France-Soir
| Type | Daily newspaper |
|---|---|
| Format | Tabloid |
| Founded | 1944 |
| Political alignment | Centrism |
| Language | French |
| Ceased publication | 13 December 2011 |
| Headquarters | Paris |
| Website | www.francesoir.fr |
France Soir (English: France Evening) was a French daily newspaper that prospered during the 1950s and 1960s, reaching a circulation of 1.5 million in the 1950s. It declined rapidly under various owners, and was re-launched as a populist tabloid in 2006. However, the last copy of France Soir was published on 13 December 2011, and the company went bankrupt on 23 July 2012.
France Soir was founded as the underground paper Défense de la France ("Defense of France") by young resistance leaders, Robert Salmon and Philippe Viannay, in 1941. The first editions were printed on a Rotaprint 3 offset printing machine hidden in the cellars of the Sorbonne. Distributed to Grenoble, Clermont-Ferrand, Lyon and to Britain by the resistance networks Combat and Témoignage chrétien, Défense de la France became the largest circulation newspaper in the underground press, with 450,000 copies per day by January 1944. In March 1944, after multiple relocations, it was housed on three levels of an industrial building on rue Jean-Dolent, behind the La Santé Prison, in Paris's XIVth arrondissement.
After the liberation, Paris-Soir, which with 1.7 million copies in 1936 was the leading French daily between the wars, forfeited its printing plant in Lyon due to its ambiguous behavior under occupation. , its former editor, had returned from the US and joined Défense de la France in September 1944. The first issue of France-Soir - Défense de la France was printed using Paris-Soir's presses on November 7, 1944. The hyphenated name affiliated the old paper with that of the French resistance. The paper's name was truncated to France Soir after World War II.
The paper grew to be ranked among the country's (and the European continent's) most circulated, reaching 1.5 million in 1955 with Pierre Lazareff as chief editor. Its circulation was more than 1.4 million in the late 1950s.
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