On November 9, 1981, the socialist government voted a law ending the state monopoly on radio. Free radios could now broadcast, but the law was strict: power was limited to 100 watts, stations had to be associations rather than commercial affairs, and they had no right to advertise.

Radio Vert was one of the first unauthorized French radios, broadcasting on May 13, 1977. It grew from a critical media review started in 1974 and was conceived by Antoine Lefebvre with Brice Lalonde, leader of Parisian ecology, inspired by Italy's free radio movement.

The Paris Federation of the Socialist Party ran Radio Riposte from its annex seat, with a planned intervention by François Mitterrand. Prime Minister Raymond Barre's government had the prosecutor order an arrest; police smashed the door while activists formed a human chain to protect the transmitter.

Télé Diffusion de France installed jammers through a subsidiary that broadcast on the pirate stations' frequencies, either drowning them out or emitting strident sounds. Trucks could locate transmitters within a few meters, allowing police interventions and seizures of equipment worth a few thousand francs.

Besides Radio France's state channels, so-called peripheral radios broadcast from outside French territory: Radio Luxembourg, later RTL; Europe 1 from 1955 from the Saar; Radio Monte Carlo, later RMC; and Sud Radio from Andorra. They were commercial and owned by structures more or less controlled by the state.

Networks were forbidden until 1986, but stations like Energy bought small associative radios in Marseille, Toulouse and other cities. Reaching the big cities of France as a whole let them raise advertising prices, since local advertising rates were derisory while national audiences became very significant.

Many associative radios fell into debt after 1981. The Fonds de Soutien à l'Expression Radiophonique, a tax on commercial radios' advertising, was created to fund them, but they must justify a program grid, cultural ambition or musical diversity, which Lefebvre says led them to self-censor in form.

Around age 20, while studying pharmacy in Paris, Lefebvre listened to France Culture and to Radio Gulliver. Through a contact he visited Fréquences Libres, a station in a kind of hangar, where a technician trained him in a few weeks before he became a host of experimental shows.