The question posed in the title is whether the French so-called 'journalistic' conditional is a mark of free indirect speech. Another problem dealt with in this paper is the translation of the journalistic conditional into English. The French conditional is usually described as a combination of future tense and imperfect, which it is not, even though there are family resemblances between future and conditional. The morphology of French present-day conditional is the result of the fusion of the markers -R- of the infinitive, and of avoir / have in the imperfect. This study is based on the assumption that no grammatical markers are meaningless and my hypothesis will be that the French conditional can be read as follows : validation of the predicative relation is explicitly virtual (role or -R-, marker of the infinitive), and localized on a tuncal plane (role of -ais), i.e. on a plane disconnected from the nuncal coordinates. This description seems to apply to all uses of French conditional. The journalistic conditional is used to virtualize and tuncalize uncertain facts, or facts gathered from unreliable sources. Prospect of validation is not relevant here, and this is the reason why would + V cannot be used to translate the French journalistic conditional. The orientation to be expressed is not towards validation but the exact reverse, i.e. away from validation, as the journalist needs to decline responsibility for the reported statement.