On: French stars are rightly worried by billionaire Vincent Bolloré. Here’s how to r

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.