Share certificate issued in Marseilles in 1963.

Le Petit Marseillais was a newspaper created in 1868 by Toussaint Samat associated with his brother-in-law Jean-Baptiste Peirron. They recruited by advertisement a financial backer, Gustave Bourrageas (who was then returning from Zanzibar with a comfortable fortune), to finance a project for a popular tabloid newspaper. It was with the "Affaire des Poisoneuses" that Le Petit Marseillais became known and made his first important prints.

Subsequently, the development of the newspaper was hampered by imperial censorship, and Samat, a republican, was imprisoned for political reasons. But with the end of the Empire, then the advent of the Third Republic, and especially the laws on the freedom of the press, Le Petit Marseillais took on a meteoric rise. Most of the Marseille bourgeois of the time bought shares.

Directed then by Paul and later by Jean Gaillard-Bourrageas, the newspaper leaned clearly towards the Vichy government and disappeared in 1944. Jean Gaillard-Bourrageas was sentenced to death at the Liberation.