80 years of "Nice-Matin": your newspaper tells its story in a special edition

To celebrate our newspaper's 80th anniversary, we could have chosen to recall the major events of the last eight decades, republish our best reports, our most beautiful photos, our most emblematic front pages; look back at the tragic hours and the bright moments that marked this period.

We have made a choice that is both simpler and more ambitious: to tell you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about the newspaper that has accompanied you since the post-war period.

For the first time, in an exceptional 120-page special edition available from this Tuesday, those who made Nice-Matin 's heart beat tell the story of their daily lives. Not the official story, the one that often boils down to a collection of disembodied dates; their own story.

Or rather, their stories.

Those of a company rooted in its land since the Liberation, which has continued to evolve in step with technical changes and societal upheavals. Those of men and women who lived with the smell of ink and the roar of rotary presses, who traveled the roads to paint this fabulous territory, carried by the taste of others and the desire to "give account".

Slices of life

The actors are fascinating. There is, of course, Michel Bavastro, the co-founder, who ran this company for 47 years. An old-fashioned boss, nicknamed "The Cobra" , of whom we reveal many little-known facets. But also dozens of incredible personalities like the journalist André Lucchesi, who spent a week on the streets, in the middle of winter, to bear witness to the plight of the homeless; Sylvain Tassi, a former farmer from Cagnes who became a union leader; Jean-Marc Pastorino, hired to clean machines, who ended his career at the head of the newspaper.

Are we really going to open up our backrooms and unearth our files? Yes. Because we are convinced that the bond of trust that unites us deserves total transparency.

These pages are a collection of testimonies and stories that read like slices of life. Sometimes unusual, sometimes intriguing, always fascinating.

"Nice-Matin, 80 years of history", 120 pages, 7.90 euros, available from your local newsagent from this Tuesday.