THE SMIRK

when the left wing was in power, we discovered Jean-Luc Lagardère’s smirk; he was pleased to take the civil and military aeronautical industry under his French industrial knight's cape.
When the right wing was in power, the same smirk punctuated his absorption of the publishing sector, with a no less patriotic cavalcade, explaining that it was good for us (but not him, let’s not be a disruptive influence) that French publishing business remained French.
Then, in France, things can change (fashion) and others can remain or even strengthen (Lagardère Group), which seem so monopolistic, that we are tend to think that today there is an absolute power which is only controlled by self-imposed limits. This situation is quite alarming in that they can be not controlled by any authority, be it French or European.
Lagardère Group regularly publish their activity balance sheet in the evening issue of Le Monde , where he is used to putting the finishing touches on his campaigns, like his conquest to the publishing world. Everybody can read in the issue (25/10/02) that he runs the biggest review group in the world and that he is the world leader of press distribution. In France, he owns the major regional daily press group, and he also owns radios, TV channels and activities in armaments.
His corporate power and his precision of strategy have driven him to dispatch his “men” to key positions in order to reinforce his own power.
Thanks to the acquisition of the number #1 of the French publishing (VUP - Vivendi Universal Publishing); the Lagardère Group is now dominating the publishing market, under all its forms (80% of school and academic books, 70% of distribution and 60% of the publishing market) and quite widely the world of thoughts. The “intellectuals” who have already been little talkative, are now silent, just like journalists are. Who, among them, would never have to deal with this group one day?
The world of the “independent” publishing sector has reacted to it, but they did it so weakly and so tardily that we have the feeling of hearing death rattles.
As for the political sphere, the group does not need to belong to it as its power is organized on another scale: the global scale. It does not need to make a name for itself thanks to its weight in media and in publishing areas. Politicians are obliging underlings for his projects and are helpful walls hiding his power.
Superintendent Fouquet, a tax farmer who already understood the interest of controlling the flows and the ideas in France in the 18th century, had to confront the Louis XIV’s nascent ambition and, according to Alexandre Dumas, that great painter of powers, a single d’Artagnan stood in his way. Louis XIV and Napoléon I, the supposed hero of Jean-Luc Lagardère, had also their own limits in time, which put a brake on their ambitions and power. Where are the limits of Lagardère Group?
His case is the symbol of the stifling of liberties in the silence (from the left wing as well as from the right wing) of the current French society. It is the most worrying expression of the breach of liberty in the world and of the diversity of opinions which appeared with the power concentration, far ahead from Bill Gates, whose ambitions now seem modest. Here again this is another demonstration of the French Cultural Exception…

< Yves Sportis >

Traduction Carole Couque