Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, 82, Founded L’Express, Wrote Books on the Future
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Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, who died yesterday at 82, based his French newsweekly L’Express on the model of Time and Newsweek, and wrote books urging France to emulate America in politics and economics.
In “The American Challenge” (1967), he called for “discriminating Americanization” that would produce something like a United States of Europe. The book was a surprise best-seller, with more than 600,000 copies sold in France alone.
Servan-Schreiber revived and led the Radical Socialist party, and for many years represented Nancy, the capital of Lorraine. In 1974, the newly elected president, Giscard d’Estaing, appointed him minister of reform. But Servan-Schreiber came out against the new government’s revival of nuclear weapons testing in the South Seas and lasted a mere 12 days in the job.
In 1980, he published “The World Challenge,” a sweeping analysis of macroeconomic and social trends that predicted a global conflict between the first world and a coalition of developing and Arab nations over technology and oil. In a withering review, a former undersecretary of state, George Ball, complained that Servan-Schreiber’s “miscellany of historical events seems to have been chosen more because of people he has met than because of any necessary relevance to the thesis of his book.” He also disliked the tone and complained: “The author has been shouting at me for almost 300 pages.”
Born in 1924, Servan-Schreiber was the son of the founder of Les Echoes, a financial newspaper. He escaped from France during World War II and trained as a fighter pilot in America, a period that seems to have kindled a love affair for the nation. He was a decorated flier in the Free French Forces.
After the war, he contributed to Time and the International Herald-Tribune. In 1953, he was named diplomatic editor of Le Monde. The same year, he founded L’Express as a free insert to Les Echoes. L’Express soon became an independent newsweekly, known for its somewhat leftist politics that nevertheless included support for America during the Cold War and of France’s pullout from its colonies.
He put John F. Kennedy on the cover of the magazine in the 1950s, long before his election as president, and he traveled to meet with Kennedy several times while the latter was in office, his son told the Associated Press.
Servan-Schreiber worked as an assistant to Prime Minister Pierre Mendes France in the 1950s, and he attended peace talks with Ho Chi Minh that led to the establishment of North Vietnam. In 1956, he was drafted into the French army and served in Algeria. L’Express later became a leader in exposing atrocities committed against the rebels.
Servan-Schreiber’s political involvement came after he wrote “The Spirit of May” (1968) and “The Radical Alternative” (1970), in which he proposed American-style decentralization as an alternative to the French model, in which government was concentrated in Paris. He ran an American-style campaign featuring television ads, then a rarity in France. Among the planks of the Radical Socialist party was the elimination of private inheritance and the reform of national service.
He sold L’Express in 1977, wrote “The World Challenge,” and opened a Paris think tank, the World Center for Informatics and Human Resources. He later moved to America, where he became a resident at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
In a 1982 interview with Computerworld magazine, he predicted that robots would do most work in the future, and that all information would soon be at everyone’s fingertips via computers in something he called “a worldwide network of knowledge.”
He also said he thought America would soon become a non-capitalist nation. “They are like European societies,” he explained. “The do not respect the past.”
President Chirac saluted Servan-Schreiber yesterday with a statement: “One life wasn’t enough to contain his energy, creativity, and enthusiasm, so he forged multiple destinies.”