Guy Sitbon Interview | Alexandre Gilbert #326 |
Guy Sitbon, born Isaac Shetboun in Monastir, former correspondent for Le Monde in Tunis and The New York Times, co-founded La Nef, Le Nouvel Observateur, Le Matin de Paris, Le Magazine Littéraire and Jeune Afrique.
At 30, you traveled without a passport and worked without appointments. When Claude Perdriel, who did not have a journalistic mindset, invited you to join Le Nouvel Observateur, including in unexpected roles such as commercial director, was it precisely this ability to step outside the usual framework—to move between writing, fieldwork, and strategy—that shaped your place in this editorial venture?
GS: The founder was Jean Daniel. Claude Perdriel supported him; they were close. I had covered Algeria’s independence from 1962 to 1964 before I arrived in France looking for work and went straight to L’Express, then the leading left-leaning publication. Françoise Giroud and Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber recognized my byline from Le Monde and hired me immediately. At the time, tensions grew between Jean Daniel and Servan-Schreiber—partly political, partly personal. Jean Daniel embodied a revolutionary, anti-capitalist left. In the early ’60s, that was the norm. The French left only began embracing capitalism in the 1990s.
Claude Perdriel, like Françoise Sagan, preferred being deceived to being distrustful: his partners were taken by his editors-in-chief; he was replaced at the last minute by André Rousselet during François Mitterrand’s 1974 campaign; or manipulated by the criminal jealousy of his brother Roland, who did not hesitate to use his name to take out fraudulent loans. Was there also rivalry with Jacques Attali ?
GS: Yes, but it was about influence, not ideology. Le Nouvel Observateur remained editorially independent. Perdriel stayed largely removed from the newsroom. My role as commercial director was a way to integrate me more deeply without direct interference. I handled distribution and visual identity. With Robert Delpire, we created bold covers, sometimes bypassing Jean Daniel for artistic reasons, and introducing circles and squares in the style of Jasper Johns, the father of Pop Art. It had to do also with the omnipresence of Folon, who produced a considerable number of covers.
You later created Le Magazine Littéraire.
GS: Yes, with Jean-Jacques Brochier, who arrived slightly later, having just been released from prison. Strangely, Dominique de Roux, the somewhat controversial publisher, was his close friend. He had a brother who was looking for work, and I hired him as an office assistant in the editorial team. We were a bande de salauds. I wanted financial independence and editorial freedom. We secured advertising even before launching. One of our early issues featured Allen Ginsberg.
You had an interest and met major philosophers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Raymond Aron.
GS: With Merleau-Ponty, it was a philosophical interview; with Aron, repeated encounters nurtured a deep admiration despite our political differences. Aron’s The Opium of the Intellectuals profoundly reshaped my perspective. It made me realize I had been mistaken in nearly everything, living under layers of illusion. He reintroduced realism into political thought—not merely as objective analysis, but as a way of grasping the future being actively shaped in the present. Raymond Aron was a decisive intellectual turning point in France.
Jean Daniel famously said “he prefered to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron”. Did he truly disagree with Aron?
GS: He adapted his speech to the revolutionary mood, but his deeper thinking was elsewhere. I don’t know what his personal relationship with Aron was. Aron influenced deeply what became the “second left,” later embodied by Michel Rocard.
The 1960s were the era of “new journalism,” led by Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Tom Wolfe, who used literary techniques to depict reality. Today, this legacy can be seen in writers like Emmanuel Carrère.
GS: Very little journalist, Carrère, in the end.
Which is not the case with Jean Daniel better known for his figure as a journalist than a writer, even if he refused it. Jean Daniel slightly embodied this approach when he interviewed Fidel Castro after the assassination of John F. Kennedy and yours whith Gaddafi. Do you see yourself as a literary person who moved towards journalism?
GS: No, I wrote novels to try to write differently. But I am a journalist. I am an écriveur. I met Gaddafi, in the 1990s. We developed a kind of friendship. He was a charismatic revolutionary in his youth, almost a southern Che Guevara. I interviewed him in Benghazi during internal Libyan tensions. We connected through language—his dialect was close to Tunisian Arabic. I define the Arab world through language, not religion or borders. I saw it as a potential political entity; he, at that stage, was already post-Marxist.
What remains of Muammar Gaddafi, in retrospect is a certain joyfulness—a taste for laughing at everything—and the sense that total power was his, though not in a strictly dictatorial way. Libya, in this view, was an Italian invention; even the name came from older Greek and Roman usage, unrelated to the modern territory. So Libya, as such, never truly existed—and today’s divisions seem to reflect that. I would not say the same about Palestine or Algeria that stands apart among Arab nations, perhaps alongside Egypt. For me, the only Arab country with centuries-long state continuity—and thus real legitimacy—is Morocco. The others, largely formed through violence, lack that same historical grounding.
Le Nouvel Observateur was very critical of the state of Israel. Were Itzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres close to the newspaper or to Jean Daniel ?
GS: Shimon Peres came here, in my house ! He was Francophone. He was close to the newspaper but the Zionist and Israeli press interested him more. He had time so he came to Paris.
Shimon Peres also visited, when he was in Strasbourg, Jean Kahn, the former president of the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France (CRIF). (Editor’s note: Guy Sitbon hands me History of Alsace by Philippe Meyer)
GS: Strasbourg has become a capital and deserves it. The European capital.
Was Le Nouvel Observateur truly the first French news magazine, or did it build on the precedent set by L’Express ?
GS: He was personally, very close to the New York Review of Books. But he didn’t know it. I discovered the New York Review of Books in New York, with the director, Robert Silvers. And Francophone, too. But it wasn’t the model. No. The model was the Time Magazine.
Le Nouvel Observateur was widely regarded as the newspaper of intellectuals.
GS: The central organ of intellectuals. But we can’t say news magazine because it wasn’t at the beginning. We can say opinion journal. But everyone did not necessarily have the floor. I made Le Magazine Littéraire to gain financial independence, to no longer depend on a boss, and because I had advertising even before having it. One of the first issue was Alan Ginsberg.
Marc Gilbert, a science journalist at Le Nouvel Observateur, later initiated the first literary talk-show called Italiques in collaboration with Jean-Jacques Brochier. The program became a distinctive platform for in-depth cultural and literary exploration, bridging journalism and intellectual discourse. Together, they crafted content that went beyond conventional reporting, highlighting emerging writers, critical essays, and interdisciplinary dialogues. The magazine’s broader ambition was to combine intellectual depth with accessible media, offering readers a space where literature, philosophy, and contemporary issues intersected, and cementing its reputation as a hub for serious cultural engagement.
GS: Yes. Wonderful. It was the golden age of Le Nouvel Observateur. With certainty, yes, of course. Incredible power. Incredible influence. And why? We were ourselves a political force. Communism had become criminal. So adherence, alliance with communism, to finish the reason, yes, but adherence to Marxist-Leninist doctrine had become, for the left, criminal.
It’s important to recall the editorial positioning of Le Nouvel Observateur and related publications at the time. The magazine, while left-leaning and often sympathetic to Marxist thought, engaged seriously with critiques of totalitarianism—particularly after Solzhenitsyn’s publication of Gulag archipelago. This led to intense debates within the intellectual sphere: first between Jean Daniel and Max-Paul Fouchet, and later involving Jean d’Ormesson. These exchanges reflected the tension between the magazine’s commitment to leftist ideals and its recognition of the crimes of Soviet communism, showing that even sympathetic outlets wrestled with confronting uncomfortable truths.
GS: Jean Daniel was not that distant from Solzhenitsyn. But he wanted to distinguish himself. We knew that well. So it was unfair. Not honest from Jean d’Ormesson. It was a way to confront communism while being communist.
Le Nouvel Observateur, like Jeune Afrique, long adopted a critical stance toward Israeli policy, shaped by anti-colonial and Third Worldist perspectives—for example, its editorials after the 1967 Six-Day War often framed Israel as a regional power aligned with Western interests, while giving space to Palestinian narratives. Jeune Afrique, closely tied to post-independence African and Arab political circles, likewise emphasized non-alignment and frequently echoed positions critical of Israeli military actions, particularly during conflicts in Lebanon. Le Magazine Littéraire published discussions on Zionism, Jewish identity, or thinkers like Hannah Arendt. What about Israël now ?
GS: I have become more and more Zionist. More and more Israeli. With the feeling that it’s the only nation where I am legitimate. Tunisa, it’s over. In France, I am an exile. An immigrant. I don’t belong to the French nation. I integrate. The only place where I set foot and they tell me, “Hi, we were waiting for you at home,” is Israel. I traveled a very long path because it was not the case before. That’s for sure. My Jewishness, as one could say, was secondary. Until quite recently. It became, in my case, essential not long ago. Since October 7. I admit. The story repeats itself: the fusion of public audiovisual too, which was Giscard’s motivation, and again, they want to oust Jews.