French politician and journalist, born in Paris, France. During World War 2 he distinguished himself as a pilot with the Free French Army. He worked for the newspaper Le Monde (194853), then founded and ran L'Express (195370). Recalled into the army (1956), he was court-martialled upon the publication of his first book, Lieutenant en Algérie (1957, Lieutenant in Algeria) which exposed French wartime atrocities. His later book Le Défi Americain (1967, trans The American Challenge), warning of American domination of Europe, caused a furore in France and the USA on publication, but became a best-seller and was published in 22 languages. The Radical Party appointed him secretary general (196971) and president (19715, 19779). He was elected to the National Assembly (1970), served as minister of reforms, and co-founded the Mouvement Réformateur (Reform Movement) in 1972.
Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, often referred to as JJSS (February 13, 1924 – November 7, 2006), was a French journalist and politician.
Biography
Formative years
Jean-Jacques Schreiber (his birth name) was born in Paris, the eldest son of Emile Servan-Schreiber, journalist, who founded the financial newspaper Les Échos, and Denise Brésard. His siblings are Brigitte Gros, former senator of Yvelines and mayor of Meulan, Christiane Collange, journalist, Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber, journalist.
Enjoying the full attention of his mother, JJSS was a highly gifted and hard-working child. He studied at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly and the Lycée de Grenoble, then returned to Paris. Accepted into the École polytechnique, France's top engineering school, in 1943, he joined Charles de Gaulle's Free French Forces with his father and went to Alabama for training as a fighter pilot.
After the liberation, he graduated from the Polytechnique (1947), but never worked as an engineer. Fascinated by science and politics, Servan-Schreiber now discovered a taste for writing and journalism.
L'Express
Servan-Schreiber was among the first to recognize the inevitability of decolonization, writing a series of articles on the Indo-Chinese conflict. In 1953, Servan-Schreiber co-founded (with Françoise Giroud) the weekly L'Express, initially published as a Saturday supplement to the family-owned newspaper Les Échos.
Servan-Schreiber was conscripted to Algeria in 1956 – to still his dissent, says Giroud.
Servan-Schreiber opposed General De Gaulle's return to power in 1958. However, De Gaulle was successful, and the influence of L'Express began to wane. he divorced his first wife, and separated from Françoise Giroud, his mistress since the early 1950s, in order to marry Sabine Becq de Fouquières, who would become the mother of his four sons David, Émile, Franklin, and Édouard.
In 1964, following a study which he commissioned from his brother Jean-Louis, JJSS transformed L'Express into a weekly news magazine patterned after TIME.
The American Challenge
As the 1960s unfolded, Servan-Schreiber found himself in the position of a rich press lord, a political editorialist always chasing after new ideas.
He found a collaborator in Michel Albert, who provided him with extensive documentation to inform his editorials. It presented the United States and Europe as engaged in a silent economic war, in which Europe appeared to be completely outclassed on all fronts: management techniques, technological tools, and research capacity. Servan-Schreiber saw in this thesis the potential for a seminal book. It sold 600,000 copies in France, unprecedented for a political essay, and was translated into 15 languages.
Building on the book's success, he traveled throughout Europe, speaking to packed lecture halls, touting the advantages of a federal Europe with a common currency and of a decentralized France.
Political career
General De Gaulle's resignation in 1969 persuaded Servan-Schreiber to try his hand at politics.
During his political career, he frequently waged progressive campaigns against the current of a sociologically conservative France.
Wanting to extricate himself from the daily management of L'Express, he sold it to financier Jimmy Goldsmith in 1977. Deprived of its power base, his political career quickly deteriorated. He left the party in 1979 at the time of the first direct European elections, to present a list of candidates under the slogan "Emploi, Égalité, Europe" (Employment, Equality, Europe) with Giroud. The list won only 1.84% of the votes, and Servan-Schreiber decided to retire from political life.
Behind-the-scenes participant
In 1980, Servan-Schreiber published his second best-seller, "Le Défi mondial" (The Worldwide Challenge), devoted to the technological rise of Japan through computerization.
Returning to France, he continued to write, including two volumes of memoirs, until he was afflicted with an Alzheimer's-like degenerative disease.
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