The Newsroom of the Journal des Débats

The Journal des Débats was founded in 1789 to print the debates of the new revolutionary assembly, so its first centenary fell in the year France was celebrating the Revolution's. To mark it, the newspaper commissioned this group portrait from Béraud, and it went on show at the Salon of 1889.

The museum names 39 men in the room. Among them are the historian and critic Hippolyte Taine, Jules Simon, a former prime minister, the economist Léon Say, several times finance minister, and the novelist Paul Bourget. They sit and stand around the newsroom in dark coats, one holding a broadsheet open at full stretch, a waste-paper basket overflowing on the floor.

On the wall hangs a print of Ingres's portrait of Louis-François Bertin, who ran the Débats for decades in the first half of the century.