Servan-Schreiber, Jean Jacques (1924–2006)

French publisher and radical politician. In 1953 he founded the magazine L'Express, which supported and popularized Pierre Mendès-France's modernizing republicanism in the mid-1950s. He was the author of the widely influential polemic, Le Défi Américain/The American Challenge (1967).

From a publishing and journalistic dynasty, Servan-Schreiber attended the elite Ecole Polytechnique, and worked for a period on Le Monde as a foreign affairs correspondent. A critic of Gaullism and de Gaulle's European policies, he backed Gaston Defferre's abortive attempt to reorganize the centre-left in 1964. In Le Défi Américain he argued that US economic and technological dominance could only be challenged by a united left-wing Europe. As president 1971–75 and 1977–79 of the Radical Party, which had been a major force in government under the Third and Fourth Republics but was now reduced to a rump organization, he took it into Valéry Giscard D'Estaing's centre-right confederation, the Union pour la Démocratie Française (UDF), in 1978.