The French media system was highly concentrated, but at the same time, the interdependent state-sponsored concerns that peopled it were kept separate. For instance, Hachette and Havas each owned one ‘key’ to newspaper market entry, and each had links with the state and with Paribas. Yet they were distinct. In other words, there was no ‘mastermind’ lurking in the shadows. However, this also explains why the two individual key holders had reasons to cooperate – not because there was a ‘conspiracy’, but rather because disputes would be disruptive for both, since no one firm controlled the other. The costs of such a system were enormous, due to both the opacity it nurtured and the regressive politics it bred.
Finally, our new evidence shows that above and beyond ‘political’ competition through elections, the French Republic displayed competition between political-economic factions who knew how the system operated (probably much better than we, historians, do) and sought to capture valuable ‘keys’ to be used as veto points in their quest for power. This explains why Paribas was a coveted prize beyond its business value. ‘Capturing’ it would give the successful faction access to Paribas's rich portfolio of connections and insider know-how.
This is the light in which we should interpret the coup that sacked Finaly in 1937. It had been led, as mentioned, by Emile Moreau, former Governor of the Bank of France and connoisseur of influence spending. Securing control of Paribas's ability to influence the media was undoubtedly one reason for the coup, explaining why some contemporaries read the event as a backlash of reactionary interests against Léon Blum. Here we note that, following the board meeting when Finaly was toppled, Moreau took the new administrators to the side and gave them a lecture in the shape of ‘some instructions’ regarding the ‘spirit’ in which publicity expenditure would be made ‘in the future’. The gentlemen were reported to have ‘approved’.Footnote 74
A few months later Paribas would also become an agency of the French Foreign Office in the latter's monitoring of Havas. This was just a few months before the massive manipulation of information that surrounded the Munich crisis began. Manipulation of information would only amplify until the war in pace with the press's loss of credibility. When the threat of Monsieur Hitler finally became evident, the French press had little credibility left, given the degree of debasement at which it had arrived. As for Finaly, who had had no part in the last acts of the drama, he sought refuge in New York. As can be seen, our evidence supports neither the conspiracy theory nor the lenient idea of culture as usual.
