Les Temps Modernes: Paris mourns passing of the intellectual left’s bible
Reading issues from its first decade feels as novel today as it did then. Its tone is original, the reportage reads like literature, the style is uncompromising, and the analysis combative. New Journalism is often considered to have emerged in New York in the late 1950s. But it could be argued it came from Paris in the late 1940s with Les Temps Modernes, which was among the first to break down the divide between literature and journalism.
The first issue in October 1945 provoked a big bang in journalism and politics, and not just in France.
Its manifesto was translated and published widely, including in Cyril Connolly’s Horizon in London. It read: “Every writer of bourgeois origin has known the temptation of irresponsibility. I personally hold Flaubert personally responsible for the repression that followed the Commune because he did not write a line to try to stop it. It was not his business, people will perhaps say. Was the Calas trial Voltaire’s business? Was Dreyfus’s condemnation Zola’s business? We at Les Temps Modernes do not want to miss a beat on the times we live in. Our intention is to influence the society we live in. Les Temps Modernes will take sides.”
To carry its distinctive voice far and wide, Les Temps Modernes (named after Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times) could rely on a diversity of talented writers and philosophers from across the political spectrum. Communists, Catholics, Gaullists and socialists: philosopher Raymond Aron, Marxist phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, anthropologist and art critic Michel Leiris, and even Picasso, who had agreed to design the cover and logo.
Paris May 25 2019
