France Soir () was a French newspaper that prospered in physical format during the 1950s and 1960s, reaching a circulation of 1.5 million in the 1950s. It declined rapidly under various owners and was relaunched as a populist tabloid in 2006. However, the company went bankrupt on 23 July 2012, before re-emerging as an online-only media in 2016. In 2020, according to NewsGuard, this media "fails to adhere to several basic journalistic standards". History France Soir was founded as the underground paper Défense de la France ("Defense of France") by young resistance leaders, Robert Salmon and Philippe Viannay, in 1941. The first editions were printed on a Rotaprint 3 offset printing machine hidden in the cellars of the Sorbonne. Distributed to Grenoble, Clermont-Ferrand, Lyon and to Britain by the resistance networks Combat and Témoignage chrétien, Défense de la France became the largest circulation newspaper in the underground press, with 450,000 copies per day by January 1944. In March 1944, after multiple relocations, it was housed on three levels of an industrial building on rue Jean-Dolent, behind the La Santé Prison, in Paris's XIVth arrondissement. After the liberation, Paris-Soir, which with 1.7 million copies in 1936 was the leading French daily between the wars, forfeited its printing plant in Lyon due to its ambiguous behavior under occupation. Pierre Lazareff, its former editor, had returned from the US and joined Défense de la France in September 1944. The first issue of France-Soir - Défense de la France was printed using Paris-Soirs presses on 7 November 1944. The hyphenated name affiliated the old paper with that of the French resistance. The paper's name was truncated to France Soir after World War II. The paper grew to be ranked among the country's (and the European continent's) most circulated, reaching 1.5 million in 1955 with Pierre Lazareff as chief editor. Its circulation was more than 1.4 million in the late 1950s. Early in the 21st century, circulation dropped below 90,000. Its circulation was 30,000 copies just before its closure in 2011. In 2013, FranceSoir.fr was relaunched as a digital tablet version for a fee, but met with mixed success. Cartoon controversy In February 2006, Jacques Lefranc, managing director of the news, was dismissed by then owner Raymond Lakah for re-printing the cartoon depictions of Muhammad that were the subject of the "Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy". The 12 cartoons were printed with the addition of another