The fight for the French press

Journalists on France’s main Sunday newspaper are striking to stop the proprietor imposing a hard-Right editor. Is this a dreadful example of what the French call “le Wokisme” — or a sturdy defence of press freedom and republican democracy?

Yesterday Le Journal de Dimanche – a sort of Sunday Times with lots of big political stories but in a Mail on Sunday tabloid format – did not appear. It is unthinkable in London, where press proprietors reign supreme and can name anyone they like as an editor, but at Le Journal de Dimanche journalists are refusing to work under a new editor the proprietor has chosen.

Until his appointment, the contested editor, Geoffroy Lejeune, 34, had been editing Valeurs Actuel (“Today’s Values”). This weekly journal is the publication closest to the values of Marine Le Pen, Éric Zemmour and the pro-Putin, Islamophobic, ultra-nationalist far-Right in France.

There is no equivalent of the Valeurs Actuels in the UK  or US. Imagine a Time or a Newsweek edited by Nigel Farage or the Tory Vice Chair, Lee Anderson. It panders to every rightist desire for stopping all immigrants arriving and shipping out those already here, plus instant solutions for all economic ills, crime, poor schools, dirty streets, and world problems, usually based on backing any autocratic dictator from Putin to Xi. It promotes a hardline nationalism that at least in Britain has been discredited, thanks to the flop Brexit has turned out to be.

According to Mujtaba Rahman, who now writes the best online analysis of France for the European desk of the Eurasia consultancy, Lejeune, is a “polemicist and provocateur rather than a journalist. He is a close friend of several hard, or far, Right politicians including Éric Zemmour and Marion Maréchal-Le Pen”. The latter is at 33 the third generation of Le Pens promoting far-Right politics. She is the even more hardline niece of Marine Le Pen, seen by many as President Macron’s natural successor. The French president has alienated just about every centrist, social democratic, liberal and moderate voter in France in his second term in office since May 2022.

In 2018, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen brought over Donald Trump’s chief ideologue Steve Bannon to open a school for far-Right politics in Lyon and worked with him to try and ensure a takeover of the European Parliament in the 2019 elections. The one issue that absolutely unites the worlds of Trump, Putin, the nationalist Right in Europe and our own dear English identity nationalists is contempt for the EU and opposition to European cooperation and partnership.

The political marriage of Steve Bannon and the younger Le Pen failed, but France’s nationalist, Islamophobe, anti-EU Right have a powerful new patron. He is Vincent Bolloré, a septuagenarian billionaire businessman. Bolloré has a conglomerate portfolio of some of France’s biggest media companies covering television, publishing, magazines and films, with a presence in several European nations as well as Vietnam.

His TV streaming show “C dans l’Air” makes C dans l’Air” look like models of balance. Yet he invites leftist and non-rightist journalists to debate with figures like Lejeune. Bolloré knows that the relentless propaganda on offer from the Anglo-Saxon nationalist Right, with presenters like Tucker Carlson or our own Jacob Rees-Mogg, is often boring and unpersuasive.

Bolloré is in a long tradition of French media proprietors who want to stamp their own ideology on their newspapers, TV and other media channels. Unlike the far-away Rupert Murdoch, a US citizen, or the Barclay Brothers who owned the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator, but who choose conservative editors that conform to the existing traditions of their papers, Bolloré in an activist, intervening proprietor. He is more like a Northcliffe or a Beaverbrook, struggling to keep alive the dream of the British Empire and opposing the Labour Party tooth and nail.

Bolloré couldn’t care less about the virtually defunct French Socialist Party or the loser politics associated with Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-Left party, La France Insoumise. The latter had close links with the Corbyn-Momentum faction running Labour 2015-2020, until rank and file Labour MPs and activists woke up and booted Corbyn and his admirers into touch. Mélenchon has had more success than Corbyn, especially in the National Assembly, but despite coming a strong third in the 2022 presidential election, at 71 he is as far from power as ever.

Bolloré has immense money power to promote far-Right ideas. Though he would deny it, these ideas are ultimately derived from the semi-fascist Action Française, which promoted collaboration with Mussolini, Franco and Hitler in the 1930s. It was Catholic, anti-Jewish and hostile to democracy.

In 2023, none of these old far-Right appeals makes much sense. Instead, the nationalists promote hostility to the EU, claiming that France is being “invaded” by immigrants – language that is not unknown in current English right-wing government discourse. They also rail against “le Wokisme” — still a fairly novel concept in France.

All but two of the 80 journalists who produce Le Journal de Dimanche voted to strike in protest at having a new editor with extreme views imposed upon them. Macron’s Culture Minister, Rima Abdul Malak, a French-Lebanese Christian woman, has expressed concern about the arrival of Lejeune in the editorial chair of a major newspaper.

Macron may try to recover some lost ground with the liberal-left by supporting the paper’s striking journalists. It raises old questions that NUJ members in the UK, who fought against racism and the refusal of the BBC or any newspaper in the 1970s to hire black or Asian journalists, will recall.

Do unaccountable owners of the media have the absolute right to appoint hard-Right ideological editors to drive forward what many see as a divisive ideology aimed at installing Marine Le Pen (or her niece) in the Élysée? Is this a fight over press freedom or a battle about le Wokisme? The politics of the media have again become interesting.

Denis MacShane is a former Labour Minister of Europe, 2002-05, and was President of the National Union of Journalists, 1978-79.

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