The Press: Success Without Strings

The most influential magazine on the Continent today is a sleekly handsome French monthly. Its name: Réaltiés. Although only ten years old, Réaltiés has built the biggest subscription circulation (191,500) of any magazine in France. In sharp contrast to many French publications, which dutifully echo the views of whichever political party may buy or back them, Réaltiés is financially and politically independent, has nothing to sell but honest reporting. “We have never had to ask for outside support,” said Réaltiés Editor Alfred Max last week. “As a result, we can print what we believe to be the truth. We have told our readers many unpleasant things about France. Nobody seemed to mind; on the contrary, they thanked us for it.”

More than 6,000 readers wrote to thank Réaltiés a year ago when it ran an analysis of the nation’s economic and political stagnation called “Where Is France Heading?” Its article, “Why Do Five Million Frenchmen Vote Communist?” (TIME, June 30, 1952), reprinted throughout the free world, gave millions of readers a clear, sharp look at France’s delusive, defeatist political climate. Although French business, professional and educational leaders make up two-thirds of its subscribers, the magazine frequently needles French employers for their notoriously low wage scales and bad labor relations. It has not spared the rod in criticizing the nation’s backward public school system. Last week Réaltiés was coming off the presses with still another rebuke: a special on-the-spot report from Algeria on the shortsighted colonial policy that may eventually cost France much of her North African empire (see FOREIGN NEWS).

Friend to the U.S. Internationally, Réaltiés is a consistent and courageous champion of Western unity. Although praise for the U.S. is unfashionable among French intellectuals, Réaltiés is a warm admirer of the U.S. Two years ago, the magazine’s top reporting team, Pierre and Renée Gosset, turned out a report on the U.S. (TIME, Aug. 24, 1953) that was notable for its sympathetic understanding of American folkways.

To help interpret France to the world, Réaltiés launched an English-language edition in 1950, despite dire warnings that a foreign magazine (particularly at $15 a year) could not compete for readers and advertisers on the crowded U.S. market. After dropping $110,000, the English edition has built the biggest U.S. circulation (39,000) of any foreign publication, will start making money by year’s end.

Verve & Nerve. Réaltiés was founded in 1946 on unlimited hope and a meager $5,000 by two aggressive young businessmen, Humbert Frerejean and Didier Rémon. Frerejean, then 31, was working in the personnel department of a steel concern, and Rémon, then 24, with a management consultant. They originally planned a FORTUNE-style magazine for French business, but Réaltiés’ scope was soon broadened under Editor Max, 41. A onetime French wire service correspondent, Max studied U.S. publishing methods while living in the U.S., where he put in a stint with the Gallup Poll, married an American girl, and earned degrees at the University of Delaware and Washington, D.C.’s American University. After the war, Max joined Frerejean and Rémon, started molding a magazine that “people could be enthusiastic about.”

Réaltiés today specializes in lively, handsomely illustrated features on art and travel, but also covers a wide range of subjects with a mixture of Gallic verve and American nerve, e.g., it recently sent a staffer on his first trip to Africa to bring back a picture story on “How to Hunt Big Game,” commissioned a French explorer to write his story of an Amazon trip, “I Starved with the World’s Most Primitive Tribe.” The magazine’s lavish color pages, planned by Art Editor Albert Gilou, sometimes achieve the lustrous clarity of a Flemish painting, are equaled by only one other publication in Europe: Switzerland’s sophisticated Du.

Twins’ Trio. Not content with one publishing success, Réaltiés’ Frerejean and Rémon (known to staffers as “The Twins”) have fathered three other successful publications. The trio: glossy, authoritative Connaissance des Arts, the most widely read art magazine in France (circ. 46,500); Benjamin, the only “serious” children’s weekly in France (where parents also complain about comic books), with a circulation of 80,000; Entreprise, France’s only business magazine. The semimonthly Entreprise (circ. 40,000) was stymied at first by the traditional secretiveness of the French businessman. But in 2½ years it has succeeded in proving that the business community can benefit from alert, informed reporting on business problems. Multimillionaire Marcel Boussac turned down an Entreprise request to do a story on his textile empire two years ago. Recently, he called the magazine to ask, “What are you waiting for?”

The Twins still work closely with Réaltiés’ tightly knit staff of 47, whose pay (average salary: $430 a month) is double the prevailing French journalistic wage. The publishers hold a daily 6 p.m. editorial conference with Editor Max, seldom emerge from their cluttered third-floor office before 9 p.m. Last week the lights were burning later than usual in the massive sandstone building near the Oépra, where Réaltiés and its sister magazines are published. Max and staff were mapping their most challenging assignment yet: a wide-ranging report on life in Russia and Communist China. At week’s end, Max put the Cossets on a plane for Moscow, first stop on their trip to gather material for the report and try to take a comprehensive public-opinion poll behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains.