Éric Rouleau had a career many people can only dream of: both a renowned journalist with the French publication Le Monde & Le Monde diplomatique and a seasoned diplomat who served as France’s ambassador to Tunisia from 1985-1986 and to Turkey from 1988 to 1991. Born in Cairo in 1926 as Elie Raffoul, Rouleau grew up in a Jewish-Egyptian family during a time of rising nationalism and anti-colonial ferment. After emigrating to France in the early 1950s, Rouleau changed his name and became known for his leftist politics and anti-imperialist stance taking him as far as the French Communist Party. His Middle Eastern and French background gave him not only linguistic fluency in Arabic, English, and French but also a high degree of cultural adaptability. He could befriend political leaders, army generals, and religious leaders in an instant. His thousands of articles and hundreds of interviews of the decades prove this very ability.
Today, his legacy lives not only through the articles he wrote but also through the extensive archives he left behind for Aix-Marseille University and which are currently housed at the Mediterranean House for Human Sciences (MMSH) in Aix-en-Provence. These archives are a compendium of all the sources that he used to research and produce his articles —personal notes, interviews, news articles, and diplomatic communications—offer an invaluable window into how he gathered, selected, and interpreted information. They are now stored in a special archival room in the boxes shown below:

My name is Traian Oglinzanu and I had the pleasure of being an intern at the MMSH during the winter semester. Specifically, I worked on cataloguing the vast archives Eric Rouleau left behind. Since he had such a storied career all over the Middle East, I focused solely on the archives pertaining to Iran. My goal with this article is not only to explore Rouleau’s intellectual process through his sources, but also to argue that he was, in many ways, ahead of his time: crafting a paper-based proto-internet—a systematized, searchable, and highly organized body of knowledge long before the digital age. In what follows, we will systematically examine each of Rouleau’s sources to offer the most complete possible view of this paper-based internet he constructed.
First and foremost, one of Rouleau’s most consistent and revealing sources was the press. It is evident that he read widely across a spectrum of publications—not only major French and English-language outlets such as Le Monde, The Financial Times, Newsweek, The Economist, The Herald Tribune (acquired by the NYT) and The New York Times, but also regional Arabic newspapers, from Al-Ahram in Egypt to An-Nahar in Lebanon. Rouleau was extensive in his research. No newspaper, if reputable, was left out of his research. I was impressed to see that regardless of a publication’s political orientation, he made a deliberate effort to absorb and consider all available information. In addition, he was agnostic about the publication date; any article from the 1950s on would do. The more context he got the better. Below we have just a small example of the newspapers he amassed. Take care to notice the red underlining and notes strewn throughout! A keen eye for detail.

Beyond daily journalism, Rouleau also amassed a substantial body of more specialized and often harder-to-trace materials: political journals, academic papers, internal party documents, statistical reports, and government publications. These sources are curious because they often lack clear provenances. Sometimes there is no mention of a publisher. Other times the dates are missing. Yet unlike press articles, these documents offered him a deeper and more structured understanding of the forces shaping the Middle East. In particular, he had a fondness for Foreign Affairs alongside academic papers published by reputable universities.
Below is just one example of this added depth. Writing articles on the Iranian Toudeh party, Rouleau sought out both internal party documents (the papers titled Mardom) alongside material written by subject-matter experts. Again, take care to notice the red writing again on the documents; Rouleau made sure to painstakingly label every document in his possession.


A more intimate part of these archives comes in the form of Rouleau’s personal notes. These notes are both a mixture of observations that he made during his time on the ground in various countries, notes from the interviews he held with various individuals, or outlines for future news articles that he intended to write. It is a reference point for all future and current journalists on how to well structure a news article.
The archives contain detailed notes from his conversations with a wide range of political figures—presidents, opposition leaders, clerics, and diplomats—many of whom were rarely accessible to Western journalists. In some cases, these interviews are accompanied by audio recordings, offering a rare opportunity to hear the tone, pauses, and emphases that Rouleau would later distill into his writing. These exchanges were not off-the-cuff encounters; they were often the product of long-cultivated relationships and deep regional knowledge, allowing Rouleau to ask pointed, informed questions and earn the trust of powerful individuals. Unfortunately, much of the audio pertaining to these interviews has been lost and all that is left are Rouleau’s handwritten notes. Here is a link to the archives containing the audio of some interviews and below is a photo of his personal notes.

Among the more distinctive features of Rouleau’s research practice was his meticulous use of bibliographic sheets. Meticulously placed in brown folders throughout the archive, these sheets summarize books, academic works, and key texts he deemed relevant to his reporting. The sheets include the authors name, the published paper, the publishing year, and an index number alongside any identification marker Rouleau deemed important (below is an example of a work referencing Toudeh). Keen minds will draw the quick comparison to a modern tool such as Google Scholar or ResearchGate! Such a habit reflects a journalist who operated more like a scholar, building a structured, contextual library of knowledge to inform his analysis.


Sometimes it was even handwritten!! Perhaps because it did not print or because he would discover the academic work much later, Rouleau showed true dedication to his craft!

Alongside the bibliographical sheets, we can also find hundreds of press dispatches from the AFP (Agence France Presse). Dating from the early 1950s to the late 1980s, these dispatches contain no analysis or commentary—just concise, factual reporting of events. Rouleau used these dispatches to keep himself informed and stay on top of rapidly unfolding developments across the region. Their stripped-down, objective format made them a reliable baseline—an essential tool for cross-checking information and maintaining an unbiased understanding of events through a reputable, consistent source.

The diverse sources that have been laid out served a single purpose: to inform Éric Rouleau as thoroughly as possible while he wrote his articles. Together, they form a kind of analog internet, a vast and meticulously organized web of information built without the benefit of search engines or digital databases. This was his way of covering every angle, ensuring a holistic and deeply informed understanding of the issues at hand. Again, I encourage everyone to explore not only these archives, but all the documents that Calames.fr has to offer.
Lastly, I’m deeply grateful for the opportunity to have interned at the Mediterranean House for Human Sciences. I learned more about Iran, and about what it truly means to be a rigorous, principled journalist, than I ever could have imagined.
Crédits photographiques : image “à la une”…. Toutes les photographies sont issues du fonds Eric Rouleau, photographiées par Traian Oglinzanu le 16 mai 2025. Licence CC-BY-NC.
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Traian Oglinzanu (19 mai 2025). A journalist before the Internet – Eric Rouleau. Archives de la recherche & Phonothèque de la MMSH. Consulté le 19 juillet 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/13y7t