France Soir Not 'Bon,' Soir, But Banqueroute

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)France Soir, a Paris daily newspaper that at its peak in the 1960s boasted a circulation of 1.5 million, will have its assets auctioned off per a court-ordered liquidation, The Guardian reports.

France Soir was acquired by Sergei Pugachvov, the scion of a Russian billionaire, in 2009, and converted to an online-only publication last December, before he jettisoned the paper in June, after reportedly investing more than 60 million pounds ($94 million) in it, according to the Guardian story. One-hundred eighty jobs were cut when the paper became a Web-only presence, and nearly 50 jobs, 42 held by journalists, will be lost because of the bankruptcy, according to the Guardian article.


France Soir, then called Defense de la France, launched in 1944, but had seen its circulation decline to fewer than 100,000 readers by the year 2000. It surfaced as a populist tabloid in 2006 before Pugachvov swooped in with a major cash infusion.