Honni soit qui mal y pense

Abstract

The challenges to traditional ante-bellum or ante-Mussolini ways of ruling and running societies were perhaps most visible in the area of fundamental changes affecting the most popular mass media at that time: newspapers. Virtually all across Europe, the vast majority of hitherto operating daily newspapers were shut down at the moment of liberation, and a new antifascist press often took over production facilities vacated by their compromised former owners. After some cursory glances at the politics of the post-liberation press in Germany and Italy, I then go into considerable detail in the case of France. For it was in France where the challenges to published opinion in the wake of Nazi occupation went further and deeper than anywhere else. In France, however, too, within very few years the power of money regained the upper hand, turning back the clock to the status quo ante bellum.