Le Monde, or rather its current management team of publisher and editor Jean- Marie Colombani, managing editor Edwy Plenel, and director-of-the-board Alain Minc, has been the critical target over the past year of several best-selling books, accompanied by scores of articles in the rest of the French press. This avalanche of unwelcome attention for the newspaper was launched with the 630-page, exhaustively documented La Face cachée du Monde (The Hidden Face of Le Monde), by Pierre Péan, perhaps France’s most highly-regarded investigative journalist,1 and Philippe Cohen, economics editor for the newsweekly Marianne.