A fascinating book and useful complement to this blog and the current election campaigns in France is Joe Trippi’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised……..”. Trippi is two things: a creative computer geek and a highly experienced US political campaign manager. In 2003 he took over rank outsider Howard Dean’s struggling campaign and was responsible for pulling Dean ahead of the other Democrat candidates – until he crashed. Trippi’s book is a unique insider’s view of how the internet, and specifically Web 2.0, works in conjunction with conventional politics, and more broadly with democracy (not the same thing). The fact that the French are currently experimenting with the same mix of new technology, staid self-interested politicians and grass-roots dissatisfaction makes the book entirely pertinent.

Be warned: Trippi’s is an all-out, all-American view: “Politics and high tech have always sprung from the same well – a balls-out desire for progress, the idea that the greatest force for political and social change in America has always been the ingenuity and creativity of its people.”

“A balls-out desire for progress” may not be the first phrase that jumps to mind when describing French politics, but despite their differences (funding for example) there are enough similarities to make the book well worth reading on this side of the Atlantic. In both presidential republics there is that uneasy mix of naïve, utopic belief in democracy which has been ground down relatively recently into disenchantment by the relentless self-aggrandisement and cynical self-enrichment of so many politicians.

In both countries also, conventional politicians have leant too heavily on television: “in the last half of the twentieth century, television staged a hostile takeover of American culture, in just twenty years going from reflecting American life to altering American life, to dictating nearly every aspect of American life: the products we buy, the clothes we wear, the things we fear….TV is a passive, top-down medium. Sitting around watching television inspires nothing but more sitting around and watching television.” Not just in America.

By contrast, the Internet is an active medium and, as Trippi, who was geeking with the best of them back in the early 1990’s, realised, the Internet creates inter-active communities: Google in the old days, e-bay, Wikipedia all bring people who don’t know each other together for a particular event. That’s what Trippi did with Howard Dean’s campaign, creating a community of over half a million people who cared passionately about Howard Dean. But the parameters have changed, this new community is not a flock of mindless people blindly following, and their leader is not what he thought he was: Trippi quotes Joi Ito, another person who understands this new world: “You’re not a leader you’re a place. You’re like a park or a garden. If it’s comfortable and cool, people are attracted. Deanspace is not about Dean. It’s about us.”

“Tell me and I forget; teach me and I remember; involve me and I’ll vote for you.” Benjamin Franklin’s theory of getting people on your side, up-dated. When the Dean team dried up on ideas, Trippi would put the problem to the blog sites and within hours solutions would be flooding in. Open source campaigning. When they needed funding, it was the the bloggers who came up with the idea of sending in $10 each. When you have around 600,000 bloggers that brings in more than fund-raising dinners with tickets at $2,000 a piece, but almost more important you’ve touched that mass of people who want to help and can afford $10 but not $20. It’s similar to what Ségolène Royal started out doing last year, when she also was a rank outsider, with her participative on-line book. But she (or her campaign manager) didn’t have the courage to continue. So though people backed her, she did not follow through. They were not involved enough. Trippi’s experience is that you have to let the people take over, all those people you don’t know, you have to trust them. But that is hard, especially for a top-down trained French administrator.

What killed the Howard Dean internet campaign was Howard Dean: he didn’t really understand why all these people were mobilised for him. Despite the money it brought him, he didn’t understand the influence of the internet. In Trippi’s phrase “he didn’t get it”. I think the same can be said of the candidates in this French election: none of them really believes. Which is understandable, if foolishly short-sighted (but when were politicians anything else?). Very few years ago if I had written that a search-engine called Google, or a funny write-your-own encyclopedia could all become integrated in our lives, who would have believed? Or that you would soon be quite OK about throwing your money electronically at a private individual you’ve never met in return for a lawn-mower, or a bike or archery set you’ve never seen. Or that just by creating a simple free download a 19 year-old could and would destroy the enormous omni-powerful music empires. Even the people behind them didn’t realize how fast their brain-children would grow nor how far they would penetrate. “It’s 1956 again and we just got the box in the house,” says Trippi. Nobody back then could imagine, as my father made a ridiculous mule-shaped puppet called Muffin jerkily prance about on the tiny pebble-thick screen in the corner of a few hundred homes, that in 12 years John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon would be using the same box but now in millions of homes to debate politics. And by that debate, inspire a generation.

Why are political blogs so popular in France? How is it that they have become a real force in politics, whereas in Britain they are not? The difference is the distribution of power. In France, power is concentrated at the top, in an elite. The French have become used to being governed by a restricted number of highly-trained specialists – yes, I know in Britain people complain about Oxbridge graduates getting the best jobs and in the States you have Harvard, MIT and the Ivy League. But the graduates of those schools are not what the French would call an elite: there are far too many of them. How many graduates are there each year from Oxbridge – perhaps ten thousand? There are only one hundred graduates a year from the most prestigious Ecole Normale d’Administration (and to get in there every applicant must have a minimum of two university degrees plus at least a year’s special preparation course, and since even then only 7% will pass the entrance exam, you start to understand what elite means). The specifically French aspect of ENA graduation is its ranking system: the top graduate goes automatically to the best job, posted by prime ministerial decree: number one is in the Conseil d’Etat, number two in the Cour des Comptes and so on through the ministries with, at the bottom, the Min of Ag and Fish. Personal choice is not an issue – another aspect of the definition of elite.

Certainly, there are more grandes écoles than just the ENA – but not for running the country, and in politics there’s just the Sciences Po. The others, excellent in their own fields, are focussed on commerce, engineering, humanities etc.

A consequence of politicians and administrators coming from just one or two grandes écoles is la pensée unique, which again overrides personal opinion: they have been taught by the same teachers and they have written their essays and exams to please the same people.

Most graduates go straight into the civil service, and from there they can move into parliament: most députés are on secondment from the civil service, and their jobs are kept for them if they are not re-elected. Some civil servants become government ministers without being elected to parliament – like the current prime minister and minister of economics. Certainly the députés represent the people, but they are not representative of their people: there are too few women, almost no one from les classes populaires, or ouvrières and notoriously no one of north or west African origin from the urban ghettoes which surround France’s main towns. Which is not to say that the députés from those areas are not totally committed to their charges, but their electorate wouldn’t feel they were “one of us”.

In such a situation rebellion is inevitable. The other day I quoted De Gaulle’s statement about the impossibility of governing a country proud of possessing 370 different cheeses: in fact he was wrong, it’s perfectly possible, but not the way he saw government. That way insurrection lies. Particularly since the press and media are perceived as being controlled by the same elite. The battle to save Libération is not just about the closure of a national newspaper: Libé is renowned for expressing opinions closer to intelligent, thinking “ordinary” French people. Being taken over by a member of the Rothschild family was seen as the beginning of the slide to conformity.

Blogs, citizen’s newspapers like AgoraVox, perfectly answer the need felt by many French people to contribute to the running of their lives. Etienne Chouard, for example, who takes much of the credit for sinking the European Constitution, was one of the first to use the internet constructively. A teacher of law in a Marseille lycée, he saw legal errors in the proposed constitution and simply posted them on the net. He received some 12,000 questions as a result. That means there were hundreds of thousands out there hungrily waiting, without knowing quite what for.

Now it’s not unusual to see four or five hundred comments after a political posting, with perhaps ten times more reading the piece.

Like many bloggers, M. Chouard says he is not attracted by any one particular party: “Whoever is elected, nothing will change, unless one changes les règles superieures,” he says. And I would guess that he shares that sentiment with many of his compatriots. Ségolène Royal has made huge efforts in the direction of participative democracy, but being an enarque herself, I am not convinced she would go as far as changing les règles superieures. Sarkozy didn’t go to any grande école but I think he is too well encrusted in the system to want to change it. So blogs will continue to be hugely popular in France, read as were Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu, until that mythic person in whom the whole of France believes – l’homme providential – appears.

Although it’s only just getting under way, it’s fascinating to see how the campaign is shaping. At the moment it has practically nothing to do with traditional left against traditional right, but with a conflict between two different approaches to democracy.

The writer of le blog politique says that Ségolène Royal will not make it into the 2^nd round because she has not got what it takes. France, the writer says, is not Sweden or Denmark, it needs a real head of state, a boss. A lot of people, not only French, would agree: leaders need to be strong managers, looking after everything so you, the citizen, can get on with your life.

But others say that system of top-down government no longer works, because it inherently breeds disillusion with the leader. Messrs Blair, Bush and Chirac are current examples of voter disillusion. Consequently, people vote less and less (even for last Sunday’s election of the UMP candidate, open only to committed, paid-up party members, nearly a third of the members didn’t vote). These critics of the command-and-control system claim that it would be better to move power outwards, decentralising it, giving responsibility to everyone. That idea is certainly catching on in France, and partly explains why Ségolène Royal has done so extraordinarily well over the past 12 months, defeating her “strong manager” rivals who were, 12 months ago, far better placed than she. The problem, or the question, of course is, what has this “soft” idea of taking power away from managers and giving it to everyone, got to do with the “hard” business of running a major country? Conventional wisdom says one is reality, the other for the birds.

Advocates of the second, decentralised approach point to one major, international company that works in this amorphous, let-each-unit-decide-for-itself way. It’s a big company, most readers not only know it, they carry its calling-card on them at all times. It’s called Visa. Visa, by conservative estimates, is one of the most successful companies ever created – in fact it is the biggest commercial structure in the world. Since Dee Hock set it up 30 years ago, Visa has grown an estimated 10,000% and still grows at 20% a year. Yet Visa is not owned by anyone, nor can you buy shares in it. It is a network of 22,000 banks across 200 countries, each bank respecting its own rules and the rules of its country, yet it also fitting into the trans-frontier Visa package.

How Visa evolved as a disorganised, deliberately chaotic organisation is a fascinating story in itself, a precursor of the internet and Open Source. To find out more, go to Wikipedia – another example of a highly successful open system. It’s that sort of system which some French voters are beginning to think may work for politics too. Thierry Crouzet, an influential French blogger, with some 3,000 visits a day, has much on his site well worth reading, and his new book Le Cinquième Pouvoir, deserves to be translated. Have a look too at his recent blog on Wikinomics. But Thierry does not imagine that open source democracy, or the 5^th power, will overnight replace the present system of government, any more than Open Source will replace Microsoft. But in the same way that Open Source was born as a reaction to Microsoft, and simply by existing has an enormous and beneficial influence on that company, so an open source democracy might breathe fresh life into the frankly unappealing politics dominated by Messrs Bush, Blair and Chirac.

“The real work of the 5^th power is done by little imperceptible touches, a slow accumulation of grains of sand, which will be capable of creating monstrous avalanches.”

Naturally, there are plenty of voters who see that as utopist twaddle, who feel a strong boss is the only workable answer. Perhaps next time they delve for their plastic card they should wonder who is the boss of Visa.

At the moment this blog is focussed mainly on the French elections. I am hoping that as well as giving a daily commentary and explanation, I’ll be able to show aspects of the election campaigns not often reported but important, nevertheless: like the French political blogs.

French blogs fall into two groups: the blogs of the candidates, and the blogs of those dissatisfied with what the candidates are offering. The candidates are using the net simply as a platform, little different from a TV or newspaper interview, reaching out to people they hope will vote for them. The obviously far more numerous “others” are using the internet for something else: bloggers like Thierry Crouzet, Thierry Maillet start from the premise that the internet is a force in its own right, not merely a means of communication. The 5^th power, according to the French press.

Certainly blogs are very popular in France: it is second only to the United States for the number of blogs per inhabitant (maybe that should be inhabitants per blog). ADSL has caught on very fast (it has even reached France profonde, though the service is pretty tattered by the time it gets out here and if anyone’s got a better idea for fast, reliable internet service, I’d love to hear it) and the French repeatedly tell each other they love talking to each other – traditionally in cafés (as oppose to the Brits in pubs who yell at each other). Most important, the French always have an opinion and they like that opinion to be different from other people’s – which may be why there are so far 38 candidates for the presidential election.

It’s worth having a look at an edited video on Thierry Crouzet’s blog. It’s a presentation he gave, in English, at the recent Web 3.0 conference in Paris, attended not only by some of the leading web-people from 36 countries, but by politicians and decision-makers. In the video Thierry explains how Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory – familiar to economists and star-gazers – is applicable to French politics. A comet, blazing across the sky leaves an ever-broadening and lengthening trail behind it – until very recently graphs of retail sales used to look just the same: one product was a tear-away best-seller (the comet), leaving in its wake an ever-broadening trail of increasingly dead, unsellable products – independent writers, film-makers and musicians were all victims of that “best-seller only” approach! But the internet is changing that: now people down-load what they want to see – or buy off the internet what they want as oppose to what the man in the shop has on his shelves – with the result that there is wider choice, the market is no longer dominated by a handful of products and a handful of producers (we hope!). Thierry Crouzet reckons the theory holds for politics too – that democracy is no longer represented by big star politicians. In the 1965 French presidential elections there were 6 candidates, and the two who went through to the second round, De Gaulle and Mitterrand, took between them 76% of the vote. In 2002, the first when candidates had their own web-sites, there were 16 candidates, showing the desire to participate in democracy is growing. But in that election, the top two only got 38% of the vote between them, which shows that the best sellers are selling less and less – it also shows that 62% of French voters were, in a sense, not represented at the second round. Thus democracy is changing, but the existing system does not accommodate the growing pressure from below. I know that’s a bit simplistic, but if you’re after democracy, and that is precisely what the French are after, then those two figures are worth bearing in mind. This year, so far, there are 38 candidates.

The threat is that if the existing political system does not accommodate the changes taking place, then more and more people will abstain from voting, and claim that those elected don’t really represent the country. You get universal dissatisfaction. The retail industry, of course, is famous for the speed with which it reacts to changing public demand – it has to change in order to survive. Politicians cling desperately to the wreckage they themselves have caused.

Secondly, can the long tail theory be applied to government in Britain, which runs obsessively on the (arguably now out-dated) two party, best-seller system? There simply is not the scope, within the British electoral system, for 38 candidates wanting to be prime minister (subject for a BBC sit-com?). But is there a feeling within Britain (or the United States, Canada or Australia which also run two, or two-and-a-half horse races) that greater participation is essential if an increasingly well-educated, well-informed electorate is going to remain satisfied?

All French politicians pay lip-service to the power of blogs. They fully understand, for example, that the 2005 referendum on the European Constitution was dominated and won not by TV homilies or newspaper editorials, but by a network of people outside politics connecting with each other and asking What is all this? Politicians now know they cannot live without the web, but at the same time they are fundamentally afraid of it – with good reason.

Ségolène Royal has used Web 2.0 more intelligently than her rivals in the race for the French presidency. A year ago she created a participative web-site, Désirs d’Avenir, inviting comments and suggestions, collaboratively writing a web-book with bloggers and encouraging each region of France to start its own Désirs d’Avenir web-site to discuss local problems. The party stalwarts in Paris pooh-poohed it all as gimmickry. The French public, however, found it was exactly what they wanted. Madame Royal’s popularity soared. At the same time, as Thierry Maillet points out, Ségolène Royal surrounded herself with women, and not necessarily women who had excelled at the schools of administration, but women who are good at marketing and communication. As a result, she amassed a huge following, mainly from the internet, and used that popularity to trounce the party stalwarts standing against her in the primaries.

So why did I say she is afraid of Web 2.00? Look at the video-clip at YouTube. It shows Ségolène Royal at a meeting of local party officials, announcing an idea which she does not want shouted from the roof-tops, “because I don’t want to be clobbered by the teaching unions.” Her “revolutionary” idea is that secondary school teachers must work their full 35 hours a week at school, not the “17 hours” which is “accepted practice (droits aquis)”. This will stop them sloping off to teach in private crammers (“quoted on the stock market”) – something Madame Royal finds outrageous. Her remarks caused nervous laughter at the meeting: teachers are to the French Socialist Party what miners, steel-workers and railway workers used to be to the old British Labour Party – at once a core and an un-reformable thorn in its side. They were shocked by what this video revealed – the gap between what Mme Royal declares in public and what she says in private meetings (shocked as well, of course, that they might lose a good source of pocket-money). But their anger was nothing compared to Mme Royal’s.

Such a security lapse will not be allowed to happen again – doubtless many French politicians wish they could take a leaf from China’s stranglehold on the net – indeed there has recently been a new spate of calls for regulation and control. But the whole point of Web 2.0 is that it is people talking to each other in public, beyond the control of those who wish to contain everything in rehearsed sound-bytes and carefully staged appearances.

At the last vote (the referendum), French politicians not only lost, collectively, but were all shown up for being out of touch. So how are they going to remedy that before the April elections? How are they trying to prove that, contrary to appearances, they are in touch with a large and probably younger section of French society? Ségolène Royal, as I have said, has a low-key, intelligent approach, creating a participative blog. However, it is running out of steam and now she is fully engaged on the “official” front, I wonder whether she will be able to keep the blog convincing. Her principal rival, Nicolas Sarkozy’s solution is typically American-style razzmatazz. His way of showing he’s part of the scene is to get one or several stars to come to a big public rally, and there they perform a variant of the medieval obeisance ritual: they approach each other on-stage and on-camera, one, by his body-language, clearly the presidential candidate, the other, despite being a star, doing a sort of mock-humility act which we know is temporary. They face each other stiffly and indulge in mutual jaw-holding (in France people do this where Americans hug and thump backs – anyway Sarko is too short to thump backs, his people must have told him that clamping people round the knees is not good for his “I’m your man” image). To show he is just a click away from the connected community he likes to have Loïc Lemeur, a (or perhaps the) key French blogger, beside him on stage at the big rallies, taking email reactions from people down-loading the podcast of Sarko’s speech. Loïc is quoted on BonVote as running the most influential of the 1,328 political French blogs. Sarkozy honed his web image by making a lightning appearance at Loïc’s recent Blog Fest in Paris, Web 3.0, organised with SixApart. Clearly he could not refuse the invitation to speak before web-people from 36 countries, but in the event he had nothing much to say, and left abruptly after his speech. He must have sensed something in the air, for many dismiss him on their subsequent blogs as irrelevant. In other words, like Ségolène Royal, he still has not really understood what it’s about. As Thierry Crouzet, a very astute, committed blogger points out, both Sarko and Ségo still see the world from the old top-down, command-and-control perspective which no longer fits with what many in France want.

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? (more…)