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FIP went on air in Paris on 5 January 1971 as France Inter Paris, created by radio chief Roland Dhordain with France Inter producers Jean Garetto and Pierre Codou. The original brief was traffic bulletins wrapped in music for drivers stuck in the city, carried on medium wave at 585 kHz. It spread to Bordeaux, Lyon and other cities from 1972, moved to FM and stereo under Radio France in 1975, and has held essentially the same shape ever since, minus the traffic reports it finally dropped in 2020.

Programming is hand-sequenced and entirely ad-free: jazz into chanson into electronica into film score, with announcers speaking only briefly between records and never over them. Nothing is trailed in advance and nothing repeats on a clock, so the effect is less a radio station than a very long mixtape assembled by somebody with unusually broad taste.