France Archives - LES RADIOS AU TEMPS DE LA TSF

29 April 2026

Listen All You Want… but Pay : The Incredible Pay-Per-Listen System of Radio Riviera in 1923

13 March 2026 0

“Les radios” refers not to the medium in general, but to individual stations, the specific broadcasters, voices and frequencies that populated the airwaves in radio’s formative decades.

“Au temps de” means “in the time of” or “in the age of”, a phrase with a distinctly nostalgic, almost romantic flavour in French. It evokes a lost era, a world that was, rather than a simple historical period.

“La TSF” Télégraphie Sans Fil, literally “wireless telegraphy”, was the word ordinary French people used for radio throughout the 1920s, 30s and 40s, long before “la radio” became the common term. Crucially, it carries enormous emotional weight: it conjures the crackling family receiver in the living room, the amateur enthusiast building his own set from spare parts, the Resistance operator tapping out morse code in an attic. For anyone with a passion for broadcast history, TSF is not a technical term, it’s a time machine.

So the title really means something closer to: “Radio stations from the golden age of wireless”, a deliberate, affectionate nod to the era when broadcasting was still young, still miraculous, and the act of pulling a human voice out of thin air felt like nothing short of magic.

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