He had been head of publisher development and publishing operations at Zumobi.
For the past three years, Lachlan Murdoch, who is 30, has been in charge of the News Corporation's United States publishing operations, including HarperCollins Publishers and The Post.
American publishers with operations in Britain are potentially more vulnerable to an effort to collect an award, lawyers say, and newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, as well as The Times's global edition, The International Herald Tribune, have faced British libel actions recently.
Vivendi seems to be embracing globalisation by choosing as its new boss a Frenchman who has been running an American publisher's British operations.
Coleridge is also vice-president of the publisher's international operations, which recently launched GQ in China and Condé Nast Traveller in India, where it already publishes GQ and Vogue.
Lewis, the Telegraph's award-winning editor-in-chief, departed after a disagreement over the future direction of the publisher's digital operations which he was put in charge of last year.
"We congratulate Arnaud de Puyfontaine on his appointment as Vivendi's senior executive vice-president, media and content activities and thank him for his work over the last four years," said Duncan Edwards, the chief executive of the publisher's international operations.
He said that the deal will be funded by the sale of the Economist complex, three buildings in London's St James's Street valued at more than £150m, with the publisher's editorial operations moving to new offices to give more space "for our digital ambitions and the needs of a 21st century media company".
The restructure, which forms part of chief executive Simon Fox's "One Trinity Mirror" vision, includes changes in the publisher's wider operation.
Because of the intentional separation between editorial and business-side operations, publishers usually don't know about editorial decisions — unless they are very big ones, fraught with legal implications.
