‘When so many newspapers lean to the left, don’t we have now the correct to have one on the centre-right?’ In an look on the 8 o’clock information present on France’s TF1 TV channel on 23 August final yr, Nicolas Sarkozy lavished unqualified reward upon his ‘friend,’ the media mogul Vincent Bolloré. When it got here to discussing Bolloré’s current buy of the weekly Journal du Dimanche (JDD), nevertheless, he uncared for to acknowledge the newspaper’s placing ideological reorientation since Geoffroy Lejeune’s appointment as editor-in-chief. However there isn’t a denying that the JDD’s new editorial line, like these of the free-to-air TV channel CNews or the Bolloré-owned radio station Europe 1, is now diametrically against the values espoused by the ‘centre-right’ media. Regardless of all of the proof, the journalists and administrators of those shops make use of the identical alternative of euphemism as Sarkozy, describing themselves as pluralist and open and presenting their broadcasts or pages as areas the place all opinions are revered.
This silence or denial undoubtedly masks a sure unease in direction of a journalistic custom that was born through the Belle Époque and flourished as much as the top of the Second World Warfare. Till then, the far-right press had at all times been in a position to impose its concepts, its vocabulary, and its worldview, by the likes of the antisemitic journalist and politician Édouard Drumont and the nationalist Robert Brasillach. It started with the Dreyfus Affair, the political scandal that break up French society in 1894 after an artillery officer of Jewish descent was falsely accused of passing on army secrets and techniques to Germany, and lasted till the Nazi collaboration. In fact, the far-right didn’t disappear within the many years following the Second World Warfare – removed from it. However ever since then it has been excluded from the mainstream media, and its legacy nonetheless carries an inflammatory stigma. At a time when the reactionary press is experiencing a brand new golden age, nevertheless, you will need to acknowledge the profound kinship between Bolloré’s media empire and this lengthy custom of nationalist and xenophobic journalism.
The enemies inside
In fact, the Breton magnate has not deployed all the titles owned by his Vivendi group to the identical extent in his media campaign. The magazines within the Prisma group, which Bolloré purchased in 2021, have largely had their budgets reduce and now have interaction in low-cost journalism designed to synergise with the group’s different actions. There is no such thing as a doubt, nevertheless, {that a} channel like CNews or a weekly paper like the brand new Journal du Dimanche are persevering with the enduring traditions of the far-right press. They share with the anti-Dreyfusard newspapers of the late nineteenth century a want to defend in any respect prices what they see as a beleaguered France, one which inner enemies threaten to deprave.
It is very important bear in mind how a lot the press helped to popularise antisemitism from the Nineties onwards: Drumont’s anti-Jewish campaigns in La Libre Parole could have been significantly brutal, however a big portion of the nationwide and regional press remained hostile to Dreyfus for a very long time, whilst increasingly proof of his innocence got here to mild. The French political theorist and mental Charles Maurras expressed maybe higher than anybody else the necessity for a scapegoat to unite the nation and provides it a collective wake-up name, going as far as to explain antisemitism as a ‘godsend’ in an notorious article in L’Motion Française, a journal related to the monarchist motion of the identical title.
The occasions could have modified, as has the identification of the unassimilable foreigner, however the pursuit of scapegoats goes on. CNews broadcasts reiterate their accusations towards Muslims and folks of international origin advert nauseam within the repetitive nature so typical of 24/7 information channels. In the same vein, Geoffroy Lejeune has imposed his obsession with identification upon each subject of the Journal du Dimanche since his appointment as editor-in-chief. The earlier editorial workforce, who resigned from the newspaper en masse in 2023 in protest on the publication’s new far-right orientation, fought to have a paragraph added to the moral constitution stipulating a rejection of ‘racist, sexist, and homophobic comments.’ The administration’s refusal to incorporate this paragraph bore all of the hallmarks of an avowal, if not a manifesto.
Distributors promoting the L’Motion Française in 1909. Supply: Wikimedia Commons
The glorification of violence
Bolloré’s media shops zealously problem democratic establishments, which they accuse of weak point, and even complicity, within the face of mass immigration. This stigmatisation of the elites as corrupt, beneath international affect, and incapable of defending nationwide pursuits bears apparent parallels to the discourse of the far-right press through the Belle Époque or the interwar interval. In fact, hostility to the Republic was extra overt in these newspapers than it’s right this moment in Bolloré’s media shops. However real incitements to riot have been seen within the conservative Valeurs Actuelles, which on the time was beneath Lejeune’s stewardship. In April 2021, for instance, the weekly newspaper printed an interview through which the businessman and populist conservative politician Philippe de Villiers known as for rebellion, adopted by an opinion column through which a number of former generals threatened to grab energy to be able to save the nation. These articles acquired in depth protection on CNews speak exhibits, which welcomed and celebrated their writers. With their endorsement of anti-republican agitation, Lejeune, the French conservative journalist Charlotte d’Ornellas, and the Valeurs Actuelles workforce had been basically following within the footsteps of the editorial board of L’Motion Française, who explicitly inspired the inhabitants to insurgent in February 1934.
This violent tone within the discourse of the Bolloré media sphere is without doubt one of the principal parts it has inherited from the far-right journalism of the interwar interval. Within the Twenties and Nineteen Thirties, the identical sort of excessive language was frequent in newspapers that had been explicitly tempted by fascist or Nazi ideologies. However the hateful abuse spewed by Robert Brasillach or the fascist mental Lucien Rebatet within the antisemitic newspaper Je Suis Partout had its counterparts within the pages of L’Motion Française, regardless of the literary pretensions of contributors resembling Charles Maurras or Jacques Bainville. Because the French historian Michel Winock writes, L’Motion Française ‘broke with its traditionally moderate, royalist style and assumed all the excesses of polemic, ad hominem attacks, and calls for murder.’ In reality, the best success of CNews commentators in recent times has been exactly their skill to breed a style for antagonism and outrage within the media. This violence is focused significantly, in an nearly ritualised method, at figures on the left or within the centre: even common friends on speak exhibits appear to serve no function apart from to behave as foils for his or her opponents. Over the last presidential election marketing campaign, the channel’s combative ambiance even ended up rubbing off onto different audiovisual media. This triumph of an exaggerated radicalism, which additionally characterises Cyril Hanouna’s TV broadcasts on the C8 channel, would be the Bolloré mannequin’s most resounding success.
Hatred of the media
In the meantime, hatred of the mainstream media continues to mobilise the far-right press: simply as their predecessors did, these journalists specific a fierce hostility to their mainstream counterparts and the values they champion. The primary subject of the Journal du Dimanche printed after its relaunch, on 6 August 2023, was a textbook instance. The obvious factual error on the entrance web page—{a photograph} of a march in honour of a young person named Enzo was used for example the demise of a unique Enzo—might have been excused by the tough circumstances through which the problem was ready. However Geoffroy Lejeune has obstinately refused to acknowledge the error, regardless of the household’s protests and in contempt of all journalistic ethics.
The rejection of main newspapers and their alleged unanimity additionally leads CNews commentators, like the brand new JDD workforce, to decide on ‘alternative’ media narratives. As at all times in such instances, this carries the danger of publishing ‘fake news,’ and even relaying propaganda. For the reason that relaunch of the Journal du Dimanche, a number of former RT journalists and members of Kremlin networks in France have acted as reporters protecting worldwide information. In an obvious paradox that when once more recollects one other interval in historical past, the JDD exalts patriotic values whereas concurrently embracing the manipulation of knowledge orchestrated by a international dictatorship.
This hatred of mainstream journalism is usually accompanied by a want to compete with it by itself turf by aping its editorial fashions, and typically by taking on media manufacturers to be able to flip them towards their very own historical past. The best way Geoffroy Lejeune and his workforce subverted the editorial line of the JDD is especially placing. Though the newspaper’s bodily look remained unchanged, points printed after August 2023 typically look like imitations, pastiches, and even crude caricatures designed to mislead readers. On 27 August, for instance, the entrance web page featured {a photograph} of the minister of nationwide schooling, Gabriel Attal, in his workplace alongside an ‘exclusive’ claiming to disclose his ‘plan of attack’ for the brand new college yr. The headline relied on the newspaper’s repute in recent times for publishing leaks from the Élysée Palace or authorities ministries. However in actuality, the brand new editorial workforce had no entry to the minister or his entourage. As for the supposed revelations, the piece merely repeated info already broadly out there elsewhere.
A century earlier than Bolloré, a French industrialist had already employed the technique of taking on well-known newspapers to be able to use them in a reactionary battle. Within the house of only a few years after the top of the First World Warfare, the perfumer François Coty constructed up an especially influential media empire, with the objective of selling an explicitly fascist challenge. In 1922 he bought Le Figaro, adopted in 1928 by Le Gaulois, earlier than merging the 2 papers. Like his modern-day successor, he repeatedly fired journalists who confirmed indicators of resistance, changing them with devoted lackeys. Below his management, the previous bourgeois every day that was Le Figaro progressively turned a mouthpiece for its proprietor’s unqualified xenophobia and antisemitism.
In fact, this analogy has its limits: François Coty was looking for to additional his personal political profession and recurrently contributed to his newspapers, to the purpose of formally changing into political director of Le Figaro in 1927. Bolloré’s technique, in contrast, is predicated on discretion and silence. His function mannequin is Rupert Murdoch, who has managed to efficiently form political life in the USA and the UK, creating a behavior of successful elections with out ever standing as a candidate himself. However the sudden transformation of the JDD exhibits that Bolloré’s campaign is changing into more and more specific, maybe to the purpose of recklessness. For an industrial group that has refocused on media, the danger is in prioritising the ideological battle on the expense of financial rationality. It may be harmful to attempt to change the historic identification of a newspaper too shortly, as the instance of François Coty exhibits: he died in monetary destroy after sinking a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of francs into his media empire and finally even having to surrender Le Figaro.
Éric Zemmour on the intersection of eras
Nobody right this moment would dream of claiming to wield the affect of François Coty or the far-right press of the interwar interval. On CNews exhibits, audio system even deny the appropriacy of the time period ‘far-right’, as if it had been a meaningless, irrelevant descriptor with no foundation in actuality: the Canadian conservative political commentator Mathieu Bock-Côté, for instance, sees it as a ‘ghostly category,’ ‘more at home in demonology than political science.’ But the whole lot means that this ideology and journalistic motion are extra highly effective now than they’ve been at any time because the liberation of France in 1944-45. Bolloré just isn’t straight liable for this revival: the indicators had been already seen within the pages of Valeurs Actuelles as early as 2012, when Yves de Kerdrel turned editor-in-chief of the conservative weekly. However the Vivendi group is now performing as a catalyser, uniting, combining, and concentrating forces that till just lately had been nonetheless scattered. The identical unstated rule is now imposed on each younger journalist from reactionary circles who strikes to CNews, Europe 1, or the Journal du Dimanche: by no means say the place you come from or what ideology you serve.
This deliberate dissimulation is in stark distinction to the method adopted by the newspaper La Croix in recent times, and significantly in current months. Based in 1883, the Catholic every day determined that the easiest way to keep away from repeating its historical past was to confront it full-on: in 2023, to have fun its one hundred and fortieth anniversary, it devoted a well-documented sequence to the antisemitic hatred expressed in its pages from the time of the Dreyfus Affair till the Nineteen Thirties. Its editorial workforce’s consciousness of the significance of the responsibility to recollect is poles aside from Bolloré’s coddled younger reporters, preferring to disregard the journalistic custom of which their shops are a component.
One journalist, nevertheless, is an exception. Regardless of having lengthy occupied a central place at CNews, the conservative essayist Éric Zemmour has by no means hidden his fascination with figures like Maurras or Bainville – removed from the technique of denial adopted by the remainder of the Vivendi group. Internet hosting ‘Face à l’data’ on 29 September and 15 October 2020, he even went as far as to overtly query Dreyfus’s innocence and to criticise the novelist Émile Zola’s function within the affair. He additionally repeatedly said that the collaborationist wartime chief Marshal Pétain had saved French Jews, feedback for which he’ll quickly be retried for denying crimes towards humanity.
Zemmour has additionally by no means hid his hatred for the mainstream media, nor the methods he has employed to grasp its instruments and use them towards its personal journalists. In an interview with Le Monde in April 2011, he justified his common appearances on mainstream tv, significantly on the liberal host Laurent Ruquier’s exhibits, as an try and get contained in the ‘propaganda machine’ to be able to ‘use the Left’s personal weapons towards it.’
Although it initially served him effectively, this radical and forthright stance could have contributed to his failure in his 2022 marketing campaign for the presidency, through which he appeared caught within the entice of his personal excesses. However his attachment to the traditions of the far-right press and his intimate information of the mainstream media world he so despises make him each a pioneer and a mannequin for a technology of journalists now desirous to comply with his instance. Though a lot of the new JDD workforce come from Valeurs Actuelles, a few of its writers have a CV that hyperlinks them much more clearly to the far proper: Charlotte d’Ornellas, for instance, has labored for the web conservative information platform Boulevard Voltaire, for the journal Présent, and for the tv channel Libertés. Likewise, Pascal Meynadier writes beneath a pseudonym for the journal Élements, which was based by Alain de Benoist, a political thinker and a number one determine within the Nouvelle Droite (‘New Right’) motion. Nor was antisemitic territory neglected when the brand new JDD workforce was fashioned: one in every of its writers, Marc Obregon, just lately appeared alongside the creator and conspiracy theorist Pierre Hillard, who has been making antisemitic feedback for many years.
All of those journalists owe a lot to Zemmour, who has performed a key function in liberating a discourse that had been saved firmly on the margins of the media sphere because the Second World Warfare. With undoubtedly much less expertise, however maybe with better acumen, established on the coronary heart of an empire that’s decided to see their concepts triumph, in their very own method they’re persevering with the legacy of François Coty and Charles Maurras.
Printed in cooperation with CAIRN Worldwide Version, translated and edited by Cadenza Tutorial Translations.
