I used to regularly read Le Monde online as I found that the articles were at the right level for me to be reading (a bit challenging, but understandable). However, since the last time I visited the site, it seems to have changed to only allowing you to preview articles and requires either a subscription (at €17.90 per month) or to buy the individual article (at €2) to read the full article.
If there is no other option, I will likely end up buying a few interesting articles every now and then. But I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations for French newspapers that are available online for free and write at a similar level to Le Monde?
If you want French newspapers (so from France), I don’t really know because I don’t read a lot of them, but if you want a newspaper written in French, but not from France, almost every article in Le Soir (Belgian newspaper) is free (on the website and on the app). Also, all articles are free on the website or the app of the RTBF (Radio-Télévision Belge Francophone, it’s the equivalent of the BBC in Belgium).
France 24! They also have free streaming news 24/7 that I’ve been watching for years.
As a side note, I have found that one of the best sections of Le Monde for beginners/intermediates is their En Bref column: The day’s news summed up in a few sentences.
Pro tip: You can circumvent the paywall on LeMonde, NYT, and other sites by opening the article in an incognito/private browsing window.
If you’re interested, they’re currently offering a half price subscription.
somewhat on topic - does anyone know how to watch tf1 without a vpn? I have an account but it doesn’t let me watch when I’m not in france.
And if you ever want to check out La Presse, it’s the biggest french newspaper of North America – from Québec of course. Everything is free, they have a lot of great stuff and their world news section has a lot of articles from Agence France-Presse.
Je suis d’accord avec vous. 
I agree that you can easily trick nyt, ft, economist, etc. websites by changing your referee to google or something like that.
But those solutions simply doesn’t work for french newspapers like lemonde, lefigaro, etc. Their paywalls are of a different kind and there’s no way that i know of to bypass them.
incognito/private browsing window
I can’t circumvent the paywall on Lemonde in an incognito/private browsing window of Chrome. Can you still make it now, please?
I think there’s a chrome extension called "Hola!” that works, but don’t quote me.
Still works fine for me. Maybe it’s dependent on location—I’m in the US.
“service de proxy gratuit Hola Unblocker VPN.” - this is exactly what I was looking for. per-site proxy that doesn’t make all the other traffic go through it. Thank you for your help.
