PARIS — A small and shrinking newspaper with roots going back to the French Resistance was reborn this week thanks to a risky 50 million euro ($68 million) bet by the 25-year-old son of a Russian billionaire.
France-Soir, the smallest of France's national news dailies, printed 500,000 copies of its newly revamped daily, more than 20 times its normal circulation, on Wednesday.
It also cut the cover price nearly in half, in a promotional launch intended to continue for a month.
The paper's relaunch is being accompanied by a lavish 20 million euro publicity blitz in an attempt to convince readers that the once nearly bankrupt tabloid again merits a spot on Paris' newsstands alongside rivals like Le Parisien, Le Monde and Le Figaro.
Alexander Pugachyov, whose billionaire father Sergei is a close friend of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, bought France-Soir last year and has since gone about expanding the newsroom from about 40 journalists to about 100, a spokeswoman for the paper said.
The paper's initial newsstand price of 50 centimes (69 cents) is half that of Le Parisien/Aujourd'hui en France, the country's biggest-circulation national news daily. The paper's daily circulation is between 150,000 and 200,000, the spokeswoman said, which would put France-Soir in fourth place among the country's big national dailies.
Very little is known about the younger Pugachyov, other than the fact that he was raised in Monaco and has no previous experience running a newspaper. He does, however, have a French passport, something his father doesn't. That allowed the Pugachyovs to get around a French law limiting foreign ownership of media companies.
The elder Pugachyov made his fortune in banking in the early 1990s. He owns two of the largest military and civil shipbuilding yards in St. Petersburg. Ongoing exclusive talks between Paris and Moscow toward the possible sale of four French warships could benefit the Pugachyovs, as the ships could be built in the elder Pugachyov's shipyard, according to Russia expert Arnaud Dubien of the IRIS think tank.
Alexander Pugachyov was unavailable for an interview Wednesday, the France-Soir spokeswoman said.
The situation recalls the purchase last year of London's venerable but money-losing paper The Evening Standard by another Russian tycoon, Alexander Lebedev.
France-Soir was launched in 1944, after the Liberation. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was one of France's biggest-selling dailies, with circulation reaching a peak of more than 1 million copies daily.
In recent years, the paper has suffered even more than the rest of the loss-making, shrinking French newspaper industry. Last year, its circulation dropped to only 23,000, according to figures from media tracking body OJD.
The Pugachyovs' interest in buying a down-market and stumbling daily "is a real question," Dubien said.
With such a small circulation, "the thesis of influence, I don't believe it for a second," Dubien said. "Or else he is confusing the France-Soir of today with the France-Soir of the 1960s."
And with such a large investment in the embattled media landscape, "it's also clearly not to make money — he's not going to make money with France-Soir," Dubien said.
"I think it's more a question of the need to give the son something to do," Dubien said. "He has ambitions to be a press baron, there was a once-prestigious newspaper for sale, and voila."