The conference room of France's iconic newspaper Libération enjoys a panoramic view of glittering domes and spires. The famous Parisian skyline contrasts with the grimness inside the building these days. Gazing through the room's giant porthole, the paper's foreign editor, François Sergent, sighs. "We could have done better with our readership," he says.

Readers seem to agree. Nearly 33 years after Jean-Paul Sartre and a group of Maoist intellectuals

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) launched their journal in the aftermath of the 1968 Paris riots, Libé — as the left-wing daily paper is dubbed — appears close to death. The title's unlikely major shareholder, the aristocratic banking heir Edouard de Rothschild, has given a joint staff-management committee until this Wednesday to present its plan to save the title. The board will consider this plan along with two other ideas, one devised by Rothschild and the other by Edwy Plenel, a former Le Monde editor who hopes to become Libé's editor in chief.

Turning Libé around won't be easy. Losses are about €1 million a month, advertising has dwindled and readership has shrunk. That Libé is hard up isn't exactly news. For years it has been kept afloat partly by loans from sympathizers whose politics outweighed their business sense. "It was not a normal business," says Bertrand Pecquerie, director of the Paris-based World Editors Forum, who previously worked at the paper. "Everyone in Paris knew that when you put money into Libé, you were sure to lose it." That attitude came to an end as the losses ballooned. And Rothschild's decision last July to fire the paper's longtime editor Serge July — one of Sartre's few remaining comrades — alienated older fans. Desperate, the editors last month launched a "readers' society," asking for donations as though the newspaper was a charity. One reader responded on the website: "Libé's radiant future is behind you," he wrote. "Adieu!"

Several journalists suggest that some blame lies within the newsroom itself, which they say is filled with aging bobos — bourgeois-bohemians — who are increasingly disconnected from a multiethnic France and the country's hard-charging, careerist youth. "We are all the same kinds of people," says Sergent, 53. Like many of the senior journalists, he joined Libération decades ago and lives close by its offices. Deputy editor, Pierre Haski, also 53, says that, with a generational shift in France, the dynamic idealists of Sartre's 1968 generation are "on the way out, but blamed for everything."

To an extent, the paper's problems are similar to those faced by newspapers in much of the rich world. It is up against competition from free newspapers distributed in Paris' underground trains, the Internet, several newsweeklies and 24-hour news radio stations. In France, the problems are compounded by laws heavily restricting where and when newspapers can be sold, and legal rules that mean weekend editions — profitable in other countries — are all but impossible to start. The plan to be presented by the staff-management committee includes publishing many more stories online, says Sybille Vincendon, an editor. But that, as she notes, implies "a very, very big investment in the website." Is that likely? Maybe not: Rothschild, who declined to talk to Time, is believed to have approached several European media companies for investment, and found little interest.

That leaves Libération journalists contemplating their futures. Vincendon has spent 22 of her 46 years at the paper. "We are still asking ourselves the question: 'Is this really going to disappear? Are we working for coal mines?'" We will soon know.

• VIVIENNE WALT | Paris
• France's left-wing daily fights for survival