In 2011 the Bolloré Group sold two free-TV channels to Groupe Canal+, which Vivendi had already acquired a decade earlier. One of them was rebaptised C8 and went on to provide a platform for the talk show host Cyril Hanouna, who has since morphed into a right-wing shock jock. Hanouna runs a media production company with one of Bolloré’s sons, Yannick. (Yannick heads Vivendi’s supervisory board and runs the marketing and PR company Havas, another of Bolloré’s assets. His brother Cyrille runs the Bolloré group.) Bolloré’s 2011 sale to Canal+ came under scrutiny by the French equivalent of the monopolies commission but eventually passed muster. The takeover of Lagardère in 2019 was the subject of a lengthy inquiry in Brussels – it appeared to contravene the EU’s rules on fair competition – but it, too, was approved at the end of last year, after Bolloré agreed to sell off a smattering of media assets.

Bolloré has courted two former presidents, Nicolas Sarkozy (centre-right) and François Hollande (centre-left), and almost every figure in Les Républicains, the remnants of de Gaulle’s emaciated party. According to Le Monde, it was Bolloré who persuaded Eric Ciotti, the president of LR, to form an electoral alliance with Le Pen and Bardella. (In June, LR’s politburo dethroned Ciotti as a consequence, but he fought the decision in the courts, which ruled that it was invalid.) Macron, who is said to loathe Bolloré’s project, agreed to meet him as his first presidential term was coming to a close. You’re buying up ‘everything’, Macron is rumoured to have told him.

C8 isn’t the only destabilising channel in Bolloré’s sheaf of acquisitions. There is also CNews, a free 24-hour news offer reinvented from a dusty Canal+ strand. After the relaunch in 2017 CNews rapidly became one of the three most popular news outlets in the country. It was Bolloré’s answer to Fox News: in-your-face, truculent and increasingly sure that it could make the case for a government of the far-right. Then there is a radio station, Europe 1, where Hanouna also has a gig. Bolloré acquired it as part of his Lagardère takeover and reconfigured it as a far-right agitprop outlet (just shy of two million listeners in 2023).

In this election campaign, Europe 1 has given Hanouna free rein: he and his guests have done their best to take France to the cleaners. The day before campaigning closed for round one, the French media watchdog Arcom warned Europe 1 that Hounana’s ‘virulent’ attitudes towards LFI and the NFP were beyond the pale. It was the second warning in a week. There have been heavy sanctions on Bolloré’s content in the past. In 2021 CNews was fined €200,000 by Arcom after Eric Zemmour, the head of the ultra-far-right party Reconquête – and a regular CNews commentator at the time – was found to have incited racial hatred. Last year Hanouna incurred a swingeing fine of €3.5 million for C8 when he slandered an LFI deputy to his face. And Arcom has just imposed a €50,000 fine on C8 for another of Hanouna’s extravagant turns last year, when he treated his audience to a video clip claiming to show two people out of their heads on the ‘zombie’ drug xylazine. It later emerged that they were disabled. But the Bolloré empire can afford these slaps on the wrist. It can also bear down on editorial content and bully its staff. Days after the Lagardère takeover, Bolloré appointed a young far-right editor at Le Journal du Dimanche. After a five-week strike, a deal was cut on severance pay and Bolloré’s ideologue was firmly at the helm.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/july/occluded-fronts