I can’t resist linking to this article from Rue89 on the revelation that François Mitterrand, then Minister of Justice and supposed lifelong opponent of the death penalty, assented to the execution of 45 Algerians at the beginning of the war in Algeria. This “scoop” comes from the latest book of Benjamin Stora, who is actually a very good historian, but the newness falls flat. The information was already published three years ago in an article in Le Point and in the 1994 book on Mitterrand’s links to the far-right La main droite de Dieu.
I love the conclusion:
Is the market for ‘revelations’ so small that we need to overuse hackneyed scoops? In any case, to know everything on Karachi, on Bettencourt, on the investigation of the sources of Le Monde, on Tapie’s check [all recent French scandals], rendezvous in 2050 (with new editions in 2060, 2070, etc).
