UNE DEVELOPING A HISTORY OF HOW CATHOLIC PUBLISHING AND PRESS GROUPS GREW THEIR AUDIENCES

Abstract

The history of the press and publishing groups in contemporary France has tended to neglect that part of the sector that was organized under Catholic influence. Over the past ten years, however, a number of monographs offer a new, multidisciplinary approach to understanding the development
of Catholic publishing houses such as Mame, Le Seuil, Éditions du Cerf and Bayard. The aim of
this issue of Entreprises et Histoire is to maintain this research dynamic and to complement a
broader comparative vision with a specific focus on how these organizations built their audiences.
Comparing organizations is necessary as there is no single model for Catholic publishing. The
Catholic presence in the companies studied is constantly evolving and can take different forms and
be present at different levels of the organization. Those involved may be members of the Catholic
faith or formal representatives of an ecclesiastical apparatus. They may be employees, managers,
directors or shareholders. As a result, researching how audiences were developed by the French
Catholic press and publishing companies after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s requires
an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses entrepreneurial orientations, marketing strategies
and the actors’ classification schemes.