Le Matin (French pronunciation:[ləmatɛ̃]ⓘ,The Morning) was a Frenchdaily newspaper first published in February 26, 1884,[1] and discontinued in 1944.
Le Matin was launched on the initiative of Chamberlain & Co., a group of American financiers and the American newspaper editorSamuel Selwyn Chamberlain,[2] in 1883, on the model of the British dailyThe Morning News. The direction of the project was entrusted to the French journalistAlfred Edwards,[3] who launched the first issue on 26 February 1884. His home was then situated in the10th arrondissement of Paris, at 6 boulevard Poissonnière, and his offices at numbers 3 to 9 on the same street.
A few months later, Edwards leftLe Matin to found his own journal,Le Matin Français, which soon surpassed the circulation ofLe Matin. Later Edwards boughtLe Matin and merged the two papers. He modernized the resulting hybrid with the most modern techniques and technologies such as thetelegraph, and signed great writers such asJules Vallès and thedéputéArthur Ranc.Le Matin was thus favourable to moderate republicans and opposed toBoulangisme andsocialist ideas.
Implicated in thePanama scandals, Edwards re-sold the newspaper in 1895 to the banker and advertiserHenri Poidatz, who invested considerably in advertising in it. The journal was particularly notable during theDreyfus affair, as early as 1896 questioning the withheld evidence against the officer accused of treason and publishing in July, 1899 the confessions of commandantEsterhazy.
In May 1899, the newspaper followed a proven publicity and readership recruitment model by organising theTour de France Automobile in conjunction with theAutomobile Club de France. The newspaper's price rose to 5 centimes, like the majority of papers in this era, and its number of pages rose from 4 to 6. The same year the businessmanMaurice Bunau-Varilla, at first one of the paper's shareholders, joined its board of directors, becoming its president in 1901. Borne along by effective advertising, by the catchy tone of its articles and its brave reporting,Le Matin continued to increase its circulation, from 100,000 copies in 1900 to around 700,000 in 1910 and more than a million around 1914.[4]Le Matin was thus one of the four biggest daily French newspapers in the period beforeWorld War I, employing 150 journalists such asGaston Leroux,Michel Zevaco andAlbert Londres, along with 500 technicians and other workers.Félix Fénéon'sNouvelles en trois lignes appeared anonymously throughout the paper in 1906. In 1918, it made the first recorded use ofjazband (French for ajazz band), and was subsequently cited in bothÜber englisches Sprachgut im Französischen andGrand Larousse Dictionnaire de la Langue Française although they mis-typed the date as 1908. Also in the inter-war period the paper had the Russian-exile cartoonistAlex Gard on its staff.
Le Matin's political leanings moved progressively towardsnationalism and, after World War I, were openly anti-parliamentary and anti-Communist. It approved ofcollaborationist policies in June 1940 and adopted a pro-Nazi line before disappearing on 17 August 1944, a few days after the death ofMaurice Bunau-Varilla.[5]
