ABSTRACT

Ici-Paris is one of France’s main weekly scandal sheets, euphemistically classified as the ‘escapist press’ (presse d’évasion). Founded in 1945 by Henri and Suzanne de Montfort, as successor to their Resistance newspaper, IciParis soon changed to target a lowbrow market, featuring horoscopes, titillating love intrigues, cartoons and society gossip. Locked in permanent battle to outdo its main competitor, France-Dimanche, it has consistently plumbed the depths of outrageous, shocking and far-fetched reportage, drawing on bizarre tales of the occult, gory accounts of medical mishaps, exposés of secrets, and in particular the intimate detail of marriages and divorces. It has made a speciality of speculatively probing the private lives of internationally known figures in politics or entertainment, often printing wholly fictitious accounts, and focusing with particular relish on Europe’s royal families, especially that of Britain; for example, since the 1960s it has regularly headlined lurid announcements of the (secret) abdication, blindness, terminal illness or death of Queen Elizabeth II. Its circulation rose to a high point of 1.2 million in 1970, but fell in the 1990s to a third of that level. Like FranceDimanche, it is now owned by the powerful Hachette publishing group.