“I Am Taking Back My Freedom”
Jean Quatremer Leaves Libération
A pillar of the newspaper, where he began working in 1984, Jean Quatremer, a leading specialist in European affairs, is leaving after being pushed out by a faction within the newsroom that could no longer tolerate his positions, particularly on Israel and Palestine.
This is more than a minor episode in Parisian journalism.
Jean Quatremer, who will turn 69 next November, could have continued writing for Libération for many years. According to our information, he will continue publishing elsewhere, but his departure from Libération, which he formally communicated to management several days ago, was made official on Wednesday, July 29.
He is leaving the newspaper where he spent his entire career with a bitter assessment.
“Islamo leftism and wokeism have won,” he told us.
His farewell letter, which we publish below, names no one apart from the newspaper’s founding figures, Jean Paul Sartre and Serge July, as well as its new director, Sonia Delesalle Stolper, whom he wishes well.
No Room for Debate
Who exactly was behind the campaign against him is something Quatremer does not really know.
“No one ever came to tell me to my face what was wrong, except at the very end, on social media, when it became obvious that I was going to leave,” he says.
The journalist dates the rise in tensions to October 7, 2023.
Before that, some of his social media posts and television appearances had caused unease in the newsroom, but remained within what was considered tolerable.
That limit was crossed after the Hamas massacres.
The journalists’ society took a position against him, while the management continued to support him.
The broader backdrop is obvious: a war between two versions of the left.
Jean Quatremer represents a social democratic Libération, while those who wanted to silence him belong to the political orbit of La France Insoumise.
“The arguments would probably have been brutal at Libération in the 1990s, but in Libération in 2026, people no longer debate,” he says.
“My internal enemies never revealed themselves and did not want to discuss anything. They simply wanted to silence me.
“I defend the idea that Israel is a democracy. I observe that evidence of genocide in Gaza remains impossible to find. I believe we should be able to speak openly about Muslim antisemitism.
“If I am wrong, anyone at Libération could have asked for space to try to prove it. No one did.”
His daily life will not change much.
For decades, Jean Quatremer has worked from Brussels. He rarely went to the Paris newsroom, whose insularity he criticizes.
“Those who wanted me gone do not seem to understand that my positions do not shock the vast majority of the population, including the 30 percent who remain on the left.
“You make a newspaper in order to sell it. Who will Libération be targeting tomorrow?”
Jean Quatremer’s Farewell Letter
“Goodbye, Libé!”
Dear friends at Libération,
I confess: I am a libertarian and, like every libertarian, a provocateur.
Neither God nor master.
That is precisely why I chose Libé in 1984. A free, chaotic, dissident, unconventional newspaper, the one Serge July had recreated in May 1981, Libé II.
“In the beginning, there was chaos at Libération,” as he put it so aptly.
That chaos of the newspaper’s origins remained part of its identity for a long time.
Unlikely and passionate people worked side by side, people who spent their time arguing openly, something that would have been impossible at the other stiff and institutional newspapers, and then making peace over a drink or a meal.
We were afraid of nothing, and above all we were not afraid of people who thought differently from us.
On the contrary, we sought confrontation with them.
We would never have censored anyone or anything, with a few exceptions, admittedly.
“It is forbidden to forbid,” a legacy of May 1968 of which we could be proud, even though there were occasional excesses that Libé had the courage to acknowledge, unlike many other newspapers.
We were perfectly comfortable smashing the crockery and putting our feet on the table.
But the best things eventually come to an end.
So I take my leave.
I thank the successive editorial teams that for so long allowed me to practice my profession independently within the newspaper, as well as on other platforms.
I also thank the majority of my colleagues, with whom I have always had cordial relations over the years, and the various shareholders who financed us more than generously without ever interfering in the newsroom. I can personally testify to that.
If I am leaving, it is not because of Europe, the subject to which I devoted a very large part of my professional life with passion.
I belong to that social democratic left that fights religious obscurantism in all its forms, racism, antisemitism, discrimination, hatred of Muslims, sexism, homophobia, social injustice, authoritarian regimes, and so on.
It is a left that considers individual and collective freedoms sacred, freedom of expression above all.
A left that does not compromise on the rule of law or the Republic.
Sadly, I can only conclude that this left has now become a minority, and may even be on the verge of disappearing.
Out of fear of being accused of “Islamophobia” or neocolonialism, or more cynically, in order to secure a particular community’s vote, part of the political and media left now tolerates within its ranks homophobic, misogynistic, transphobic and anti secular discourse, hostility to freedom of expression, and clericalism with which it forms alliances.
Since the October 7 pogrom, it has transformed hostility toward the Netanyahu government, which I completely share, and legitimate support for the Palestinian cause into a virulent antizionism, a mask for unrestrained antisemitism, as Vladimir Jankélévitch understood so well.
That antisemitism is a rejection of the values not only of the left, but of the Republic itself.
People demonstrate outside synagogues.
Jews are attacked.
People shout “Heil Hitler” at demonstrations.
Intellectuals, artists, scientists and journalists are denied the right to speak because they are Jewish and therefore supposedly Zionist and therefore supposedly “genocidal.”
Anyone, Jewish or not, who does not follow this line is called a fascist, in the name of a new kind of antifascism that resembles, almost exactly, the violence, sometimes deadly, that it claims to oppose.
A New Kind of Censorship
This new left, wallowing in antisemitism, defends the freedom to express only the opinion it already holds.
As in the great days of the USSR and the Comintern, the thought police impose ideological terror through denunciations, defamatory accusations and cancel culture.
Jews are portrayed as Nazis.
Israel and Jews around the world are accused of genocide, just as Jews were once accused of deicide.
The right of Israel to exist is denied, something that is not demanded of any other country.
Antisemitism is treated as an opinion like any other, rather than as a principle that cannot be compromised.
Yes, all of this is permitted.
But denouncing antisemitism and antizionism, defending Israel’s right to exist, challenging the claim that Israel is committing genocide or deliberately organizing famine, pointing to the use of civilians as human shields by Hamas terrorists, questioning the exploitation of UNRWA or the United Nations by Islamists, well, that is not permitted.
And yet, I tell you this as someone who is not Jewish:
Antisemitism in all its forms, including its most subtle forms, is an unmistakable marker of hatred for the Republic, for freedom, for the rule of law, for equality and for humanism.
It is a warning sign of totalitarianism.
This new left, wallowing in antisemitism, defends the freedom to express only the same opinion it holds.
It chooses which victims deserve sympathy instead of defending humanity as a whole.
It insults and defames anyone who refuses to stand at attention before its propaganda, its lies and its hatred.
Thus, contrary to what representatives of this left, which has little left about it beyond the name, have claimed since October 7, I have never confused Muslims with Islamism, nor Palestinians with Hamas and its supporters.
Anyone who accuses me of racism, Islamophobia, an accusation that harms only those who are accused of it, or fascism is an idiot, a bastard, or both.
I am too old to give in to the intimidation of people who are selectively offended.
I admit it: I no longer recognize myself in this version of the left, which is itself a negation of the principles that founded Libé.
Certainly, these people are far from being a majority within the newspaper and even further from being a majority within its leadership.
But through methods of harassment perfected by the far left, they have managed to make the atmosphere unbearable for me.
So I am leaving.
I am taking back my freedom, because it is my most precious possession.
I have no intention of surrendering even the smallest part of it, submitting to any discipline, or spending my time defending myself before little groups conducting Moscow Trials on the Seine.
I am too old to give in to the intimidation of people who are selectively offended.
I could have quoted Pialat:
“You don’t love me? I don’t love you either.”
But that would be false.
I have loved, and still love, many of you.
But more than anything else, I value my freedom.
The real rebels are not the ones you think.
I am leaving Libération, certainly, but not its readers.
Not those who have read me, listened to me and appreciated me throughout all these years.
Not those for whom diversity of opinion within the left is a precious treasure.
As Jean Paul Sartre said in 1973 about Libération, which he had co founded with Serge July, it was “a newspaper that does not belong to a party and where journalists, all of them on the left, do not necessarily share the same opinion.”
To all those readers, I say: I will see you on other platforms, where I will continue to make my voice heard and defend the values and journalism in which I believe.
I hope that the majority of you will continue, as I have tried to do in recent years, to defend Libération against those who would seek to hold it hostage in the name of an ideology contrary to its values.
To those who will fight to “liberate Libération,” to borrow once again an expression used by Serge July in 1981, I wish you well.
And I wish Sonia Delesalle Stolper, the newspaper’s new director, well too.
Never forget that you can recognize freedom by the noise it makes when it leaves.
Jean Quatremer
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