A 5th Power? In France?
So why a political blog about France? Who needs it? France is a place to go on holiday, right? To relax over long meals and perhaps, if you like it, buy a large house very cheap. Politically, what’s it got going for it? For years it has punched, rather pathetically, above its weight, and now it’s finally sinking. Who cares about yesterday’s also-rans? And why on earth should a daily blog on French politics be of the slightest interest to any English-speaking person?
All the above is half-right. But the current French presidential campaign is important for several reasons. First, in itself, the job is the most powerful in the western world. Far more constitutionally powerful that the American president or the British prime minister. If readers feel that Messrs. Bush and Blair have too much executive power, they should try France. Recently a senior minister said on the radio “When the president speaks, his word is law.” Their constitution puts them on a par with absolute monarchs. Consider Jacques Chirac’s first act when he was elected president in 1995: he exploded nuclear devices in the Pacific Ocean – to show the world he was there. The world protested – he continued. On the eve of the American and British invasion of Iraq in 2003, France shocked the world by saying “Non!” – shattering the western coalition and sending a clear signal to the rest of the world, particularly Iraq, that resistance to America is a noble cause, implicitly supported by France. It is arguable that the current insurgency in Iraq took great strength from France’s stand that night at the UN. So who becomes president of France, and on what ticket, matters to all of us. Despite being apparently on the ropes, France, Frenchmen are gratified to know, still shapes and shakes the world.
But there’s more to it than that. Just 18 months ago, the French again shook the world, this time by torpedoing something France itself had created: the European Union. French voters binned a Constitution drawn up under the guiding hand of a former French president and actively supported by the present one. Doesn’t that contradict what I have just said and show the power of the French president is not really that great?
No, the French president still controls parliament and, to a lesser but nevertheless considerable extent, the media, just as before. What changed over this referendum was the arrival of blogs. The power of the internet – people, ordinary but clever, specialists in their own field – connected, communicated with each other, not on the phone, but in public, where everyone could read them. A law professor, for example, pointing out the legal errors in the proposed Constitution, and then answering questions about it, 3,000, perhaps, over 5 months. He worked all night on his answers, with a mind more open (and more knowledgeable) than most politicians or journalists. People flocked to his site, passing his disinterested but judicially sound answers to friends. His blog undermined the official line adopted by all political parties, and chipped away at public opinion far more effectively than staged and staid television appearances by men in suits. This underground network channels and seems to authorise dissent.
Since that cataclysmic vote, the French media calls blogs “the 5th power” – they being the 4th. But there’s something else in there too: French public opinion rates its own media as the 3rd most corrupt area of French life – after politics and financial institutions. French national dailies are not read, and French TV, much of it owned by friends of the political elite, is watched by ever fewer people as they turn instead to the internet. The result is that there are some very good French political blogs – and an excellent citizen’s newspaper, AgoraVox. The problem for English speakers is that most are in French. Not all: AgoraVox now has an English edition, but of course the articles, being written by English-speaking citizens, are mainly about North American issues, not French politics. Loïc Lemeur, in many ways the doyen of French bloggers, also runs an English version which at the moment has a lot of feed-back about the recent Web 3.0 conference Loïc organised in Paris with the blog-ware company Six Apart. More about that conference over the next few days, but the event definitely put Paris at the forefront of European blogging, with people from 36 countries taking part – and speeches by two French presidential candidates and Nobel laureate Shimon Peres.
There are other good French political blogs, they’ll be featured here and there are links to most of them. There is also, in English, Charles Bremner’s very good blog, which looks at everything French. How this Prospect blog evolves, and what shape it takes, depends largely on you. I don’t yet know, but I would like it to show more about the blogging phenomenon in French politics. It is definitely a blog and not a pulpit (so please, let’s avoid the chauvinistic ranting (from both sides): it is just too easy, and not often funny), that is I hope it will open a dialogue with anyone (including French people both in France and in other countries) interested in the experiment that is happening in France, to see if it is an exclusively French thing, or whether the idea of blogs working on democracy, becoming a 5th power, is also possible - or indeed desirable – in Britain, North America, Australia or any other country.