The existence in North Africa, Egypt and Lebanon of about fifty Frenchlanguage dailies and weeklies, as well has hundreds of magazines, most of which were founded recently, belies the widespread belief in a process of decolonization in which states have been structured partly around the primacy of a single national language. The author proposes three hypotheses to explain the persistence and even intensification, in the last decade, of this "anomaly": the openness onto the world and onto domestic policy that this Francophone press offers; a contribution to a Euro-Mediterranean partnership; and, lastly, the emergence of a political French-speaking community personified in Boutros-Ghali.