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Play on words and free expressions on the Front Page of the French daily Libération (1973-2004) At the heart of journalistic discourse, newspaper headlines are where playing on words most depends on a stock of idiomatic expressions and set syntactic structures. This is due to the scriptural constraints and communicative functions inherent to the headline itself but also to the intertextual and interdiscursive relations connecting it to the other texts in the paper and to the reports that circulate according to the event considered. We first study the various procedures that unleash puns and free otherwise set expressions in the main titles of the daily Libération, and the meanings such procedures produce. We then discuss that vocation of the paper's headlines since its foundation (1973-2004), i.e. to allude to the social and cultural context on its front page, and we attempt to discern the major changes that have taken place and how they affect the way news are reported.