With nerve and arrogance, hype and money, Paris Match has chronicled half a century. The best-selling French magazine in the world pioneered the art of the paparazzi, but it also published some of the best photographs of wars and events that shaped the planet. This month, Match launched its own golden anniversary celebrations with a two-volume collection of the articles that made it a French institution.
You may feel sheepish for being fascinated by the love stories and illegitimate children of famous people, but like 4.7 million French people who read Match every week, you can't put the book down. Often described as "voyou and voyeur", Match is known for its lack of scruple and disregard for facts. Yet the red and white logo and slogan "the weight of words, the shock of photos" still work magic.
Match helped to make Paris the world capital of photojournalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the three main photo agencies, Gamma, Sygma and Sipa, set up shop here. The magazine was their best client, always ready to pay top price for an exclusive. "Match is the reference," the former photographer Henri Bureau, now director of the Roger-Viollet photo agency, told Le Monde. "The great upheavals of the world are there, but also the little glances of history . . . If Match wants a photo, they get it. If they don't, it's a sin."
Archives are kept behind a six digit code-locked door at Match's glass and granite headquarters outside Paris. Roger Therond one of the magazine's founders and its director general, cannot bear losing a photo to competitors. The inventor of the "shock of photos" slogan, Therond is known by his staff as "the eye". Legend says he can choose the best of 300 photos in seconds. The 50th anniversary celebration is also Therond's farewell. Now 74-years-old, he has promised to step down next year.
Therond has purchased thousands of photos that the magazine never published. The most controversial, which will doubtless appear one day, is a close-up of Princess Diana in the Mercedes moments after the August 31st, 1997 crash. Photographers complain that Match - which has always encouraged them to "steal" images by any means - did not defend the "Pont de l'Alma Ten" who are still under investigation for manslaughter.
Although Match has focused more in recent years on princesses and actresses, it still provides highly personalised - some would say soap opera - coverage of politicians and world leaders. The week that Gerhard Schroder was elected, the magazine published the best photos of the new German Chancellor and his attractive fourth wife. In its latest issue, the magazine scooped the entire French press with a cover on Jean-Pierre Chevenement, the French Interior Minister, who suffered a 55-minute heart attack on the operating table and then went into a three-week coma. "After the abyss, the return to life", the cover says in inch-high bright yellow letters. "I had reached the other shore", the minister confesses in the subtitle.
Originally a sports weekly, Match was re-launched at the beginning of 1949 by the industrialist Jean Prouvost. The six-man team was young - aged between 26 and 32 - and backed up by prestigious writers including Jean Anouilh and Marcel Pagnol. In the impoverished post-war period, when other publications were struggling to survive, Match paid top salaries. Its photographers drove expensive sports cars and dated starlets.
The image of Match reporters and photographers as the spoiled brats of French journalism has persisted. The photographer Henri Bureau recalls sleeping all night on the back seat of his Volkswagen in a stake-out for a princess at a ski resort. "In the morning, I saw my colleague from Match open the shutters of the five-star hotel, drink his tea in a bathrobe on the balcony, in the room next to the princess. In these conditions, beating Match to a photo was a rare occurrence!"
In 1994, Roger Therond received photographs of Mazarine Pingeot leaving a Paris restaurant on the arm of her father, President Francois Mitterrand. The story of Mitterrand's illegitimate daughter was known to journalists, but the Elysee had until then imposed silence on the press.
"Now that the photos are out, there's no telling where they'll go," the publishers blackmailed the Elysee. "It would be better to let Match publish them . . .if you want to send someone to fix up the captions, you know we won't mind." Mitterrand resigned himself to the revelation, saying "after all, it's a beautiful story". Match's headline was "The tender gesture of a father".
When Mitterrand died two years later, Match obtained a photo of the late president on his deathbed. The Mitterrand family was furious and sued, but the identity of the photographer remains a secret known only to Roger Therond, who claims he would not have published the photograph had it not been "extremely beautiful". In The Corrupted, a novel about Match by one of the magazine's editors, the Therond character says he "can't stand dirty words like `ethics' or `investigation'."
In the 1950s and 1960s - before television news pushed it towards more emphasis on what the French call "la presse people" - Match's coverage of foreign news was rivalled only by the American magazine LIFE. The photographer Henri CartierBresson, who worked for both magazines, travelled to China and the Soviet Union at Match's expense, and they published his long photo-documentary reports - 34 pages for the 10th anniversary of the Chinese revolution in 1959. Today, Match devotes at most two or three pages to foreign stories.
Match's 50th anniversary commemorative volumes are dedicated to two journalists from the days of the "grand reportage", photographer Jean-Pierre Pedrazzini and reporter Jean Roy. Pedrazzini was wounded during the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary. He brought his film back to Paris before dying in hospital. Roy, who had fought in the second World War as a paratroop officer with the Free French forces, was killed by an Egyptian sniper after the ceasefire in the 1956 Arab-Israeli war.
