Le Soir
Belgian French-language newspaper
Le Soir (French pronunciation: [lə swaʁ], lit. 'The Evening') is a French-language Belgian daily newspaper. Founded in 1887 by Émile Rossel, it was intended as a politically independent source of news. Together with La Libre Belgique, it is one of the most popular Francophone newspapers in both Brussels and Wallonia, and since 2005 has been published in Berliner format. It is owned by Rossel & Cie, which also owns several Belgian news outlets, as well as the French paper La Voix du Nord.
History and profile
Le Soir was founded as a free advertising newspaper in 1887. Later it became a paying paper.
When Belgium was occupied during the Second World War, Le Soir continued to be published under German censorship, unlike many Belgian newspapers which went underground. The paper, which became known as "Le Soir Volé" (or "Stolen Le Soir"), was parodied by the resistance group, the Front de l'Indépendance which in 1943 published a satirical pro-Allied edition of the paper, dubbed the "Faux Soir" (or "Fake Soir"), which was mixed with official copies of the paper and distributed to news kiosks in Brussels. The "Stolen Le Soir" was notable for including Hergé's The Adventures of Tintin cartoons in serialized form during the war.
The renewed production of the "Free Le Soir", under Lucien Fuss, restarted on 6 September 1944, just days after the Allied Liberation of Brussels.
The public source identifies “Le Soir” as belgian French-language newspaper. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Soir, Belgian and French-language.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q690672. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1887, 2005, 1943 and 1944.
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This entry incorporates text from “Le Soir” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.