“We have very long holidays here, and you cannot really work, you can’t find your usual sources, but you have to fill the newspaper,” said Alexandra Schwartzbrod, the deputy managing editor of Libération, a leftist daily newspaper.

And, she added, “readers are looking for something different, something lighter.”

Rather than being seen as obscure, newspapers that offer flights of fancy, or a quirky turn on history (there was a series on great autopsies and another on famous impostors) do well. Read closely, some of these pieces are highly political but less dogmatic than editorials. They draw on the fondness in France for discussing books and all things intellectual; while the fiction best-seller lists include the latest Dan Brown novel, “Inferno,” the top nonfiction book at the moment is “A Summer With Montaigne” by Antoine Compagnon.

This summer, Libération ran a series of 40 essays of historical fiction (it is the paper’s 40th anniversary) on what the world — or at least France — would have been like if real events had turned out differently. For instance, what if the far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen had become prime minister? (Answer: abortion becomes a crime; the death penalty is reinstated; the remains of Philippe Pétain, who was a World War I hero but then led France’s Vichy government, are disinterred from the cemetery near his last prison and reburied with other World War I veterans.)

Another essay considered a Y2K bug that lived up to popular fears. Clocks were reset to 1900, and Marcel Proust communicated with French sailors on a nuclear submarine — the piece had both a zaniness and a creativity that is unheard-of in American newspaper writing. However improbable the conjectures, the conceit was provocative, inviting the reader into an imaginary salon where people have the time and frame of reference to use their imaginations for pure pleasure.