Obituary: Claude Roussel

CLAUDE ROUSSEL, one of the founders of the Agence France-Presse, was not intended for a career in journalism.

He was from an academic family, his father Pierre Roussel was a distinguished Hellenist, and a member of the Institut de France. Claude was educated at the Lycee Louis-le-Grand in Paris and gained entry to the Ecole Normale Superieure. All was set therefore for a successful career in the academic world, but everything changed with the Second World War and the defeat of 1940.

At the age of 21, Roussel entered the Resistance and was soon using his skills as a writer to produce pamphlets attacking Vichy and the Germans. In 1942 the Resistance organised its press and created the Agence Information et Documentation, which worked closely with Jean Moulin's Conseil National de la Resistance. The agency distributed information and combated Vichy and Nazi propaganda. It also helped to indicate the policies of the Resistance and was favourable to General de Gaulle's views on the future. In spite of his youth, Roussel was put in charge of this organisation.

In August 1944, as the first uprisings took place in Paris, Roussel, together with half a dozen armed men, invaded the Agence Havas on the Place de la Bourse and took it over. They needed a centre for the news agency that would play its part in the Liberation of Paris and France. It was in this way that the Agence France-Presse was created.

The man who arrived from London and Free France, via the Normandy battlefields, to become the first President of the AFP, and who was always known by the name that he had assumed when broadcasting in London, was Jean Marin. This large Breton, who was on friendly terms with General de Gaulle, took Roussel as his right-hand man and they worked together successfully for many years. In 1957 the agency was given a new statute and became an entirely autonomous organisation.

Roussel went on a number of missions abroad, including one to Scandinavia where he met his Swedish wife, Asa. During the period of the presidencies of General de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou, Roussel was the Secretary-General of the Agence France-Presse. On a number of occasions news items and interviews diffused by the AFP led to controversy, notably an interview with the new Minister for Culture Maurice Druon.

This meant that when Valery Giscard d'Estaing became President of the Republic in 1974 he was determined to reform the AFP. He accused it of being under left-wing influences; he objected to Jean Marin's constant loyalty to the memory of General de Gaulle. But, above all, he thought that an organisation such as the AFP should be controlled more directly by the state. He therefore succeeded in getting the then ageing Jean Marin to retire in 1975, and he was resolutely opposed to Claude Roussel's succeeding him.

A crisis was inevitable and it took three months for it to be resolved. Giscard d'Estaing chose as his candidate the then French ambassador to Brussels. He thought that this would make the AFP satisfactorily subservient to French diplomacy. But newspaper editors were on the committee that elected the President of the AFP and, under the leadership of the editor of Le Monde, the case for independence of the agency, like the independence of the press, was imperative. Roussel was elected President for three years.

During these years Roussel carried out the modernisation of the AFP with great thoroughness and efficiency. His work in this respect has been compared to that of the late Gerald Long at Reuters. But, in spite of Roussel's acknowledged success, his political problem remained. Giscard d'Estaing was even more determined that, in 1978, Roussel would not have his authority renewed for another three years. Roussel had the additional disadvantage of having aroused some trade union discontent within AFP.

Some five days before the election was due, another press agency announced that Roger Bouzinac had been designated as the new President of AFP. It must be said that it is difficult to know the exact truth of what was happening in the world of the French press, but the directors of two important regional papers, Ouest France and Midi Libre, had switched their allegiance to Bouzinac, apparently under pressure from the Elysee. Roussel's friends also say that he was offered attractive future employment.

The fact is that Roussel stepped down from the presidency of AFP in 1978, and for a time was given positions in the Ministry for Culture. The Director of Le Monde publicly stated that in his view Giscard d'Estaing's "princely behaviour" had been unfair to Roussel, who soon retired to the South of France, to Antibes.

I met Roussel briefly when he visited the Ecole Normale Superieure in 1947. Rediscovering the academic atmosphere he was wondering whether or not he had been right to abandon it. In his retirement it is to be hoped that he found satisfaction in having played a vital role in creating the world's third largest news agency.

Douglas Johnson

Claude Roussel, journalist: born Paris 17 February 1919; married (one son); died Antibes 24 November 1998.