Yes, joy is powerful

Published on November 20, 2024 at 6:30 p.m.

For our 60th birthday, we chose to thumb our noses at the ambient gloom, by celebrating, for our anniversary, the power of joy.

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Sixty years old. Sixty years of a formidable editorial adventure, which began on November 19, 1964 with the first issue of “Le Nouvel Observateur” and which is still continuing. Six decades of publication of a magazine which has marked French history and political life, carried out social struggles, supported and accompanied intellectuals and artists. This week, the entire editorial staff and employees of your newspaper are proud and happy to celebrate this wonderful longevity. This is an opportunity for us to address you, dear readers, to thank you for your loyalty. It is also an opportunity to break away from anxiety-provoking news, while Trump's victory obscures our future, the war is escalating between Ukraine and Russia, and the conflict in the Middle East remains insolvent.

Faced with this dark picture, we have decided to take a step aside, remembering that reality is not limited to tragic events in the world, as long as we shed light on it in another light. We chose to thumb our noses at the ambient gloom, by celebrating, for our anniversary, the power of joy. What a funny idea, in these troubled times, the grumpy people might say… Nothing is more serious, however, as the sixty personalities from the intellectual world, politics or culture have confirmed to us, who give us in this issue their “bursts of joy”: all responded with enthusiasm.

From Delphine Horvilleur to Fabrice Luchini, from Nicky Doll to Pierre Rosanvallon, they confided to us their ephemeral pleasures or their great reasons for hope, these little things that keep them going every day. From the feeling of fullness when you close a book that you loved deeply (Maylis de Kerangal) to the simple joy of mowing the grass in the morning “weighed down with dew” (Gaspard Koenig), from the mushroom picking that precedes the fricassee (Andreï Kourkov) to the joy of singing in unison (Camille) or listening to Beethoven (Edgar Morin)… So many moments that help us to simply feel alive. “To the deadly news of the world, we must resolutely oppose our own news of life, however tiny it may be,” summarizes the writer Grégoire Bouillier.

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Yes, joy is powerful, as long as we provoke it, cultivate it or cherish it. And who better than Thomas Jolly, the conductor of the Olympic and Paralympic Games ceremonies, to embody it on the front page of our anniversary issue? Everyone remembers that the Games were able to show another side of ourselves, that of a country proud of itself and its openness to the world, rich in its diversity. And if we have often said that they were only an enchanted parenthesis, we have less emphasized that the France to which they testified exists at least as much as the France, worried and doubting itself, that we like too often to depict. “What we showed was France: beautiful, plural, fraternal. Different bodies, different ways of being in the world… And that the Republic takes in its arms. It’s the only France that exists,” affirms Thomas Jolly in the interview he gave us, before urging us to « organiser » : “Let’s get organized, yes. Let's organize the fact that we want to be together, let's organize tolerance, welcome, acceptance, generosity, let's organize all that. And then let's express it. It is a political and media mission, but also a mission for everyone. »

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For sixty years, our title has carried this conviction: “the New Obs” has strived to defend an open and plural model of society, to support all emancipations and accompany the changes in France. While the clouds are gathering over our country as elsewhere, we will continue to echo all the progressive forces, and to fight the ambient declinism which provides the breeding ground for reactionaries and populists. This is the reading contract that we have been offering you for sixty years, and that we hope to offer you for the sixty years to come. Without naivety and with open eyes. Looking forward to informing you.