Abstract

The Paris Press Scandal

The affair of the Gazette du Franc is in itself a banal one. A lady called Mme Hanau, who ran what appears to have been a glorified bucket-shop, has been arrested together with an assortment of her alleged accomplices, and all are being tried by newspaper in the approved French fashion, with the zealous cooperation of the juge d'instruction, or examining magistrate, who seems to be enjoying himself immensely. French law, quite logically, lays down that, an instruction being secret, no information about what passes at it must be published, but laws in France are made to be broken and, as in all such cases, columns of the papers are filled with tendentious reports of the proceedings, evidently supplied by the examining magistrate, for no reporters are admitted.