Courrier International (French pronunciation:[kuʁjeɛ̃tɛʁnɑsjɔnal]; lit.'International Mail') is a Paris-based French weekly newspaper which translates and publishes excerpts of articles from over 900 international newspapers. It also has a Portuguese and a Japanese edition. Courrier Japon was launched on 17 November 2005 and is published by Kodansha Limited.
Conceived in the autumn of 1987 by five Parisians, Jean-Michel Boissier, Hervé Lavergne, Maurice Ronai, Jacques Rosselin and Juan Calderon, Courrier international was first published on the 8 November 1990, one year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, financed by Pierre Bergé and Guy de Wouters (of the Société Générale de Belgique).[citation needed] The paper is published by the media group La Vie-Le Monde (lit.'The Life – The World').[2]
A "Volume Zero", in a print run of several hundred demonstration copies, was printed on the 22 June 1988. It was financed by a fund-raising round from family and friends of the founders, brought together a few months earlier in a method dubbed the "calendar multiplier" by Ronai and Rosselin.
Jacques Rosselin, one of the founders, managed the magazine until the end of 1994, less than a year after it was bought by Générale Occidentale (a subsidiary of Alcatel, which also owned L'Express and Le Point).[citation needed] The deal was completed in March 1994 for 83 million francs, though the magazine would wait until 1999 to break even.[citation needed]Courrier International was then sold to Vivendi, together with L'Express, then to Le Monde group, which had looked to buy it since its creation.[citation needed] Rosselin was succeeded by Bernard Wouts, who joined via Générale Occidentale. Wouts, a former executive of le Monde, had met with the founders in 1989 but declined their offer to join the then fledgling magazine.[citation needed]
Today the paper is part of Le Monde group[4] and edited by Philippe Thureau-Dangin, who joined in 1993.[citation needed] A number of original employees are still there, the most senior are Hidenobu Suzuki and Kazuhiko Yatabe, who worked on number zero in June 1988.[citation needed]
For its twentieth anniversary, on the 9 September 2010, Courrier international unveiled a new logo and layout.[5] The redesign was accompanied by a marketing campaign which included an image of two planes circling, without colliding with, the digitally shortened towers of the World Trade Center in New York.[citation needed] The implication being that if the towers had been smaller there would have been no collision.[citation needed] The image, which illustrated the magazine's new slogan « Learn to anticipate » (« Apprendre à anticiper »), solicited numerous negative reactions in the United States.[6]
In 2020 the circulation of Courier International was of 168,766 copies.[7]