Marianne (magazine)

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Please improve this article if you can. (July 2007)


The April 14, 2007 front page of Marianne (best seller)
Type	Weekly magazine
Format	Compact

Owner	Robert Assaraf
Founded	1997
Political allegiance	Centre-left Leftwing
Headquarters	Paris
Circulation	300,000 weekly

Website: www.marianne-en-ligne.fr

Marianne (ISSN 1275-7500) is a weekly Paris-based French news magazine created in 1997 by Jean-François Kahn with Maurice Szafran as editorialist. The main shareholder of the company is Robert Assaraf with 49.4% of the shares ^[1].

1 Overview
2 2007 Presidential election
3 Notes
4 External links

[edit] Overview

Marianne claims a distribution of 300,000 copies per week but topped at 580,000 with French news magazine record breaker "The True Sarkozy" in April 2007.^[2] It is close to the French Left Republican wing.

[edit] 2007 Presidential election

Main article: French presidential election, 2007

During the 2007 French presidential election Marianne's editors Jean-François Kahn, Maurice Szafran and Nicolas Domenach openly supported the centre-right candidate François Bayrou^{[citation needed]}, although at the same time they exposed "the redaction's favourite" and advocated for French Socialist Party candidate Ségolène Royal^{[citation needed]}.

Furthermore, they led a strong anti-Sarkozy campaign in the magazine including a special issue released on April 14~20 (#521) the day before the vote arguing right-wing candidate Nicolas Sarkozy was "insane" (which was the title of a previous issue^[3]) in a negative portrait "of all dangers" (de tout les dangers). Such aggressive practice rather common in Great Britain and the United States is unusual in France.

Issue #521 "The True Sarkozy" (Le Vrai Sarkozy) was named after the popular anti-Sarkozy propaganda video first released on July 5, 2006 in online services - as Dailymotion (+2,132,686 views) French counterpart of Youtube (+927,770) - by left wing supporters group RéSo (close to the French Socialist Party's Dominique Strauss-Kahn wing) author of the "AntiSarko" 2005 online campaign, which became the magazine's best seller (580,000 copies)^[4]. It was since then made online for free in the magazine's website.^[5] The issue sold well with an exceptional out of print and two reprints^[6], but some journalists argued that the criticisms against Sarkozy actually strengthened Sarkozy's supporters per the victimization process.

The previous issue's (#520) cover titled "Sarkozy's fault: he chose Bush's America against Chirac's France" (La faute de Sarkozy: Il choisit l'Amérique de Bush contre la France de Chirac)^[7] as a reference to Sarkozy being one of the few French politics to have initially supported the 2003 Invasion of Iraq has been described by the French far left and left wing as a "fault"^[8], and by a part of the Gaullist right wing as a "mistake".