In France, the Bolloré media empire mainstreams the far right

When I moved to France in 2006, the far)right had no seats in the National Assembly, even though four years earlier Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the Front National, had caused widespread shock when he reached the second round of the presidential elections.

Today, the political situation in France is very different. In the second round of the legislative elections in July 2024, the Union of the Far-Right led by the Rassemblement National (RN), heir of the Front National, obtained more than 10 million votes, compared to 7 million for the left-wing alliance (the latter, however, won 182 seats, versus the RN’s 143).

Among the factors that explain the RN’s electoral success is the “normalisation” policy pursued by Marine Le Pen, Jean-Marie’s daughter, who took the reins of the party in 2011. This so-called "dédiabolisation" (“de-demonisation”) strategy deploys shrewd political communication aimed at making the extreme right seem less extreme: Marine Le Pen has appeared to distance herself from her father’s anti-Semitism and racism, for example, and promoted a modern image of the party.

This strategy helped Le Pen to win over 40% of the vote in the 2022 presidential election, increase the presence of the RN in parliament, and receive almost a third of all votes in the June 2024 European elections. Normalisation has also given the far right an increasingly powerful presence in the media, which in turn increases the party’s visibility and acceptance.

Far-right’s normalisation via the media

The far right’s increasing visibility in the media is one of the most significant changes in France’s media landscape over time. In the past, the French press had, for the most part, chosen not to give a direct platform to representatives of the extreme right. Figures of the FN/RN were neither interviewed nor invited to debates. 

This was not, however, a written rule and shared principle, as it is in Wallonia. In this French-speaking region of southern Belgium, a cordon sanitaire against the extreme right has existed in the media since the 1990s. Representatives of parties that advocate openly racist or discriminatory views are not interviewed or invited to debates on public radio and TV. Other countries, such as Italy, have never erected such barriers: the fascist, post-fascist, and neo-fascist right have always found space in the public media.

After World War II, “there was a kind of will to protect against a return of the extreme right in the media”, explains Alexis Lévrier, historian of the press and media and author of Jupiter et Mercure. Le pouvoir présidentiel face à la presse (“Jupiter and Mercury. Presidential power and the press”). “What the extreme right represented, and what it had led us to, was still fresh in people’s minds. Intellectual collaborationism in France went deep. So there was an effort to avoid making the same mistakes.”

Today, many French media outlets still avoid giving direct coverage to the extreme right, and do not treat the RN as a “party like any other”. But the media landscape is very different, with a handful of powerful media groups controlling a large portion of the market. If the normalisation sought by Marine Le Pen has worked so well, it is also thanks to these groups. Especially on television, representatives of the RN, but also far-right pundits and supporters of sovereignist and xenophobic positions are among the regulars on talk shows and panels.

There are several studies mapping media concentration in France. Libération summarises the situation as follows: in February 2022, 11 billionaires accounted for 81% of national daily press sales, 95% of general interest weeklies, 47% of radio audience share, and 57% of television audience share. Among the billionaires dominating the media market, Vincent Bolloré stands out.

With a net worth estimated at around €10 billion, Bolloré heads the group that bears his name, which is especially active in the sports, communication and transport sectors. The entrepreneur has been investing in the media since the early 2000s. Today, he owns the television channels of the Canal+ group (C8, Canal+, CNews, CStar), publishing groups (the Lagardère Group is the world’s third-largest book publisher for the general public and educational markets), radio networks (Europe 1 and RFM), print media outlets (Télé-Loisirs, Geo, Voici, Femme actuelle, Capital and Le Journal du dimanche), corporate communications and advertising (Havas), and press distribution (Relay).

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‘It is the same extreme right that we saw from the Dreyfus Affair to collaborationism. It has invented a new scapegoat, which is no longer the Jew. Today it is the Muslim, the foreigner… but it is the same vocabulary, the same imagery’ – Alexis Lévrier, historian of the press and media

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The common characteristic of newspapers, radio networks, and TV stations controlled by the Bolloré group is the ubiquitous presence of commentators, journalists and guests who are part of the ultra-conservative and/or extreme-right cultural universe. These media also widely make use of sensationalism to turn information into spectacle, in an even more extreme way than Silvio Berlusconi did in Italy in the 1990s.

Various journalistic investigations and analyses have highlighted how Bolloré’s media work in favour of a grand alliance between the RN and the conservative right. Bolloré himself makes no secret of wanting to build a large ultra-conservative right wing. When President Emmanuel Macron dissolved the Assembly and called new elections following the debacle in the European elections, for example, the conservative leader of Les Républicains (LR), Eric Ciotti, met with Bolloré to discuss his party’s electoral strategy. Ciotti then formed an alliance with the RN, causing a rift within LR.

Taken individually, Lévrier explains, Bolloré’s media is not always profitable. “Bolloré is betting on being profitable at the level of the whole group. […] For defending an ideology, this is a tool that works. And French democracy was not ready.” According to Lévrier, the current law on media regulation in France, in place since 1986, is outdated. “The only limitation on the extension of [the Bolloré Group’s] empire came from Europe. If it had been only French rules that were applicable, he could have owned practically all of the publishing industry.”

In July 2024, however, Arcom (the French authority that regulates audiovisual and digital communication) revoked Bolloré’s licence to use the free digital terrestrial frequencies of Télévision Numérique Terrestre’s (TNT) for two channels from 2025 onwards. The decision was taken after Bolloré’s channels racked up 44 penalties (fines, recalls, etc.) over 12 years, for failing to respect pluralism of information and for broadcasting insults and defamation.

“Classic liberal media outlets are like paralysed, they are not armed to withstand attacks by actors who no longer play the same game,” argues Mathieu Molard, co-editor-in-chief of the independent online newspaper StreetPress, which was launched in 2009/2010 and has a particular focus on the far-right. “Before, the fight was about business and gaining bigger audience shares, and while some outlets may have swayed a little more to the left or a little more to the right, the battle was being fought on common political ground. Today there are new actors who put ideology – a radical-conservative ideology – above business.” According to Molard, only two kinds of actors are able to respond: the public service, due to its basic values and mission, and the independent media, whose economic model is not profit-oriented.

But the fight is not a fair one. The reach of channels like C8 is ubiquitous among the population that votes RN en masse, especially in rural areas. According to rural sociologist Benoît Coquard, author of Ceux qui restent. Faire sa vie dans des campagnes en déclin (“Those who stay: Making a life in the declining countryside”, La Découverte, 2019), this type of media “echoes worldviews that have already gained currency in the declining countryside, but amplifies and instrumentalises them.” This is the case, for example, with the “us first” leitmotif of right-wingers around the world, which leverages “a competitive and conflictual state of interpersonal relations, directly inherited from deindustrialisation and lack of work”.

People, the sociologist explains, have the impression that they “have to think ‘us first’, in the sense of family and friends.” And this attitude finds wide resonance in pro-RN media, which conveys the idea of a “Great Replacement” or a “clash of civilisations”. “This is also why the RN does not need so many grassroots activists to have a lasting impact in areas far from the big cities, where its thinking and worldview are increasingly less contested,” Coquard concludes.

The galaxy of the far-right

“[In the media landscape] we have gone from the predominance of the intellectual left in the post-World War II period to the extreme right today: these people who know the media, know how to use it, are trained in how to do so, and now have a media empire to defend their ideas. We have a media landscape that is completely unbalanced and dominated by the extreme right,” argues historian Lévrier.

It is not only the likes of Eric Zemmour, who rose to prominence in the early 2000s and founded the Islamophobic and anti-immigration Reconquête political party, who convey the ideas of the radical right. Today, the French media landscape is populated by young, smiling, telegenic figures such as Geoffroy Lejeune, Charlotte Dornelas, and Eugénie Bastié, who convey a reassuring image of an ideology that is always the same, according to Lévrier. “It is the same extreme right that we saw from the Dreyfus affair to collaborationism. It has invented a new scapegoat, which is no longer the Jew. Today it is the Muslim, the foreigner... but it is the same vocabulary, the same imagery.”

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'Bit by bit, the far-right has conquered people’s minds, in many different ways. And the media has followed this trend, because you can no longer treat a party that represents 1% of voters [like the Front National at the time of its founding] as one that represents 30%' - M. Molard, Street Press.

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Ivan du Roy, a journalist who co-founded the independent newspaper Basta! in 2008, notes that many new small far-right media outlets have sprung up in France in the past decades, such as Causeur (2007) and L’Incorrect (2017), while others that have been around much longer, such as Valeurs Actuelles, have veered even further to the right. While this development is not solely attributable to Bolloré, his group’s media outlets have played a legitimising role by inviting representatives of the new galaxy of the far-right as commentators. Through these figures, a racist conspiracy theory like the “Great Replacement” could begin to penetrate television studios. This, according to du Roy, created a ping-pong effect, prompting other media to talk about it, legitimising extremist ideas and their promoters.

“Bit by bit, the far-right has conquered people’s minds, in many different ways. And the media has followed this trend, because you can no longer treat a party that represents 1% of voters [like the Front National at the time of its founding] as one that represents 30%,” explains Molard of StreetPress. “And then there’s a second factor: [the media] realised that the far-right’s way of doing things, the far-right’s positions, were divisive, provoked reactions and increased ratings.”

The digital revolution has also played its part. As journalist Sylvain Bourmeau, founder and editor-in-chief of the French online newspaper AOC, explains to Voxeurop: “The media’s economic models have been upended by the digital transformation: we have seen the emergence of a lot of ‘free’ content, which is in fact paid for by advertising. This has led to the so-called ‘race for clicks’. In order to attract clicks, in order to gain audiences, the media started to change patterns, covering some topics rather than others.” The rise of “running news” has also destroyed “what should be one of the sacred principles of journalism: the ability to offer a hierarchy of information.”

Macron’s insidious politicking

Politics has also played its part in the rise of the extreme right. President Emmanuel Macron, in his second term, bears a great deal of responsibility for the recent election result – not only for his choice to dissolve the Assembly prematurely, but also for implementing a series of policies that wink at the extreme right. For example, the immigration law that came into force in January 2024, so restrictive that the Constitutional Council rejected almost two-thirds of the articles, was claimed by Marine Le Pen as a “victory for the Rassemblement National”.

Macron “has never stopped trying to seduce the far-right media”, argues Lévrier. Since 2018, the French president has given no time to Le Monde, one of the biggest national newspapers, but he did give an extensive interview to Valeurs Actuelles in 2019. As Le Monde wrote following the publication of that interview, “The president chose the ultra-conservative weekly to discuss immigration and Islam, thereby setting up the idea of an inevitable duel with the far-right in 2022 [the next presidential campaign]”.

According to Lévrier, Macron was following the example of socialist president François Mitterrand. In 1984, in the name of pluralism, Mitterand lobbied for Jean-Marie Le Pen to be invited on the television programme L’heure de la vérité. Mitterrand’s strategy was to divide the right at a time when the Front National was electorally irrelevant. However, the French press seized the opportunity to produce content about the “controversial” man, initiating a “peopolisation” (popularisation and mediatisation) effect around Le Pen and his family.

Macron has also tried to contrive a division between a large centre on one side and the extreme left and right on the other. By equating the RN and La France Insoumise, the left-wing party led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the president has created “a false equivalence between extremes” often amplified by large media outlets, wrote The Guardian. 

Troubled business models

The landscape described above clashes with a more comforting one. France is an extremely fertile country in terms of the wealth and variety of independent, more or less small and specialised media outlets. This fertility reflects the diversity and commitment of civil society, characterised by association-building, bottom-up initiatives, participative projects, debate, and demands. This political and participatory culture is not reflected in the political structures of power.

StreetPress and Basta! are part of this rich ecosystem of independent media, which also includes Reporterre, which focuses on ecology, La Déferlante which deals with feminist struggles, MarsActu in Marseille, Arrêt sur Imageshttps://voxeurop.eu/en/source/arret-sur-image/ which conducts  media analysis, Alternatives Economiques, Politis, Disclose, Mediapart, and many others.

Launched in 2019, the Fonds Pour une Presse Libre (FPL, Fund for a Free Press) is a non-profit organisation that defends pluralism through financial support for independent media, especially those that rely on the support of readers and editorial staff ownership. As FLP director Charlotte Clavreul explains, the fund currently works with 110 independent media outlets in France at the local and national level.  

The FLP was launched by the co-founders of Mediapart and some staff members. For Lévrier, Mediapart represents a model that is admired worldwide: “It is an economically viable project that has been able to build a reputation for investigative journalism and has never been faulted in terms of the quality of its articles. It is an editorial, journalistic and commercial success story.” Unfortunately, as the historian acknowledges, the structural crisis facing the press means that this model is “rarely possible”.

Most independent media outlets in France live on the razor’s edge, seeking a difficult economic balance through subscriptions, donations, and fundraising campaigns. Charlotte Clavreul adds that, all too often, independent media outlets still have precarious business models and are frequently “dependent on public subsidies”. These subsidies are often insufficient to cover costs, not least because “in France, three-quarters of public subsidies are given to large groups owned by billionaires.”

Furthermore, independent media outlets find it difficult to access bank loans with which to launch and sustain projects. For such cases, the FLP is a crucial support mechanism. Specious lawsuits (Strategic legal actions against public participation, or SLAPPs) against journalists are another threat, which are often costly in terms of both time and money.

A new awakening?

Nonna Mayer, research director at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and expert on the extreme right, explains in Libération that “the influence of the RN and its ideas, while significant, should not be overestimated. If we recalculate its results in proportion to registered voters, in the first round of the legislative elections it obtained 29.2%. While that is indeed a lot, it only represents 19% of the registered and eligible voters, leaving aside those who do not vote, because they are not French, or because they are not registered as French.”

According to Mayer, there is a growing gap between society as a whole – with its diversity, meeting of worlds, mobility – and the mobilised electorate, which is older, affluent, homogeneous, and conservative. “If we want to revitalise democracy, we have to bridge this gap, for example by granting non-French people the right to vote at least in local elections – and the majority of French people agree with this – by making it easier to register to vote, and by reconnecting political parties and civil society.”

👉 Original (and full) version on Green European Journal