French Version of Huffington Post Online on Monday

The French version of the U.S. socialite blogger Arianna Huffington's news website, the Huffington Post, will go online Monday, hoping to repeat the success that made her an Internet multimillionaire.

The team behind the French language "HuffPo" will put the site on the web on Monday shortly before an 0830 GMT press conference, it said.

The site will be edited by Anne Sinclair, a leading French journalist best known as the wife of former International Monetary Fund director Dominique Strauss-Kahn who resigned last year amid allegations of sexual assault.

Sinclair, who is a multimillionaire heiress and former television anchor, has stood by her husband. Charges that he attacked a New York hotel maid have been dropped, but he has been dogged by a string of further allegations.

HuffPo France is a partnership between the leading French daily Le Monde, the U.S. parent firm and banker Matthieu Pigasse. It will incorporate a French interactive news website, Le Post, owned by Le Monde.

Huffington launched her original American website in 2005 and sold it to Internet giant AOL in 2011 for $315 million (246 million euros). It boasts 37 million readers per month in the United States.

The size of the buyout surprised many observers, as the HuffPo's gossipy mix of celebrity, political and lifestyle stories was at first largely culled from other outlets and fleshed out with unpaid columnists.

It has become a successful advertising platform, however, and now has British and Canadian editions.