200 Years of a Liberal-Conservative Newspaper: Le Figaro, a Source of French Pride

In January 2026, the newspaper Le Figaro celebrated the 200th anniversary of its founding with great pomp. This is a rare enough event to be worth noting: it is one of the oldest newspapers in France still in circulation, having been published almost continuously since its launch on 15 January 1826, during the Restoration period.

Today, Le Figaro dominates the French press landscape, and politicians of all stripes, writers, and journalists flocked to the Grand Palais in the heart of Paris to pay tribute to it. Despite the vicissitudes of the times, the newspaper has managed to stay the course that made it so successful: the quality of its writers, its freedom of tone, and a certain old-fashioned French elegance which, despite its inevitable weaknesses, makes it in many ways a benchmark for the liberal-conservative press.

The newspaper first saw the light of day as a satirical journal, which aimed to be “witty and combative,” teasing King Charles X, brother of Louis XVI, who had returned to the throne and who sometimes sought a little too eagerly to turn a blind eye to what France had become after the Revolution. From the outset, it placed itself under the benevolent and sarcastic tutelage of Figaro, the famous barber created by Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, known for his audacity and wit, inventor of the famous epigram that became the newspaper’s motto: “Without the freedom to criticise, there is no flattering praise.” (Sans la liberté de blâmer, il n’est point d’éloge flatteur.)

The exhibition, spread over four days under the imposing glass roof of the Grand Palais, built with splendour for the World Exhibition of 1900, was designed with pomp and circumstance. How welcome this assumed grandeur was in the France of Emmanuel Macron, crippled by residual socialism, which today struggles to remember the glory that was once its own in the concert of nations. A sweeping scenography—honouring the historic front pages, the renowned poster artists who contributed to the illustrated editions, and the literary figures who wrote in its columns—brought everything together to give visitors a sense of high spirit.

The history of Le Figaro is a summary of the history of France, a modern France—that is to say, without this being a badge of honour, a France born of the French Revolution, which has been trying for a little over two hundred years to navigate the storm and find a political compass.

In its early days, Le Figaro was classically liberal; royalist without being ultra. It was annoyed by the pettiness of Charles X as much as by the mediocrity of Louis-Philippe, the monarch of the barricades. After various editorial vicissitudes, it was vigorously taken over in 1854 by a certain Hippolyte de Villemessant. People spoke of a second birth for the newspaper. At the time, Le Figaro stood out above all as a literary and artistic newspaper. Its reviews were read and appreciated, setting the standard in the small Parisian world of arts and letters—which, at that time, meant the whole of Europe. Music was not excluded from its field of expertise. Villemessant was a close friend of Offenbach, whose work he fervently supported. In Paris in 1867, Le Figaro helped to promote the phenomenon that was Johann Strauss, thus paving the way for the international triumph of The Blue Danube. In a unique gesture in the history of the press, Strauss composed a Figaro Polka, a piece dedicated to the newspaper, as a token of his gratitude.

In the same year, Le Figaro became a political outlet, thanks to the liberalisation of Napoleon III’s empire. At the time of the Commune, the newspaper watched with horror as revolutionary madness raged in Paris. Under the Third Republic, it triumphed with the restoration of order. Its social conservatism and attachment to freedoms made it a model of balance in this troubled period when a leaderless France still did not know where its destiny lay. When Captain Dreyfus was unjustly convicted in a climate of antisemitism fuelled by rivalry with Germany, Le Figaro chose the side of justice. Émile Zola published several articles in Le Figaro defending the innocent officer before his indictment, “J’accuse,” published in a rival newspaper, L’Aurore, truly launched the ‘Dreyfus Affair.’

The newspaper weathered the First World War and the crisis of the 1930s by continuing to publish the most prestigious writers of the time, including Marcel Proust and Jean Giraudoux among its columnists.

When the international situation became tense, Le Figaro chose the side of the Francoists against the Republicans in Spain. At the time of Munich, like many other French people, its journalists were ‘unenthusiastic Munichites’ while Nazism aroused increasing mistrust and revulsion.

The Second World War marked a turning point in the history of the French press. The vast majority of French newspapers, which had continued to be published under the Occupation and the Vichy regime, disappeared or were bought out and renamed. Le Figaro, which first withdrew to the free zone before suspending publication in 1942, was an exception. A Gaullist publication, it rose from the ashes with the liberation of Paris on 25 August 1944, benefiting from its literary aura and the support of writers ranging from Louis Aragon to François Mauriac. The flow of publication, which had been interrupted for a time, resumed.

During the celebrations of the last few days, the newspaper’s aura was glowing in the convergence of multiple and sometimes unexpected personalities from both the Right and the Left. Jordan Bardella, president of the Rassemblement National, rubbed shoulders with François Hollande, former president of the Socialist Republic, confidently declaring himself a daily reader of Le Figaro because, in his words, it contains things that cannot be found elsewhere.

Le Figaro is not immune to the paradoxes of the contemporary press. The majority of journalists who write and publish the uninterrupted flow of daily news that passes through its columns lean to the Left. The reason is very simple: today’s journalism schools are dominated by left-wing thinking and train freelancers who vote more than 70% for the Left, or even the far left. Le Figaro, dependent on these training programmes, therefore finds it difficult to escape the mainstream. But it manages, with a certain panache, to give a voice to many valuable conservative editorialists who carry on the torch of tradition or renew right-wing thinking today. They know that they will always find a sympathetic ear for their ideas at Le Figaro, as long as they are expressed with the combination of respectability and balanced freedom that has made the newspaper so successful for two centuries.

This tone owes much to the personality of Alexis Brézet, editorial director of Le Figaro, and those around him. As the heir to a cohort of prestigious names—all those who preceded him at the helm of Le Figaro, such as Hippolyte de Villemessant and Gaston Calmette—he knows better than anyone else the weight of this legacy and the need to live up to it. It was he who, in 2014, came up with the idea for the Figaro Vox pages, which were intended to offer a refreshing and peaceful outlet for so many talented writers who were scorned by other major newspapers.

For its bicentennial, Le Figaro, in one of its publications, made a point of highlighting two hundred figures of the future. It is a pleasure to find people identified by The European Conservative, such as the young essayist Pierre Valentin, a specialist in wokeism, or MP Charles Alloncle, who spearheaded the offensive against abuses by the state media.

In the mainstream press landscape, in the age of social media and AFP news reports, whose activity consists of recycling politically correct platitudes without vision across the globe, Le Figaro continues to be a reassuring refuge and the embodiment of a certain form of good taste. When, on occasion, the newspaper allows itself to become too complicit with the prevailing mediocrity, we are willing to turn a blind eye, knowing that it will undoubtedly soon make amends.