Two quick comments on the very lively debate about whether or not “responsible” countries should boycott the Olympic Games this summer: first Bernard Kouchner seems to me to have adopted exactly the right tone in his interviews with the press. Kouchner, France’s foreign minister, is in the uncomfortable position of having made his name fighting for human rights and human dignity in the face of powerful, bullying or tyrannical regimes. Indeed in the 1970’s, with the issue of the Vietnamese boat-people, he helped create the concept of international intervention. Since he is now a senior minister chez Sarkozy, the French press not surprisingly questions his sincerity. The invigoratingly new element is the way Kouchner’s replies. He doesn’t become all mealy-mouthed and try to paper over cracks. When asked what he thinks of his life-long friend Daniel Cohn-Bendit’s attitude towards the boycott (that France, calling itself “le pays des Droits de l’homme”, is being hypocritical), or Robert Menard’s (head of Reporteurs sans frontières) activism against the Olympic torch, Kouchner replies “It’s great. They’re doing their job [raising awareness of China’s Human Rights abuses], I’m doing mine, helping to run a major country.” That seems to me an entirely adult way of looking at the diversity of people and what they can do in a democracy, pointing up the press’ rather simplistic views of what life is. When pushed further about his own position (”aren’t you being hypocritical?”) Kouchner, on France Inter yesterday, turned the hypocrisy tables on the interviewer by asking in a lively tone had he only just realised there is a world of difference between what NGO groups do and say (focussed on one particular problem, however large and important it may be and by definition advocating an ideal) and what those job is to steer a country for 5 years can do.

In my view Kouchner was right to point out the journalist’s hypocrisy. The French press, until a few years ago quiescent in the face of any member of government, has recently decided to become bolder, perhaps more Anglo-Saxon, by asking the searching questions that penetrate deep into the soul of our existence. But they seem to believe that to achieve this instant searing incisiveness, all they have to do is simply ask the questions a bright child might ask: how can you deal with a country which does not respect human rights?…… The job of a good interviewer is much harder, with hours of preparation and the back-up of a team of very good researchers.

The other point that jumps out at me with this torch which will today pass through Paris, is the multitude of French politicians (and sportsmen and women)  who say that politics and the Olympic Games should be kept apart (doubtless their British equivalents said the same, but I haven’t had time to read the reports). Do they not remember apartheid in South Africa and the boycotts of the 1970’s? Indeed South Africa was expelled from Olympic membership in 1970 because of its apartheid policy – a perfect example of where politics and the Olympic philosophy came together. With the perhaps over-publicised case of the white woman runner Zola Budd (at 17 she broke the women’s 5,000 metre world record, but because she did it in South Africa it was not recognised) who had to assume British nationality to run in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. The whole boycott business was a running sore in cricket, rugby, tennis and other sports for many years, and not always successful, but it achieved its purpose which was to show the people of South Africa that the international community did not agree with their government’s policies. It has always seemed to me that the long-running boycotts, and all the fuss they engendered good and bad, worked away like water on a stone to help change fundamentally a deep-rooted evil system.

At last he is acting like a president of the French Fifth Republic – taking major decisions about foreign policy and France’s place in the world, leaving the merely domestic stuff to his government. Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to send troops into Afghanistan may turn out to be the single most important act of his five-year presidency, how ironic, then, that he has handled it so badly. A year ago we were all saying that Nicolas Sarkozy’s greatest strength was his consummate skill at communication. This latest business over sending troops to Afghanistan calls all that into question.

First of all he made the announcement in possibly the most inappropriate place – the Royal Gallery of the British House of Lords: Royal, British and, as far as many French people are concerned, full of irrelevant aristocrats (the Commons did not suspend their business to listen to the French President). Hemmed in and dwarfed by two huge murals, Nelson at Trafalgar towering above him on his left, Wellington at Waterloo dominating his right, the somewhat undersized Sarkozy chose to announce a U-turn in French foreign policy to the traditional enemy. Worse, he made his announcement in the heart of the very institution which, in French eyes, failed democracy by meekly allowing Tony Blair to send British troops into Iraq.

French parliamentarians were mortified and deeply shocked. They complained to their Prime Minister, who mollified them by saying of course you can debate it – but then adding there will be no vote. An emasculated exercise in shop-window democracy. The Assemblée Nationale is now in no doubt as to its continuing lack of relevance within Nicolas Sarkozy’s Fifth Republic. The institutional reforms suggested by Edouard Balladur making it compulsory to consult Parliament before any troops are sent abroad for more than 6 months look less than convincing. But we did consult you, Nicolas Sarkozy might say: the reforms don’t say anything about voting. Anyway, there are 1,600 French troops there already (2,200 in the Stans region as a whole).

If he had set out to anger his compatriots deliberately he could not have done better. During his election campaign a year ago, Sarkozy promised to bring home the French troops already in Afghanistan (“What I promise I will do”), and even last summer the Minister of Defence said: “The President of the Republic has clearly established that the troops have no reason for remaining durablement in Afghanistan”. In a recent poll nearly two thirds said they were against sending more troops to Afghanistan. For many French people the Taliban have ceased to have any importance (part of this may be political correctness, not to be heard bashing Muslims, however extreme and unrepresentative they may be, to avoid angering the Muslims in France) and the information they receive is often contradictory – one report yesterday said the main area of violence was the east “where the Talibans and Al Quaida operate”, another said the south is where the action is, where “the Taliban have re-taken control”. Who cares? At best the war is seen as a lost cause, supported by the intolerable George Doubleyou, himself a lost cause, but for many the war anyway has been lost – on last night’s radio there were those saying France should negotiate with the Taliban and be done with it. In other words just as in 2003 they seemed willing to leave Saddam to continue his butchery, they have either forgotten quite who the Taliban are and what they represent or, like many in Britain, they believe the Taliban have changed their spots. French anger is less about Sarkozy sending French soldiers to a battle zone than his undoing 50 years of French independence, undoing De Gaulle’s great work: he is joining the abomination, the Anglo-Saxon alliance. Atlantism is still a dirty word in some quarters. But if Sarkozy’s wider ambition is nothing to do with Afghanistan, rather increased French power in the Mediterranean, how else can he achieve that than by giving a sop to the Americans? And what better sop than to send a few more troops (the original 1,000 has this morning been reduced to 800) to help out in a forgotten war?

French cinema. The jewel in the crown of an otherwise lacklustre post-war French culture. Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Resnais, Bresson, Malle – even early Lelouche – in the 1960’s and early 1970’s nothing else sold France as well as its cinema. As far as the rest of the world was concerned French painting died in 1954 with Matisse; exportable French fiction never recovered after the 1950’s; with too few notable exceptions French theatre never rivalled London or New York and no one beyond the hexagon was much interested in the music of Francoise Hardy or Johnny Halliday, let alone Messiaen or Boulez – but French cinema…..there was something we (meaning Western Europe and North America because in those days that was the World) could get truly excited over! One of its many qualities was that the best of the New Wave was a continuation of the Golden Age of French cinema of the 1930’s and ‘40’s: there was a thread that seemed to constitute a national culture. But now, according to the Club of 13 , a group of some of France’s best film professionals, French cinema is in deep danger of losing its identity and they have written a 190-page book to explain how to get it back to the forefront of world culture.

The book will be published in mid-April, I have not read it, but journalists on both Mediapart and Rue89 have. What these journalists say about it is fascinating because it seems to speak not only for the French cinema industry but for the recovery of France in general – and it fills me with despair.

I should perhaps explain that the root reason I am in France at all is probably because of its cinema. When I was 2 my father, a film director, came to Paris to work for a couple of years, so my earliest memories are an unformed jumble of France and its film business. Later I discovered and became passionate about the films of the directors quoted above and spent many happy years making films that sought, modestly, to emulate them – in particular their understanding of human nature. But by the end of the 1980’s I realised that kind of personal cinema was over and I should move on: film-making was already dominated by television accountants, not by individuals but by faceless committees, and the only thing worse than a committee was an international committee – that is an international co-production. So reading extracts of this 190-page liturgy of woes makes me wonder where the authors have been for the past 25-30 years. Are French film-makers really so totally cocooned from the winds that shape our world?

The Club de 13 was created in February 2007 when a director, Pascale Ferran won several national awards for her film “Lady Chatterley”. Instead of the usual lovey-gush associated with these events she grabbed the microphone and, knowing she was on live TV, made an impassioned plea to save what she calls “les films du milieu” – films that try to combine a certain artistic integrity with popular appeal.

An ad-hoc group formed around her, not of film-buffs and theoreticians but experienced professionals including distributors, exhibitors and exporters. So far so good. But the result of their labour is disappointing: “We continue to live with the idea that cinema is both an art and an industry (the power of Malraux’s thinking) whereas it has become essentially a business. The present commercialisation of the cinema comes from….the substitution of the producer’s power by that of the broadcaster – television on one side and distribution conglomerates on the other.” But that was true 30 years ago, to repeat it today as if it were a blinding new insight is extraordinary.

According to Rue89 the report reveals “the terrible and perverse mechanism [mega-bucks and TV] which leads to uniformity [of ideas, scripts and casting]. Inevitable consequence: the quality of films being presented to the public has deteriorated….” According to the authors the evil TV is responsible for this uniformity and dumbing-down: on the one hand there are enormous budgets given to ultra-predictable films, on the other minimal finance for films which cannot break in to the main circuits and are thus “ghettoised”. In between, too few of the films Mme Ferran advocates – the very diverse middle films, ambitious but with popular appeal of which only 19 were made in 2006 against 49 in 2004.

None of that is wrong, but neither is it new. What the authors of the report do not seem to have understood is that times have changed, the world has moved on. In little more than a single life-time cinema has moved from silent black and white with piano accompaniment, to talkies, to wide-screen Technicolor with Dolby sound, back down to TV, through VHS to DVD and now the internet. From 35mm to 70mm, down to 16mm then on to beta tape and now silicon chip. It evolves constantly, as do the public’s tastes. And will continue to do so – just look how the internet has upset (destroyed) the “traditional” music business. Yet, Mediapart says, nowhere do the authors of the report address the future, nowhere do they even mention digital technology. From what is quoted it seems they are stuck in the glory of the New Wave of 40 years ago, of independent individuals making bold decisions rather like independent publishers or art galleries.

For that reason the report is perhaps an echo of the wider phenomenon of whether or not France as a whole can change. Evolution means letting some things go, however much nostalgia clings to them. As a generalisation it seems the French may find that particularly difficult. But what worked 50 years ago almost certainly will not work now, just as the capitalisme à la francaise which created the 30 glorieuses cannot work today. The important thing is to address now.

The Club de 13 appears to believe that the way out of this situation, the way back to the past so that the “descendants of Truffaut, Demy or Resnais can give birth to their projects”, is by more rules, regulations and increased government hand-outs. That may be simplifying, but it seems to be what is being suggested: doubling the government pre-production grant (currently about half a million euro per film) and providing support finance to the originator of the idea (with the demand that 7.5% of this finance go to the writer, 25% to any distributor who invests in the project without a TV company…..). In short the Club de 13 seem to want to lessen the risk in what has always been a high-risk business. Cinema is exciting at every level (including the audience level) precisely because it is a high-risk business. While seed money is certainly vital, give films too much protection and you are guaranteed boredom. Cinema is not about making the films you want to make but second-guessing what films you believe, you hope, you pray people will pay to see.

A word of explanation about my use of the words “extraordinary” and “exceptional” to describe Nicolas Sarkozy yesterday. A couple of French readers have asked how on earth I could call Sarkozy “extraordinary”, assuming I was praising him. In French I think “extraordinaire” usually does infer praise, so there is clearly confusion at the English use of the word. Certainly it can be an adjective of praise, but very often it isn’t. Think of the phrase “He used the most extraordinary behaviour/language.” That does not mean you condone the behaviour/language, usually quite the reverse. It means the behaviour/language took you by surprise (it was “out of the ordinary”). “It’s quite extraordinary how someone can park in the middle of a busy high street just because he’s too lazy to walk to the paper shop,” meaning “Bastard, if I were driving a pelle mechanique I’d make short shrift of  him” Maybe it’s just English understatement.

The same can be said of “exceptional character”  - in English it doesn’t necessarily confer praise, but is often used ironically, meaning “Thank God there aren’t many more like him!” To take exception to someone means to dislike them intensely, although calling a disliked person “exceptional” may be stretching the sense a little too far!

The French language: a subject about which I feel passionate about. Too late I caught the latest ministerial attempt to shore it up against foreign intervention (patriotisme linguistique), and the excellent Charles Bremner got there first. I strongly recommend a visit. Having read Charles’ well-argued reasons for wanting to keep foreign words out of France, do read the lengthy and fascinating comments which follow. Every shade of opinion is there, and it’s clearly a subject which many people (English as well as French) care about deeply: a woman signing herself “an angry teacher”(presumably French), who berates linguists such as the venerable Alain Rey for not giving “a dam shxxt about poor kids not being able to express themselves properly and who lack words”; a reader arguing that, far from being in decline, French is the growing language of Africa (proof, cynics might say, that it is doomed); a reader who rightly (and elegantly) says “To care about language is to care about thought….”

I have only two tiny contributions to this very rich argument: I have long wondered why the French abhor the comparatively simple word “email” and try (rather unsuccessfully) to replace it officially with the deeply ugly “courriel”. “Mail” has impeccably French credentials since it is quite possibly (OED) derived from the French word “malle”, the leather satchel in which the “mail” was carried (think of the Pony Express motto: the malle must get through). Second thing is that, as I understand it, Britain has some claim to fame and  thanks as the only country where French is taught as the first foreign language. Previous correspondents have replied to this claim by reminding me that French is taught in Canada as a second language, but since French is an official language in Canada (bi-lingual road-signs etc), I can’t see how it can be taught as a second language.

Finally, since I apparently cannot write a post without mentioning a certain NS, let me recommend a book about language. Well, a certain use of language. Written by two linguists, Louis-Jean Calvet and Jean Véronis, the book analyses in great, exhaustive and exhausting detail the French language as used and manipulated by the President: “Les Mots de Nicolas Sarkozy”. More about that later.

A friend of mine emailed me recently to criticise, gently, this blog for devoting so much space on Nicolas Sarkozy, who, my friend assured me, is simply not worth it. It’s a question I have asked before on this blog (although recent posts have been about emigration, working with the French tax system, le devoir de mémoire, Rachida Dati – as well as the French President). The answer is simple: if you are writing a blog about French politics (the sub-heading of this blog) you have to write about Nicolas Sarkozy. There is nobody else. For the past ten months he has monopolized not only the centre stage, but every square inch of the theatre, including the wings and front-of-house. He is a one-man show. Or rather he has been, because he promises things are going to change (see previous blog). But until now, when one expected a minister to announce a new bill or policy, Sarkozy hogged the spotlight and the microphone (in that he reminds me of the Socialist former mayor of Montpellier, Georges Frêche, who at public meetings would give a discours fleuve for an hour, then, as the opposition rose to its feet to reply, would simply disconnect the sound system). The French President even announces who will be the head of the (private) French TV channel TF1. Apart from all that he is an extraordinary man with a quite exceptional character: I have written before that Shakespeare would have been proud to have created him – and he would not have been flattering, although, being Shakespeare, he would have helped us understand the human threads that link us.

Sarkozy’s latest sortie has been to announce the appointment of Nicolas Princen, a 24-year old,  as the watch-dog of all and every web-blog which mentions – Nicolas Sarkozy. The appointment has caused a storm on the net, evoking recent mémoires of Francois Mitterrand’s telephone tapping of journalists or, going back further (to Sarkozy’s période de preference, the Occupation), worse. It is quite true that Sarkozy has received a hammering on the net, not by malicious rumour but by the posting of factual videos which show a side of his character he clearly would rather remained hidden. But what will young Princen do about that? How can anyone “watch the web”? How can anyone even attempt it seriously without a massive back-up of material and personnel? And if the President commits large sums of public money to an enterprise like that, he will suffer (justifiable) accusations of irredeemable paranoia. As the inestimable Versac says, Princen simply should not have accepted the job. What will he do to someone who records and then posts a video of the President saying something like “get stuffed you prick!”, or telling his press attaché, after an awkward interview with a foreign journalist, that he’s useless? Will the blogger be invited to the headmaster’s study for a pep-talk about “responsibility” and the need to “pull together”?

No, the key is at the beginning of this post: the Elysée has announced that this new job has been created. Unlike Mitterrand or others, this surveillance will not be secret. Now we all know that we are being recorded, read, perhaps archived. We all now know that our posts may be held against us. Fear, it is presumably hoped, will do its work. I repeat, and this not only for the benefit of M. Princen, Nicolas Sarkozy is an exceptional man.

It has taken ten long months for Nicolas Sarkozy to start to understand what a president should be, but at last the penny seems to have dropped. Even as he was brushing off his disastrous poll ratings with deliberate if unconvincing insouciance, he was clearly panicking behind the scenes, for already things in France are not what they were even a fortnight ago. While everyone has been glued to the local elections, President Sarkozy has, to use the French word, re-looké his style. Long gone are those unflattering jogging opportunities making him look so ridiculous, more recently the heavy gold wrist-watches have dropped off, the helicopter-man Ray-Bans have been binned. What his minders call “an adjustment” has taken place, quietly, behind closed doors. Hours in front of the mirror to eliminate the stabbing finger and those irritating facial tics, trying to coach some gravitas into those absurd eyebrows. Gone are the flying visits to factories, farmers or fishermen (too common for a head of state, anyway he is too easily wound-up) in favour of solemn, weighty events more in keeping with a president: commemorating the courageous but doomed resistance on the Glières plateau in 1944, for example, or launching a submarine. In short we are being led to expect that the ten month-long Act I of his presidency is finally over (a nightmare, with moments of high farce). Tomorrow we may expect Act II, featuring a reformed leading-man.

For Monday is also the Day One of the new reforms which, according to Mediapart, an on-line newspaper run by four of France’s best journalists which begins life today, are going to rain down upon us. Having warmed up his team on pensions, over-time payments and the principal of flexi-security, the real work of changing France is set to start on Monday, they say. This is not a mere plan de rigeur suspected by the Socialists but structural reform at its deepest level, called impressively La Révision Générale des Politiques Publiques. According to Mediapart it will be “un ensemble de mesures transformant en profondeur l’architecture même de l’administration ou certaines règles de la protection sociale.” Employers’ charges are being reviewed, a complete over-haul of the tax system has been envisaged and is being drawn up to make both charges and tax simpler, clearer, more “competitive and attractive”. Some social security benefits may be abolished, as well as perhaps “1,000 special rights” currently enjoyed by some fonctionnaires. Even the partial privatisation of the nuclear-power generator Areva is being worked on (which, if true will cause much controversy). The over-riding aim is to reduce public spending and honour France’s commitment to some sort of balanced budget by 2012. The question is whether that rather academic ambition interests the French, or whether they will demand something more immediate and solid to improve their fast-sinking purchasing power – said to be their number one concern.

If the journalists on Mediapart are right, however (and their informers seem to be the very people working on these reflection groups), then the President is being as good as his word and is not letting his party’s defeat at the local polls influence or dilute his reform strategy. Which is all to the good. For the next week or so the French press will be asking itself the ultimately futile question as to whether today’s vote was a sanction or not – but Sarkozy looks to be using that as cover to push forward his long-awaited reform programme. He won’t have an easy time of it: even last autumn when the government fixed its budget for 2008 oil was at a paltry $73 a barrel (now $110), growth in France was estimated at 2 – 2.5% in 2008 (now revised to 1.5%), the euro was at 1.37 for a dollar (now it’s at 1.55). The next few weeks will be vital to Sarkozy’s longer-term credibility and survival.

I have written before about the problem in France of getting reliable demographic statistics, in particular about how many Muslims there are and how many French citizens have roots in North or West Africa. There now appears to be another hole: there are no figures for how many French citizens emigrate each year. Benign observation says “lots” – simply because almost everyone I speak to knows at least a couple of young people who are working in London. But astonishingly no official figure exists: no one knows exactly how many French people have left or are still leaving France to work abroad. Trying to explain this lack, today’s Rue 89 has a résumé of a 50-page report by demographer Hervé Le Bras, the whole of which is published on-line by the think-tank “En Temps Réel”. M. Le Bras, who is also a mathematician and historian, worked with Jacques Attali on the probably doomed “Liberation de la croissance francaise”.
The French, according to M. Le Bras, think of their country as a “pays d’immigration” (I suspect many British think the same of their country), a phrase which is gently flattering because one likes to imagine one’s country is a magnet for others less fortunate. The official net immigration figure has been some 52,000 a year over the past decade. In reality though, says M. Le Bras, net immigration is closer to a mere 6,000 – simply because no one counts the white French emigrants (and, he adds, few want to countenance the possibility that France might also be a “pays d’émigration”). The demographic curves established by M. Le Bras on emigration resemble those of “well-known” emigration countries such as Ireland and Portugal before they became part of the EU. That bad.

INSEE’s mistake, says Le Bras, has been to see emigrants only as previous immigrants who decided to return home. While accepting that during the years of high unemployment many young French people went to London, and then perhaps across the Atlantic, it was always said they didn’t really count as emigrants since it was assumed they would come back as soon as they could. Whether they will or not is of course in the land of conjecture. What is now clear from M. Le Bras’ researches is that fully 5% of the generation born in the late 60’s and early 70’s left France between the two census points of 1990 and 1999 and most have not come back.

Politically this is hard to swallow: public opinion says that France is “envahie par l’étranger”. Many politicians owe their votes and therefore their jobs to encouraging this notion – as I write the President is making a speech on the subject. Hervé Le Bras is one of a small band of researchers trying to explode myths about their own society. But like Michèle Tribalat’s two reports (1999 and 2004) on how many Muslims there are in France, I doubt much more will be heard of it. “Demography,” says Le Bras, “is a perfect illustration of the dangers of French conservatism, marked by a great difficulty in analysing deep changes in French society.”

Now that the first (and for many only) round of the local elections is over and we realise they are not the public flagellation of the ruling party many had predicted, we can expect the President to get back to the true business of government and do the job for which he was elected. Objectively it is absurd that having been elected by a good majority less than a year ago, he felt he had to delay most of his reforms until after the local elections for fear of upsetting people. All his reforms were announced with much pomp during the presidential campaign so why he should feel suddenly so bashful about them is a mystery. Anyway, now at last we should begin to see whether all the media silliness of the past few months can be thankfully forgotten, or whether France really is stuck.

Because silly stories have dominated for so long it is easy to forget that Sarkozy has had some quite surprising successes in two important areas – both where his predecessors either failed or ducked out: partial reform of pensions and in particular getting an agreement from the unions to discuss intelligently reform to the Code du Travail. The major question now is whether the President has the stomach to go back to finish these and to tackle new reforms. He has not got long: in three months France takes over the presidency of the EU. He is desperate that his presidency (one of the last there will be, assuming the Lisbon Treaty is passed) should make an especially big splash so that once again the eyes of all the world are riveted on France. Thus during between July and the end of the year it’s unlikely he’s going to risk strikes and huge demonstrations on the streets – he’s got to do it now. I only hope he gets it right.

In passing I note the very strange absence of comment in any French media about last week’s massive climb-down by the President over the Mediterranean Union. Originally (as announced many times during last year’s election campaign) this was to have been a wonderful French initiative, placing France at the head and the centre (if that’s anatomically possible) of two spectacular international entities: Europe and the Mediterranean basin. Angela Merkel (and she was not alone) was utterly against, and she had her way last week with an agreement from M. Sarkozy that the Mediterranean Union would revert to being an entirely European venture, in other words little different from the Barcelona Declaration adopted fully 13 years ago which launched the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership or Barcelona Process. Sarkozy’s idea of dominating the Mediterranean (he has wasted considerable energy on his idea, inflicting state visits on most North African countries) has been binned by Angela Merkel’s greater ability. Indeed last week the Germans were treated to a most fawning French President, telling them their way was the way dreamed of by all France. Yet few French papers or TV channels have endorsed this or mentioned Sarkozy’s volte-face.

There’s a fascinating video on the site of the ultra-prestigious Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. It shows what may be a portent of a coming trend: physically preventing independent – particularly internet – TV journalists from filming at public meetings where members of government are speaking. In this video we watch, from the inside, the frustrated (and deeply frustrating) efforts of a TeleLibre cameraman trying to record a public meeting at which the Minister of Justice, Rachida Dati, is going to speak. Everytime he starts filming, a huge shoulder comes in front of the lens to block him out. The camera moves, the shoulder moves with it. After a while we see the director trying (it seems politely) to clear a little space. But the owners of the shoulders (there are several) will not budge. Several young and not-so-young faces, all nicely groomed and impeccably correct, grin smugly at the camera or the increasingly frantic director. They seem to be acting in concert. We assume they are militant supporters of Mme Dati and the UMP. After a while we feel the camera being pushed sideways and suddenly it is out in the entrance hall where others, putting their hands over the lens presumably to avoid identification, apparently hustle the cameraman and his director out into the street.

Recently cameras have caught politicians saying things in public they perhaps shouldn’t have said – the most notorious case being President Sarkozy at the Salon d’Agriculture telling a member of the public to get stuffed. Within hours the video was on the internet and the President’s off-the-cuff remark was once again pushing far more important pieces of news off the slate. His minister for Human Rights was caught at a public (local) meeting saying embarrassing things, as other UMP stalwarts have been too. “La petite phrase” filmed and posted on the web has become a major bugbear for the party in power (and was for the Socialist opposition too during the presidential election campaign). Ironical of course, a case of l’arroseur arrosé, since President Sarkozy’s manipulation of the press is one of his greatest strengths.

So here is the web confirming its role as an (perhaps the only?) independent force, leader of the anonymous opposition, showing us aspects of our leaders which they would rather we did not see. The web doesn’t do so well in the hands of those in or seeking power – with a few exceptions the web-sites of the candidates for the local elections have been ignored, perhaps too parochial – but it blossoms as a purveyor of scurrilous material potentially dangerous to those in power. I know nothing about TeleLibre except that it seems to be a video equivalent of AgoraVox, a web-based citizen’s newspaper. This video is posted by a highly qualified researcher at one of the grandes écoles to make a serious sociological point.

The wider implication of the video is obvious: web journalism (independent and thus uncontrollable) has such a huge (and often gullible) audience that if someone does not want these literally free-lance reporters filming at his or her meeting they enlist the backs, shoulders and elbows of their supporters, who clearly relish the chance to flex their muscles. While far from new, the technique is very dangerous for us all. Or of course this particular video could all too easily be faked – that’s the problem with all web journalism.