Carte de presse

Beach Boys

By Alain Hertoghe

Two events this spring, with no apparent link, took the French establishment by surprise. "Brice de Nice" (Brice from Nice), a silly comedy about a post-adolescent trying to surf the flat Mediterranean, was a runaway hit, selling more than two million tickets in the first two weeks. Around the same time, opinion polls showed that French voters soured on the European Constitution, with the nons regularly outnumbering the ouis.

A happy coincidence, this popularity of Brice and the unpopularity of the Constitution, that no French pundit or politician seems to have remarked on. And yet the blockbuster provides a wonderful metaphor for French attitudes about an enlarged EU, the rise of China and India, the globalized economy, not to mention terrorism and the spread of WMDs, that hegemon America, and much else.

But let's first get to Brice, from Nice, the famous beach resort on the French Côte d'Azur. Imagine the male version of a thirty-something bimbo with bushy bleached hair, dressed in an undersized yellow T-shirt and black shorts too big for him, along with canary-colored trainers. He's a spoiled kid who gobbles-up his Nutella toast sandwich every morning before going with his surfboard to the beach to wait for his wave. A birdbrain who erects in his room an altar to Bodhi (Patrick Swayze), the hero of "Point Break," his cult movie, whose lines he knows by heart. A big baby who asks himself what it must be like to have to work, since he's never had to try himself, as he lives off a fortune made by his Mafioso father in laundering money.

And of course, Brice doesn't even know how to surf. Worse: The smallest wave freaks him out. When an unfortunate series of events leads him to the French Atlantic coast for a surfing competition, he brags about his certain victory, but ends up knocked out by his own board.

Beyond being dim and pretentious, the fool from the Côte d'Azur shows himself to be as nasty as a child, making fun of everyone and everything. Nobody earns his approval, including people who're far more successful. Convinced of his own superiority, Brice ridicules all that crosses his path. He calls it "the jabbing," and it's the only sport that he actually plays.

* * *

Anyone casually familiar with France will recognize plenty of well-developed national characteristics in the "Brice attitude." But the faux-surfer's approach to life also helps explain why the offspring of Marianne today feel like saying "merde" to the European Union and its Constitution, and yesterday said "merde" when the United States invaded Iraq.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the French behave like spoilt children who refuse to grow up in order to avoid facing the realities of the world that they dislike. As with the ancient Gauls, they're worried that the skies of globalization might fall on their heads. Like Brice from Nice, they want to reap the benefits of the "American dream," but without touching "the French way of life."

Wistful about their imagined greatness in the past, the French endlessly wait for the wave of economic growth and world power to reach their beaches here in Old Europe. But they don't want to work more than 35 hours a week, while taking some of the longest paid holidays in the planet. Or to seriously reform their public services and nanny-state, so rich in civil servants and tax money. They preserve labor and tax codes that discourage enterprise. With all their tax euros, too, they're not ready to spend much on their security or defense.

True to the spirit of Brice, the French hold others responsible for their difficulties. And who are these others? The ultra-capitalist Anglo-Saxons ogres, of course!

If the Yes vote -- which by early May came back to even, before the Nos regained the momentum in polls this weekend -- comes out victorious, it'll only be because the supporters of the Constitution (the government, the mainstream opposition, all the media) will have finally managed to convince public opinion that the EU can be the best shield for France to protect itself from the capitalist tsunami ravaging the rest of the world. That's exactly how Jacques Chirac pitches the case for oui. During a May 3 television appearance, the French President assured viewers that the Constitution was the "daughter" of the 1789 Revolution.

The referendum campaign has taken a surreal turn. As political parties from the right-wing government or the left-wing opposition promise voters that the new European treaty will protect them from economic liberalism, the chief champions of No denounce the Constitution as the Trojan horse for the most savage form of capitalism. The far right and far left stand together against the world, in the shape of the EU Constitution, as does former socialist Prime Minister Laurent Fabius, who in office was considered more or less market-friendly, and the largest trade union, the CGT.

Both camps reacted in hysteria to the prospect of a law that would liberalize services within the EU, warning of an invasion of Polish plumbers or Latvian painters who'll steal work, and bread, from the French. The European Commission gave up, thinking -- strangely -- that its submission would help the yes vote.

By a funny coincidence, if France votes down the Constitution May 29, the European Union would continue to be managed under the Treaty of Nice, signed in 2000 in Brice's hometown. That text, in fact, gives France less power than the new Constitution in the decision-making European Council. On its own and in its Charter of Fundamental Rights, the Constitution would also extend to the rest of the Continent such imminently French concepts as a social market economy, public services and the cultural exception.

But the inhabitants of "douce France" may be hoping that their refusal to sign off on a new stage of the European project will bring back the good old days. If so, do they expect that the 24 other members will say, merci, and agree to fight to build a Europe in the image of France? Perhaps the French are dreaming that at the end of the tale, as in Brice de Nice, there will be a happy ending: A super wave of growth and power will come like in a dream and that they'll surf it like the Gods.

© Wall Street Journal Europe, May 18, 2005

The Daily Crisis

By Alain Hertoghe

Does France have the daily press that it deserves?

An unprecedented financial crisis is hitting the major newspapers, abandoned by their readers, hence by advertisers. Le Monde is firing 90 of its 740 employees (including 35 journalists). The popular Le Parisien is also announcing that it will soon cut staff. Le Figaro and Libération, two direct competitors of Le Monde, will have to do the same, and sooner rather than later. As for France Soir, the once gloried popular daily, and the communist L'Humanité, both are in agony; they have too few journalists left to be able to fire any.

At the two most prestigious papers, Le Monde and Le Figaro, unrest simmers among anxious editorial teams. At Le Monde, they criticize the directing duo of Jean-Marie Colombani and Edwy Plenel for giving up the serious and moderate tone that built the success of the "the newspaper of record" and pushing a catchy, even fluffy editorial tone. At Le Figaro, journalists question the intentions of the new owner, businessman Serge Dassault, who is also a senator belonging to President Jacques Chirac's political party.

The purchase of Socpresse, which owns in addition to Figaro influential weeklies like L'Express and L'Expansion, by the aerospace group Dassault confirms the interest of France's major business groups in media in general and the dailies in particular. That's what worries the journalists. The luxury goods group LVMH already owns La Tribune, a business daily, and businessman and corporate raider Vincent Bolloré could soon take a stake in Libération. The fears of journalists for their editorial freedom are a little exaggerated, if one takes as a reference the defense group Lagardère, which stays out of the editorial rooms of its various publications, and a little besides the point.

In fact, it's no mystery why the traditional press is in decline: The French have simply lost interest. For their information, they have, for some time, preferred television, radio, and, more recently, the Internet and two free dailies, 20 Minutes and Métro, which have attracted young urban readers. In 1970, 4 million newspapers were published daily in France. In 2003, the number of copies sold had fallen to 2.1 million -- a 47% decline. Last year, Le Monde's circulation fell more than 4%, that of Libération by 3%, and Le Figaro more than 1%. Since the beginning of 2004, this loss of readership has worryingly picked up speed. In fourth position behind Le Monde, Le Figaro and Libération, the small Catholic daily La Croix is the only one to win new readers; circulation is up 10% since 2000. Not much consolation for the press community. And the crisis isn't sparing the economic press: Les Echos is down 10% since 2000 and La Tribune 13%.

How come the French dailies are among the least read in the Western world? Their high price, pushed up by the archaic printing and distribution monopoly, is the most frequently cited explanation. (And that's in spite of the direct and indirect subsidies from the French government to the tune of €280 million a year.) Competition from TV and radio, the Internet and free dailies, is also among the commonly mentioned reasons.

All this is obviously true. But no one seems to question whether French citizens don't have other deeper motives to give up the habit of buying a daily newspaper. Maybe, just maybe, readers find the traditional press and its judgments boring and uneventful.

But don't expect the French press to question itself! Mother of all media, it tolerates no reproach. Great lesson-giver to television and radio, the print press keeps silent about the recent boom of bestsellers written by journalists who criticize its shortcomings or failings. In 2003, the management at Le Monde and La Croix fired the authors of a book criticizing them, instantly considering it to be an act of high treason, even though the journalists had been working in their respective newsrooms for many years. I speak from personal experience, since that happened to me after publishing a study of the five principal French dailies (including my own paper, La Croix) that revealed their biased coverage of the Iraq war in spring 2003.

The French press, of course, congratulated the New York Times and Washington Post for their mea culpas on the shortcomings in the coverage of the Iraq crisis, including on WMDs. But sweep its own doorstep, even though its narration of the Iraqi conflict has been more anti-American than journalistic? No way. It has never seriously investigated the links between Jacques Chirac's France and Saddam Hussein's regime, either. Backing wholeheartedly the diplomatic line of the Elysée and the Quai d'Orsay, French dailies have shown in an exclusively negative light the motives and the actions of the United States and their allies in Iraq (including 12 of the 25 EU member states). French readers are never given any positive information about a country that was freed from Saddam's dictatorship.

Coverage of the American elections was just as much of a unilateral caricature. After having at length let the French believe in the victory of the new JFK out of Boston over that dangerous cretin from Texas, the dailies cast George W. Bush's victory as one of darkness over enlightenment. To follow them, a majority of brainless bigots voted to confirm in the White House a team of fanatical crusaders who irresponsibly threaten world peace and individual liberties. Maybe the consumers of the French press have grown tired of reading what they, too, spontaneously think while guessing that reality must no doubt be a little bit more complicated?

Always deferential to power, be it political, economic or unionized, French dailies have never really undertaken much investigative journalism. But, since the end of the 1980s, they have also given up their ideological identities. There was a time when Le Figaro was conservative, Libération leftist, and Le Monde at the center. Today, they all more or less share the same politically-correct corpus of views, a kind of soft social-democratic way of thinking. As a result, the dailies all look alike, and readers cannot distinguish between them. Democracy, needless to say, suffers from the absence of debate.

For when they flip through their newspapers, the French are never at risk of a surprise. Bush, GMOs, Ariel Sharon, globalization, the new EU member states from eastern Europe, economic liberalism, McDonald's or military power all -- in these pages -- upset the progress of humanity. But on the other hand, the U.N., the Franco-German duo, the 35-hour work week, the PLO, the "other America" (Kerry's and Michael Moore's), activist José Bové, France's Arab foreign policy and the Kyoto protocol all move in the right direction.

So is it really so surprising that readers buy fewer and fewer of these newspapers when they know, a priori, what they'll find inside?

© Wall Street Journal Europe, November 24, 2004