Sunday 11^th February was the date Ségolène Royal set to pick herself up, shake herself down and start all over again. After rocketing to success throughout 2006, to be overwhelmingly elected the socialist candidate in November, she went into a stall throughout December and January. She said she was listening to her compatriots cries of despair. Her compatriots, losing faith, said she has no ideas. The 11^th February was the day she fixed to convince the world that she is right.

Her initial instinct to listen to the electorate was a good one, it marked her out from her predecessors and some of her rivals. But her second instinct seems to me highly dubious. Rather than continue to surge forward with new ideas and new technology to conquer new voters, she decided to fall back on the methods used by Mitterrand in 1981: in January of that year he announced his 110 Propositions, in February 11^th of this year she has announced her 100 propositions. Today’s speech was written for her by Erik Orsenna, one of France’s most distinguished writers, but too well-known as Mitterrand’s speech-writer. Copying Mitterrand to that extent, falling back on things that worked 26 years ago, is a misjudgement. Surely? Particularly since Mitterrand’s 110 Propositions, having got him elected, notoriously failed him miserably in practice. Two years into his presidency he realised his nationalisation policies were leading France to ruin, increasing unemployment and the national debt. In 1983 he had to devalue the franc and operate the infamous U-turn which alienated millions of his supporters, who still feel betrayed. Surely Royal can’t want to tread that same path? Yet having worked so hard to throw off the heavy-weight “elephants” of the Socialist Party, exactly those people who had worked under Mitterrand, having succeeded in doing that against all odds, her first independent gesture is…..to fall back under Mitterrand’s shadow. It’s a quality I mentioned the other day: seeing the future through the eyes of history, of using history as a small child uses a security blanket. Objectively, Mitterrand was an extremely dubious figure but his shade holds a large part of France in thrall.

What are her 100 propositions? For French readers, Royal’s own site is the best place to see them. Clearly no one can make 100 propositions that are all going to be water-tight – notice she does not call them promises. Generally speaking the smaller the proposition the more sensible it is, and the more likely to be adopted – at least for a while. She wants to prevent the accumulation of mandates – that is, prevent an individual being at the same time a mayor, sitting on the regional council, perhaps being the regional president and being an MP, minister or senator. She also proposes preventing one person or group owning and controlling several branches of the media. She also wants to allow foreigners who have been full-time residents for at least 5 years to vote in local elections, by which she presumably means regional and general (departmental) councils.

Some of the propositions are based on her own experiments in the region over which she resides: people’s juries to watch over elected representatives, participative budgets in local affairs. Anything local, it seems to me, has a greater chance of being adopted.

But most of her propositions are too vague to convince any but the most naive: “To put in place an industrial policy capable of preparing the future and reducing the risk of off-shoring by creating a National Agency of Re-industrialisation.” Or “Reform the State: a euro spent must be a useful euro.” Many were already on the Socialist Party’s programme, wooing the left with promises to scrap last year’s labour reform which helps small business, and with a certain sad inevitability the State must still meddle in the way managers do their job and risk-takers are rewarded: “Companies will be charged a lower rate of tax if profit is ploughed back into the company and a higher rate if the profit is given to share holders.” Exeunt omnes.

She makes a number of guarantees, which almost by definition are untenable non-starters, for example that absolutely everyone will be guaranteed a lifetime’s housing security, or that no young person will be out of work for more than 6 months, or that those made redundant will be kept on 90% of salary, guaranteed by the state for a year. Does that apply to the nefarious bosses to whom José Bové referred, who are “making 300 times the minimum wage”? That is 4.5 million euro a year. Will she pay them 90%?. She also promises to increase the minimum wage, increase pensions and “consolidate the 35-hour week”. I have not read any proposals about reducing France’s colossal debt.

Any candidate faces that unanswerable dilemma: do I thrill the crowd by promising the moon? Or do I remain sensible and perhaps bore? François Bayrou has chosen the second option, refusing to make any promises since he recognises the impossibility of knowing whether he will be able to carry them out. Royal has taken the Sarkozy route: pile up the promises, treat the electorate as suckers. Of course some are; those who are voting for the first time have every right to expect that things will be different. All of us at 18 were certain that it was our generation that would finally change everything, that we were heralds to a new era. Hélas!

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.

Will this work? Last night, five days away from finally unveiling her presidential policies, Ségolène Royal makes a major speech in front of some 5,000 supporters in Paris , with a string of PS elephants sitting on the front row. The woman who has made so much of participative democracy, who has used the web to open up discussions with a wide public, launches straight into: “The French people want a choice based on a clear cleavage. I have decided to take on this cleavage, for it opposes two conceptions of society, two ways of governing, two visions of France.” France split in two again, pitting one person against another, oh dear: “France is not the synthesis of the Ancien Régime and the Revolution….It is the clean break made by the Revolution which explains today’s France…” Does she believe that? She has only to look at her principal rival’s chief adviser to know that’s not true: François Bayrou’s long-time adviser is a certain Charles de Courson, who comes from one of France’s oldest families, a brilliant enarque but set against elites of any sort, whether ancien régime-based or ENA-made: he epitomises the best of the old and the new. But Madame Royal wants to see what is not there, a clean break. More ideological conflict when ideologies no longer work. And she then procedes to make a traditional left-wing speech, going into the history of the left, quoting all the 19th and early 20th century greats as if society had remained static all that time. Looking at the future through the eyes of history. It is a peculiarly French habit: very often, interviewing someone about why they think such-and-such or adopt a particular policy, they begin their answer by saying “The way to understand this problem [anything from immigration to the internet] is to go back to Robespierre’ speech on the 19th May…….”

But the problem of France’s clivage is more pressing. Many of us had hoped that by listening to a wider public the socialist candidate would broaden her own policies to admit the multi-faceted nature of today’s problems and appeal to the people of France, rather than just to the committed left. It’s the complexities of today’s society she should “take on”, not its cleavage. But no. She has decided to make the inter-party fight her campaign, not the future of France. I imagine Sarko’s boys are rubbing their hands with glee, for in a straight fight against their implacable machine Royal has very little chance. Her better hope was to engage people right across the spectrum - since there are many on the right who are wary of Sarko. Blair’s third way, to mention the unmentionable. But no. Left versus right, punch for punch and large numbers of voters switch off, cynical and disillusioned.

By the time television latches-on to something and starts getting breathless about it, you can be sure that something is either past its sell-by date or is in someway a threat to television itself - for the best way to kill anything is to let TV presenters gush about it. Is that what is happening at the moment to participative democracy?

Suddenly the media are prostrating themselves before “la sagesse du peuple” with almost indecent haste. Every French radio station has announced a series of innovating programmes with state of the art titles like “Les candidates face aux auditeurs”, “Air libre” or “Service public”, in which ordinary but selected people can go head to head with, and can actually ask questions of, the man or woman who may be the next president. On television it’s even worse: sheep-like, all the channels are trotting along the line given by France 2’s director of information: “[During the election campaign] we want the maximum number of French people to participate”. Her channel is producing “A vous de juger” in which two candidates’ representatives (not the candidates themselves) slug it out in front of a jury of ten “witnesses”. On sister channels you can watch “Français, votez pour moi!”, as “candidates are confronted with reality”, something then defined as “meeting French citizens, with all their experience of life and powerful convictions.” The flagship TF1 is pitting each of the main candidates against 100 of their “ordinary” compatriots. Why 100? How many questions can be properly answered in an hour, dodging commercials? Fifteen?

In other words France is going to be inundated with people’s democracy until everyone is heartily sick of it, fulfilling Churchill’s “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” Which is a terrible shame. Participative democracy is a good idea, but it’s fragile and not a panacea for all the problems which so many western countries now face. It’s true it works best at the local level, when the people concerned know what is at stake, but even in a presidential election, if used wisely, it can stem the tide of disillusion with existing politics, get people implicated in the running of their lives or at the very least get them back into the voting booths.

Far more relevant for this election, I think, is the power of French political blogs, the 5^th power in France. If you want to look at the diversity on offer, start with BonVote, which classifies the top 100 most influential sites (out of the 1,436 sites scrutinised). BonVote also publishes its Top Buzz, counting the number of times each candidate is referred to on the net, for good or bad, in other words the noise each one generates. The current weekly evaluation shows Sarkozy at the top, followed by Royal, and then way below Michèle Alliot-Marie, François Bayrou et al. There is also a monthly version, drawn as a long tail: we can see that during January Ségolène Royal comes in first with 32,252 mentions (on the internet), Sarkozy now second with 26,807. Then it dips considerably: Chirac is third with 9,297. Other non-candidates follow until François Bayrou appears at 10^th position with 3,452 mentions, ahead of Nicolas Pont-Aignan and Le Pen with 3,363. Rachid Nekkaz, an excellent “petit” candidate, gets only 20 mentions (now 21). You can see the incredible gap: Sego get 10 times more mentions than Bayrou or Le Pen, who are jostling for third position in the actual race. It may well be that 9/10 of the battle is just to get people talking about you, particularly on the net. BonVote also shows how many sites are gathered round each party: the socialists have 255 sites, the UMP 157, the Greens a mere 32 and the FN 14 – but they don’t need the internet. The Greens do, however, and will never make headway on 32 sites.

Most of the best independent sites are listed on the right: Thierry Crouzet I find very good, Loïc Lemeur is considered the doyen of French bloggers and he has an English site. He has come down on Sarkozy’s side, Crouzet I think is more neutral. Thierry Maillet’s site is good too, and Nicolas Voisin’s Nuesblog. Reading them can be like a breath of fresh air, because they are not strait-jacketed by la pensée unique and indeed they are not always about the election. They are not necessarily interested in party politics, but often concerned more with deeper issues -  such as people’s democracy.

There is also a very good citizen’s newspaper, AgoraVox, which has an English version too, but since that is written by English-speakers, the centre of interest is mainly on the other side of the Atlantic and the French election features very little.

Participative democracy is not the monopoly of the Left. MEDEF, the French employers’ union, has just published a 150 page book which is the fruit of direct consultation with 50,000 managing directors. The book, “Le besoin d’air” (The Need for Air), is a non-partisan manifesto on how to breathe life back into French business and thus, argues Laurence Parisot, president of MEDEF, back into France. It is very rare for French employers to take any collective part in a presidential election campaign or indeed take any concerted action at all, and reflects the new direction being given to le patronat by Madame Parisot. In the past, MEDEF has been dominated, controlled by its (male) leader. Parisot, who became the first woman president of the union in July 2005, clearly believes in consultation and participative decision-making (before her present job she was managing director of IFOP, the French Institute of Public Opinion, so she has the track-record).

French companies and particularly small businesses can do very well, but they are handicapped not only by high tax, an excessively complex Code du Travail (at the employers’ AGM two years ago Laurence Parisot said “The freedom to set up business stops where the Code du Travail begins”) and what she calls “hyper-regulation”, but almost more fundamentally French entrepreneurs are crippled by being studiously ignored, if not spat upon, by much of French society. Nobody talks up French business. It would be electoral death for any candidate, even Nicolas Sarkozy, to praise the bosses. Why do so few take pride in something the French do well? It is perverse: the reason French companies do well is, generally speaking, because of the quality of conception and realisation, the reason they are not competitive is because of their high charges and the hyper-regulation. Yet the current chatter praises the latter and denigrates the job and income-creating employers. Laurence Parisot wants to switch that round that round: “Let us go out and meet people,” she told the 6,000 bosses at MEDEF’s annual general meeting (that’s probably a bigger crowd than Sarkozy got at his much-hyped coronation on January 14th), “show yourselves. How can we hope to be known and have a good image if we stay in the shadows, in our offices and workshops? Go out and talk about your successes, explain how you got where you are. Tell the French about our ideas and our methods.”

To me that is the most positive aspect of these election campaigns: the much-publicized change, break or rupture advocated by three of the four main candidates boils down to involving people, giving them information and trusting them with the intelligence to use it. If this movement continues, it can only result in a richer debate, and a higher turn-out on polling day. Many bosses at yesterday’s AGM were saying that this year, these elections, are make-or-break for French business. If that’s true, then they have to come out to people, via blogs or participative debates, why not, to explain why.