Bakchich

» see bakchich.info as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In september 2009 a French news website started printing a paper. That is the wrong direction for 2009 and it is the detail that makes this grave worth reading. Everyone else that year was closing presses and moving online. Bakchich had been online for three years and decided to buy ink.

The site itself opened in may 2006, founded by Xavier Monnier and Léa Labaye with Guillaume Barou. The name comes from the Arabic baksheesh, the money you put in an official's hand to make the paperwork move, which tells you what the editorial line was going to be before you read a word of it. Nicolas Beau arrived in 2007 as editorial director, out of Le Canard enchaîné, the satirical weekly that has been embarrassing the French state since 1915.

What it published was investigation mixed with cartoons and open contempt for the people it was investigating. It described its own output as reporting plus bad faith, which is an unusual thing to advertise about yourself and was meant honestly. By early 2008 there were around thirty journalists and cartoonists working on it.

None of this reached me. A French-language investigative site aimed at French political and financial scandal has a natural audience, and it does not include an engineering student in Ankara. I found it in 2026 while going through the French list of dead websites, which is where most of the graves on this site that are not in English come from.

~ the dossier ~

~ thirty people and a printing bill ~

Bakchich Hebdo launched on 23 september 2009. A weekly print edition of a web publication, sold on newsstands, at the exact moment the French press was in the worst advertising year anyone could remember. Six weeks later, on 9 november 2009, the company filed for judicial restructuring.

The paper never got past ten thousand readers. That is not a humiliating number for a French satirical weekly, and it is nowhere near enough to cover printing and distribution on top of a thirty-person newsroom. The website had been the cheap part of the operation. Adding the expensive part in the middle of a downturn was the decision that ended it.

~ issue fifty-three ~

The last Bakchich Hebdo went on sale on 14 january 2011. It was issue 53 and the cover said voilà, c'est fini. Twelve days later, on 26 january, the commercial court put the company into liquidation.

The notice they left on the site is worth quoting because it is a shape most shutdowns do not manage. After almost five years, they wrote, Bakchich, in liquidation, must stop updating this site. We leave you thousands of articles and drawings and all the weeklies, free to read. In the hope that this is only a goodbye for now. Then nobody touched it again.

~ who owns a dead masthead ~

The brand went on the block and there was exactly one buyer: an industrialist named Christophe Février, who talked about putting between two hundred thousand and five hundred thousand euros into a relaunch. The site came back on 24 june 2011 under that ownership. It was not the same publication and it did not have the same newsroom.

That second Bakchich ran quietly for a few years and then stopped mattering. The domain registration lapsed in 2016. Today bakchich.info sits behind a Cloudflare block page with nothing behind it, which is a very 2026 way for a French satirical weekly to end up. The date on this grave is the liquidation, because that is when the thing people remember stopped existing. What ran afterward was a name somebody had bought.

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