L'Événement du jeudi

L'Événement du jeudi (Thursday Event) is a French weekly magazine of general news and centrist opinion, founded in 1984 by Jean-François Kahn and disappeared in 2001.

History

Launch

One of the original features of its foundation was the reader subscription system set up by the management of the weekly, which managed to obtain 18,000 reader shareholders during the launch. The television journalist Albert du Roy and the cartoonist Wiaz are, with the founder, its best-known contributors.

When he founded Thursday Event 1984, Jean-François Kahn wanted "a media that hits as much on the left as on the right", to overcome the left-right divide" via "a free, dissonant space. He supported the candidacy of François Bayrou in the 2007 presidential election, then ran for the European elections 4 as head of the list in the eastern constituency of Bayrou's Democratic Movement (MODEM).

Controversy in the first two years

In the year of its launch, founder Jean-François Kahn publicly supported the centrist list "Entente radicale écologiste pour les États-Unis d'Europe", a candidate in the 1984 European elections that brought together Olivier Stirn's radical centrist Union (center-right), the Mouvement radical de gauche (center-left) and the right-wing ecologists, competing with the party's official list, represented by Corinne Lepage and Brice Lalonde, but the list obtained only 3.32% of the vote.

Many of the contributors came from the weekly Les Nouvelles littéraires, whose director from 1975 to 1983 was Philippe Tesson, who at the same time founded Le Quotidien de Paris. This was particularly true of literary critic Patrice Delbourg, whose December 5 headline read, "Jean-Jacques Goldman really sucks: l'art de faire le plein avec du vide" ("Jean-Jacques Goldman really sucks: the art of filling up with emptiness"). He called the idol of youth a "soft singer", criticizing his lack of musical culture compared to Étienne Daho or Les Rita Mitsouko. Cultivating his taste for ferocious self-mockery, the singer took out a full-page advert in Libération and France-Soir, presenting an anthology of his bad reviews, from L'Express to Rock & Folk, with Patrice Delbourg's review reproduced in full.

Taken over by the Lagardère group

In the 1990s, it was taken over by the Lagardère group. Journalist and former Globe and Globe Hebdo editor Georges-Marc Benamou took over as director in 1997.

In January 1999, the magazine was renamed L'Événement. That same year, Jean-François Kahn, buoyed by the success of Marianne, the magazine he had founded in 1997, took over L'Événement, entrusting its management to Maurice Szafran. The paper became a cultural weekly.

Takeover by France-Soir

With a circulation of no more than 80,000, the new format fell short of the 110,000 copies needed to break even. Jean-François Kahn decided to resell the title, which was bought by France-Soir in July 2000, which turned it into its cultural supplement. L'Événement France-Soir was launched on September 16 of the same year. In February 2001, after 23 issues, France-Soir discontinued the supplement, replacing it with TV Magazine.