Paris (AFP)

On August 20, 1944, five days before the liberation of Paris, a small group of resisters invests the French Information Office (OFI), created by the Vichy regime, and gives birth to AFP.

It is a Sunday, two days after the general mobilization decreed by Henri Rol-Tanguy, the communist leader of the French Forces of the Interior (FFI) of Ile-de-France. The eight "conspirators" met at 7 am, 13 Place de la Bourse, at the foot of the decrepit building of the former Havas Agency, which has been home to the OFI for four years.

"It had become an agency of German propaganda", will recall later Gilles Martinet, one of the "eight". The group of which he is a part consists mainly of former writers of Havas: Claude Martial-Bud, Pierre Courtade, Max Olivier, Jean Lagrange, Vincent Latve, Basil Tesselin, to which Claude Roussel joined, fresh from the École Normale Supérieure.

- First dispatch -

The heat is heavy, the streets are empty. We hear shootings. A German tank is immobilized nearby, rue du 4 Septembre.

The small commando, accompanied by two peacekeepers - the only ones to be armed - sent by the Parisian Committee of Liberation, sneaks up the stairs, burst into the newsroom. Ten heads stand up, bewildered.

"Nobody moves, nobody leaves ... From now on, you will work for France, instead of working for the Germans," says Martial-Bud. No one flinches. We take a German censor to the basement and lock it up.

We distribute the responsibilities: Martial-Bud, the eldest, takes the reins, Gilles Martinet becomes editor-in-chief.

Quickly, we get in touch with the underground newspaper teams: "Combat", "Defense of France", "Le Parisien Libéré", "L'Humanité" ...

At 11:30, the first dispatch is published: "The first free newspapers will be published, the French Press Agency sends them their first service ...". Until the end of the fighting, the dispatches are shot on rimeo rones and distributed by cyclists to the newspapers and the PC of the Resistance.

On the 23rd came Fernand Moulier, who, along with others in London, laid the foundations of an independent French Agency with an embryonic international network. The junction takes place between journalists of the Resistance and those of free France.

The team of the Place de la Bourse will quickly grow. We sleep on the spot. The staff took control of the Duckling Reserves, a nearby restaurant that served as a mess for German officers. On the menu: terrines, foie gras and fine wines.

Reporters criss-cross the Paris area to meet the Allied troops and the 2nd DB. At the prefecture, Basile Tesselin had a direct telephone installed in the bathroom of the prefect's apartment. It is he who will be the first, on the 25th, to announce the entry into Paris of the general Leclerc ...

- New model -

"Everything had been decided a month ago, strategy, tactics and especially the goal": to recreate a large French news agency able to make its voice heard around the world, the heiress of the Havas agency founded in 1835, he will tell later.

But Havas was a private company, which had an information branch and an advertising branch. "The capitalists who ran the business were tired of seeing that the information was wasting a lot of the money that the advertising brought in. Hence the separation, in 1935, of both activities and, by force of things, the interference of the State, by means of a subsidy, in the information branch ".

"We did not want either of these two disadvantages: that of private management, inevitably capricious and too attached to the sole financial interest, that of state interference (...), less concerned about the interest of France than of that of the party in power ", explains Basile Tesselin in his memoirs.

The new status of AFP will take some time to mature in people's minds. It will be created by the law of January 10, 1957, adopted unanimously by the National Assembly, which guarantees its independence.

AFP, still headquartered on the Stock Exchange, is now one of the world's three major news agencies, with Reuters and the Associated Press. His journalists are present in more than 150 countries.

© 2019 AFP