Newspapers: Anarchists' Weekly

Upon being told that Christopher Columbus was not the first to discover America, a bulbous-nosed, sleepy-eyed Charles de Gaulle murmurs: "Eh bien, I congratulate him for that."

Standing under an umbrella in a rainstorm, up to his knees in water, le grand Charles shouts: "Après le déluge, moi."

Such droll, needling cartoons are not softened a bit by the text they illustrate. Week in, week out, Charles de Gaulle comes under irreverent attack in the French satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné (the Chained Duck-).

Anything but chained, the Duck pokes more fun at the man it calls "le grand Charletan" than any other French publication. Nor does it spare anyone else who merits attack. Last week the eight-page weekly celebrated 50 years of ridiculing the high and the mighty, the smug and the pretentious in French life. Proud of the Duck's surviving without mellowing, staffers boast: "The duck still has all its teeth."

Combating Hysteria. Over the years, the Duck has learned to clamp those teeth on its enemies and live to bite an other day. Its secret is circuitous attack; it never charges an opponent headon. Stories begin disarmingly: "We of course deny ... It would be false to say . . ." Then they deliver what they are denying in spectacular detail. Thus the Duck gets away with printing stories no other paper dares touch. Once a Deputy not beloved by the Duck sent the paper a letter full of gamy information about government officials. What to do? The Duck solved the problem by running a photocopy of the letter. When a politician named Marcilhacy, whom the Duck disliked, declared he would run for the presidency, the Duck ran a story: "Paris-Match announces the publication of a book entitled The Life of Marcilhacy. We have been able to acquire the text of this book. Here it is." A blank space followed.

The Duck began its bold sniping in 1915, during some of the bleakest days of World War I, when its dry wit turned out to be just what was needed to combat wartime hysteria. At the time, the French press was frantically reporting every defeat as a glorious victory. The Duck did not set out to correct these inaccuracies. Instead, it claimed the biggest victories of all, until it began to make all war reporting look ridiculous. On one occasion, when the press was clucking in astonishment over a German submarine that had traveled as far as the U.S. coast, the Duck announced that the sub had done even better than that—it had been built and launched in Baltimore. The other French papers excitedly picked up the story. Exulted the Duck: "The stupidity of these great papers is so enormous that they fell upon this fable like a pig on a truffle."