No official figures are available; indeed, the present secretary, Etcherelli, bemoans the absence of any sort of record or archive. Philip Thody reported in 1960 that ‘the number of copies of TM printed each month has increased from 3,500 in 1945 to 10,000 in 1959’. At about the same time, Sartre commented as follows: ‘Void tantôt dix-sept ans que nous avons fait paraître le premier numéro des TM: nous avons gagné régulièrement des abonnés et c'est le bout du monde si quelques douzaines nous ont quittés.’

Everything indicates that 10,000 represents the peak figure. It was attained in the late 1940s (Sartre refers to the review as ‘lue par 10,000 personnes’ under the editorship of Merleau-Ponty) and may have fallen away quite rapidly after the end of the Algerian War. By January 1967 TM was clearly losing its ability to recognise its readership and issued an Enquête aux lecteurs which was an orthodox exercise in market research. Despite an undertaking to the contrary, no results were ever published. In 1975, Sartre noted that ‘la revue a en gros le meme tirage qu'à ses débuts, 11,000 exemplaires’, but this was probably an overstatement and certainly glossed over the undoubted fluctuations.

By 1981, according to Etcherelli, the print-run had fallen to 8,500 and the majority of subscribers were located abroad rather than in France.