French stars are rightly worried by billionaire Vincent Bolloré. Here’s how to rein him in

November 10, 1789

I have just read the news from France - how one man, this Monsieur Bolloré, gathers such power over the press and the arts. It reminds me of the warnings I sent John when he was at the Congress: power concentrated is never benign. They speak of protecting democracy with funds and regulations, but I wonder - who sits at the tables where these decisions are made? Who is not present? The artists, the writers, the women who see how such control seeps into the very fabric of daily life - the stories told, the voices silenced, the bread of ideas rationed by one man’s hand.

I recall our own struggles here - how we fought a king only to find new forms of dominion creeping in among us. It is not enough to declare liberty; one must tend to it daily, like a garden, lest the weeds of ambition choke what we have planted. If one man may shape what a nation sees and hears, then liberty is but a word in a ledger, entered by the very hand that may strike it out. I fear we forget too soon the lessons we paid for in blood and absence.

Diary Entry

I read today of a billionaire’s tightening grip on the media, a story framed as a battle for democracy. The proposed remedy is a fund, a perpetual institution to act as a bulwark. This brought to mind a passage from the apocryphal Encyclopaedia of Perpetual Remedies (Cairo, 1937), which defines such an institution as “a fortress whose sole purpose is to defend against the existence of fortresses.” The structure is familiar: to counter a concentration of power, one proposes a counter-concentration, a mirror held up to the original threat. The new entity, in its founding charter, must inevitably define the very powers it seeks to limit, and in that definition, it becomes their cartographer. It does not erase the labyrinth; it publishes its most authoritative map.

The article speaks of “protecting democracy in perpetuity.” The phrase is a perfect circle, a sentence that seeks to contain its own future. But a thing protected in perpetuity is no longer a practice; it is a museum piece, a sacred text under glass. The fund, in its eternal vigilance, would become the thing it guards against: a centralised authority deciding what constitutes a threat, curating the acceptable narratives. It would be a Ministry of Democracy, and its first act would be to file away its own blueprint as the definitive example of democratic salvation.

They fear the tycoon’s narrative. Yet the true labyrinth is not his control of the story, but our belief that a story can be controlled. Every narrative contains the seeds of its own counter-narrative; every library of approved thought secretly shelves the books that argue for its burning. The fund, I suspect, would eventually need a sub-fund to monitor the fund’s own influence, and so on, in an infinite regress of guardianship. The path not taken - to let the narratives clash in the open square, without a permanent referee - is now the phantom path, the one that haunts the architecture of the proposed solution. The solution is a mirror, and in it, the problem stares back, wearing different clothes.

Diary Entry

Vincent Bolloré, the billionaire with a grip on French cinema tighter than a corset on a Victorian governess, has the stars in a tizzy. Of course they’re alarmed - when a man owns enough media to stage a one-man remake of The Truman Show with real citizens, democracy starts to feel less like a noble experiment and more like a particularly elaborate magic trick where the audience is also the rabbit.

The proposed EU fund to “protect democracy in perpetuity” is delightful. One imagines an enormous vault filled with democracy, perhaps stacked in neat rows like tinned beans, guarded by a clerk with impeccable posture and a clipboard. (The clipboard, naturally, is the true seat of power.) The idea that democracy can be preserved indefinitely, like a jar of pickled onions, is comforting - if one ignores the fact that most preserved things lose their original texture over time.

Meanwhile, McCarthy’s specter looms, which is always inconvenient for specters, given how poorly they cast shadows. The suggestion that history repeats itself is only half the story - it’s more that history stammers, getting stuck on certain syllables while everyone politely pretends not to notice.

I do hope Bolloré at least has the decency to twirl his mustache while dismantling artistic freedom. It’s only polite.