Marc Endeweld
We hear a lot about Bolloré because, like Stérin, he’s shown his colors strongly in favor of reactionary ideas and in support of the far right — and its most extreme representatives.
But today a large part of the Parisian economic establishment is interested in Trump and sees itself in Trumpism. It’s not just Bolloré. There’s Bernard Arnault, one of the richest men in world and head of the world’s largest luxury company, LVMH, who’s also moved closer to Bolloré. And there’s Rodolphe Saadé, who has all sorts of business interests in the United States and who signed a $20 billion deal in the Oval Office with Trump in March.
The extreme attraction to Trump of all these billionaires is really important in today’s France.
The reason for the focus on Bolloré by other French media and political leaders is because he did something very noteworthy. He bought Canal+, a pay cable channel like HBO, which was created under [1981–1995 French president] François Mitterrand by his former chief of staff André Rousselet.
The extreme attraction to Trump of all these billionaires is really important in today’s France.
Canal+ was created in the 1980s at a moment when the broadcast industry was being economically liberalized, and it played an important role at the time in the cultural hegemony of the governing left.
The channel was created in 1984, after Mitterrand abandoned his common program of economic reform together with the Parti Communiste Français and accepted the type of market liberalization the European Union wanted.
Canal+ was created at the same time as [anti-racism campaign] SOS Racisme. It was a time when an entire segment of what you could call the cultural left, which you could find around the Parti Socialiste, abandoned a program of economic reform to prioritize social issues, in particular to defend a French style of multiculturalism.
Canal+ was, and still is, an important actor in the French cultural industry because it was, and remains, the main financier of French cinema. So, it plays a key role deciding the types of films that get made, the types of scripts that get produced, and the values that are transmitted by these cultural products. Because Canal+ represents this legacy of the Mitterrand years, Bolloré struck fear into the hearts of many artists, filmmakers, journalists, and members of the creative classes who saw his purchase as a destruction of that legacy.
And in many ways, he’s done just that: he’s turned Canal+, and in particular its news channel, into what even the Élysée [President’s office] calls a “French Fox News.”
But this also has to be taken with a grain of salt. You’d be mistaken to believe that Macron has always been at war with Bolloré. Relations between the two have had their ups and downs since 2017. Sometimes Bolloré has clashed with the Élysée, and sometimes he’s pursued rapprochement with it. You can see all this in Bolloré’s business activities in Africa, which he eventually sold to the international arms company MSC, owned by the family of Alexis Kohler, Macron’s [former] chief of staff.
On the other hand, Macron has used the Bolloré group strategically, to move the center of French political gravity to the right and to push the Left out of the political [mainstream].
So yes, there’s often a focus on Bolloré, [when people are] criticizing media ownership today in France. But when you remember that over 90 percent of France’s media owners are billionaires, you’d be fooling yourself to think that they’re investing in a disinterested manner and have no influence on the editorial line of these publications, particularly when it comes to investigations.
It’s been going on for a while now, but has accelerated in recent years with the economic decline of the French press. Obviously, [concentrated] media ownership poses a democratic question, but very few political leaders touch the question, even on the Left. While there is a criticism of media there, including its ownership, it’s rare for a political leader to go on a television show and denounce its ownership.