Agence France-Presse

Christopher H. Sterling

Based in Paris, the Agence France-Presse (AFP) is one of the relative handful of news agencies operating globally in the early twenty-first century. The modern French news service grew out of the century-old Havas agency. Havas had been reorganized during the 1940–44 German occupation as the French Information Office (FIO). Following on similar earlier actions in Algiers (after the allied invasion of North Africa in late 1942), French Resistance journalists took control of FIO offices and personnel on the liberation of Paris in August 1944. To make clear the change in control that had taken place, they began to issue wartime news dispatches under a new name—Agence France-Presse. At the end of September of that year, AFP took over the facilities and some of the staff of the old, now discredited, Havas service, and became a provisional public cor-poration—essentially, an arm of the government. AFP's initial job was to rebuild ...

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