*Infos du Monde* remains one of the most curious phenomena in the recent history of the French press. Launched by Stéphane de Rosnay and Daniel Filipacchi, with Alain Kruger notably involved in the project’s inception, the publication drew direct inspiration from the spectacular American *Weekly World News*, famous for its aliens, monsters and paranormal phenomena. The French version, however, differed in one key respect: taking the absurd to such extremes as to transform the sensationalist tabloid into a comedy machine.
The idea was wonderfully simple. Take all the visual and editorial conventions of the most serious tabloid press — headlines, supposedly exclusive photographs, eyewitness accounts, revelations, experts, news in brief — and put them at the service of entirely fabricated news stories. Not just a few humorous snippets lost amidst a real newspaper. No. Everything was fake. And everything was treated with the utmost seriousness.
That was precisely what made the joke work.
*Infos du Monde* did not look like a traditional satirical newspaper. It resembled the sort of paper one might have found at a petrol station after an alien had taken control of the printing press. Sixteen pages, an aggressive layout, huge headlines, retouched photographs that were at times delightfully crude, and a very affordable price: four francs. It came out on Wednesdays.
The front covers became legendary: ‘The Bat Child’, ‘My Son’s Name Is Castorama’, ‘Elvis’s Secret Son Lives in Nice’, ‘Cannibals Devoured by Missionaries’, ‘This Hen Lays Hard-Boiled Eggs’… The genius lay less in the implausibility of the stories than in the utterly unflappable way they were told.
Anything was possible, since the newspaper had decided that reality was no longer a constraint.
This tone created a wonderfully uncomfortable space between credulity and irony. Stéphane de Rosnay would later explain that the appeal of the experiment lay in particular in this ambiguity: some people genuinely believed what they were reading. *Le Monde* would later report that around 200,000 copies were sold each week during its heyday; a study published in 1995, for its part, indicated an initial print run of 240,000 copies in May 1994.
For such an implausible newspaper, this was no longer a private joke but a genuine newsstand phenomenon.
