On September 29th 2021 the Élysée officially announced the creation of a new commission to investigate the issues of conspiracy theories, disinformation and fake news. This new body, to be known as the 'Enlightenment in the digital age' commission, will report back by mid-December with proposals about how the country should tackle the issue of information in the era of the internet.
The commission, chaired by social scientist Gérald Bronner, is made up of fifteen experts including specialist academics, historians and journalists. One of its stated objectives is: “To define a scientific consensus that will be passed on to the general public, the media and members of civil society, about the impact of the internet on our lives as citizens: about our information, our relationship to others, our image of the world and of ourselves, and our exposure to cognitive bias that can imprison us.”
Yet already the commission and especially its membership have come under heavy criticism. One member, high-profile urologist Guy Vallancien, has just resigned after his inclusion on the body attracted negative publicity. And the nomination of Gérald Bronner as chair of the commission has been condemned by some too. In 2015 Bronner wrote in issue 449 of the journal 'Pour la Science' that: “Conspiracy theory simply means an interpretation of the facts that disputes the official version.” Critics say that in appointing the author of such a phrase to chair a commission of this type, the Élysée has made a very idiosyncratic choice. And some observers see the overall make-up of the commission as somewhere between a joke and insult, even though there is a very important and necessary debate to be had over the harm caused by conspiracy theories and their widespread presence on social media.
However, the choice of the body's members does chime with the political agenda of the ruling La République en Marche (LREM) party which is seeking to drive a wedge between the 'Enlightenment camp' supposedly represented by Emmanuel Macron's supporters and his opponents, seen as representing a retreat into ignorance and darkness. At the end of August the junior minister for European affairs, Clément Beaune, kicked off the debate by explaining that the election in 2022 would be about “a division between those who acknowledge complexity, reason, science and a form of verbal and political moderation, and those who play on division and polemic”. What was needed, he said, was to represent the “side of reason”.
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A few days later, at Angers in western central France, the boss of the LREM's group of senators, François Patriat, went down the same route when he told a captive audience of fellow LREM Parliamentarians that “when science does miracles, that's when obscurantism advances”. Meanwhile Richard Ferrand, the president of the National Assembly and a close supporter of the president, dared to compare the latter with the 16th century French jurist and philosopher Jean Bodin who, he said, sketched the outlines of the modern state “between the violence of fundamentalists and the naivety of utopists”.
The new commission's chair, Gérald Bronner, is also one of those “guardians of reason”, to use the title of a 2020 book by Stéphane Foucart, Stéphane Horel and Sylvain Laurens, a work which describes itself as an “investigation into scientific disinformation” and which includes a devastating chapter on Bronner himself. Bronner is a member of the patronage committee of the Association Française pour l’Information Scientifique (AFIS), a sceptical body that is controversial because of its scientific approach towards environmental issues. An equally controversial member is Belgian physicist Jean Bricmont, who has been described as an anti-Zionist conspiracy theorist by academic Rudy Reichstadt. Reichstadt is founder of Conspiracy Watch and is himself a member of Macron's new 'Enlightenment' commission.
It is hard to imagine that, as the Élysée hopes, the final recommendations and policies of this commission can be accepted by all of the candidate's at next April's presidential election. This is even less likely given that some of the so-called “experts” on the commission are not really experts as such. For example, members include the political commentator Roland Cayol, the historian Jean Garrigues – who also has a high media profile – and Rachel Khan, author of the book 'Racée', published by L’Observatoire, and who is an outspoken critic of supposed 'woke' ideology. “It's not just a debate among technicians,” retorted Macron's entourage, defending the nominations.
One presidential advisor insisted that “more than anything we didn't want a political hue” and extolled the “legitimacy” of Gérald Bronner to pronounce on such issues, his “multi-disciplinary approach” and his “ability to bring the issue into public debate”. In other words, he is on television a lot. Yet this legitimacy has been under challenge for some time despite his publication of books whose titles such as La Démocratie des crédules ('The Democracy of the Gullible') , published by PUF, and Déchéance de rationalité ('The Decline of Rationality') published by Grasset, indeed seem to cover the subjects that the commission will be examining until December.
In particular his legitimacy has been questioned since he co-wrote Le Danger sociologique, a pamphlet published by PUF against his own discipline of social science. Under the guise of defending a field threatened by ideology and a lack of scientific rigour, the pamphlet did all it could to clip the discipline's wings, calling on it to give up its critical dimension. The work also gets bogged down with ethical conflicts that he constantly raises - in between his media-friendly attacks and editorialising against the 'precautionary principle', environmentalism and utopian thinking - and his relations with large companies and with bodies that defend the neoliberal world.
Gérald Bronner was a member of the scientific committee at the French nuclear firm Areva and sat on the medical committee at energy giant EDF. He also gave the food company Danone his analysis of the “worrying precautionary principle in nutrition” and the dangerous suspicion that seeks to “spread fear about every food innovation (artificial sweeteners, GMOs) and, worse still, about more traditional products such as palm oil”. In order to help pass on his advice to businesses, in 2013 he founded the company 'Cognition & Stratégies' – it has since been dissolved – with the former director of human resources at steel firm Arcelor Mittal in eastern France, who became executive director of an employers' group in the metal industry.
Yet despite all the issues with making Gerald Bronner the head of such a commission, his was not the appointment that most undermined the credibility of this latest Élysée initiative. For despite major misgivings being expressed once the details of the commission were first announced, the urologist Professor Guy Vallancien was initially confirmed as a member before eventually quitting eight days later. This high-profile medical specialist – a former advisor to health ministers - was recently officially reprimanded by the medical body the Ordre des Médecins over a “false” certificate and for a “breach of morality”. He was also involved in the 2019 scandal concerning how donated human bodies were treated at the Paris-Descartes university in the capital.
Above all, according to whistleblower Irène Frachon, Vallancien was “one of the key figures in a group of high-level doctors … who for years had shamelessly sought to discredit, minimise and even deny the seriousness of the human tragedy caused by Mediator,” referring to a treatment for type-2 diabetes patients that was widely prescribed as an appetite suppressant. Up to 2,000 patients are estimated to have died from pulmonary and heart disease caused by Mediator. Frachon, a lung specialist, noted that Guy Vallencien had written that “the violence of this unique attack on the industry was shocking … The number of ill people who were hurt by complications linked to the product was rare … among the plaintiffs' cases … just a tiny number up to now have been acknowledged as being related to the taking of the offending product”. Yet in the criminal proceedings that later took place over the drug's use a scientific analysis concluded that Mediator was the direct cause of death or disability in thousands of people.
As Irène Frachon notes, this scandal “rightly and profoundly shook public confidence in the ability of the health authorities, of pharmaceutical laboratories and of the world of medicine in general to guarantee their health”. She believes that this mistrust “which is complex in nature, plays a part in the growing audience for 'conspiracy theories', the reams of false information but also more simply the expression of legitimate concerns”. The Bronner commission scarcely had any chance of dispelling such concerns by confirming Professor Guy Vallancien among its members, she suggested. When questioned about this on the television programme C Politique on public broadcaster France 5 on October 3rd, Bronner spoke about the work of “malicious minds” and said that Vallancien had “very strong arguments with which to defend himself”. Bronner said that having spoken to the urologist, the latter had spoken about “disinformation”.
However, on Thursday October 7th Guy Vallancien told news agency AFP that he was stepping down as a member of the commission after a “shameful, vile and lying smear campaign” against him. Professor Vallancien dismissed any suggestion that he had been forced to quit. “It was I who decided to leave and I told the Élysée that,” he stated. “I could have stayed but that would have created conflicts within the commission and that's not healthy. There was no good option but I took what seemed to me the freest and most honest one.”
Should one be surprised that both men were appointed to the commission and that the chair initially supported his beleaguered fellow member, before the latter felt obliged to resign? Not only do the two men share well-established political views, as Guy Vallancien is a member of the scientific committee of the ultra-liberal think tank Génération libre, founded by philosopher and novelist Gaspard Koenig, of which Bronner was himself a member until recently, but they have also helped each other for a long time. In 2017 the two men were among the dozen signatories, who also included the former conservative president of the National Assembly Bernard Accoyer, of a letter criticising the “biased presentation” of an edition of the television programme 'Envoyé Spécial' on public broadcaster France 2 about the herbicide glyphosate.
Nonetheless, two members do not make a commission and it could be argued that there are several competent people on it, albeit swamped by others whose presence may not be a scandal but whose involvement still raise question marks. For example, there is actress, legal expert and writer Rachel Khan, who was recently appointed as a sponsor of the Prix de la Laïcité – which recognises the work of those who have contributed towards protecting and promoting secularism in France – by the junior minister for citizenship Marlène Schiappa. What is Rachel Khan doing here other than to offer a more appealing face than that of philosopher Alain Finkielkraut to ferocious criticism of minority thinking? What about historian Iannis Roder, who was one of the main people behind the “Republic's Lost Territories”, a controversial collective book published in 2002 by Mille et Une Nuits, and which described the anti-Semitism, racism and sexism in French schools?
The Élysée's repeated response is: “There's great political diversity on this commission.” And the commission itself wants its “independence” to be acknowledged. Though it will have offices and secretarial support, all the members are volunteers. “Symbolically we didn't want it to be at the Élysée to avoid criticism that it is an official commission,” said a source in Emmanuel Macron's entourage. Yet the decisions that have been made in relation to its creation are rather more political that they appear. They indicate a very restricted vision of the Enlightenment, as shown by Gérald Bronner's latest book, 'Apocalypse cognitive', published by PUF in 2021 and which the Élysée says it combed through before making him president of the commission.
This latest work adopts the style of Bronner's previous books, using anecdotes, the results of behavioural experiments, examples of cognitive bias and mocking Marxist or utopian failures. In it the academic again trots out his favourite themes: attacking “demagogues” and “populists”, and the weakening of the role of “traditional gatekeepers (journalists, academic experts … everyone considered socially legitimate to take part in public debate) who maintained a control function in this market”, the “growing number of all kinds of health or environmental alerts that are not always based on reason”, and the “contamination of conventional media by social networks”.
But the ideological backbone of the book is the idea that the philosophy of the Enlightenment is, according to the author, being “fought by a form of reactionary thinking that gets its strength from a hatred of the present day and of the possible future”. Since, he adds, “our contemporaries only look at the future with fear and are sometimes persuaded that the present is a kind of hell on earth, a hatred of rationality is expressed with force in public debate, and used as much by those on the reactionary Right as by a no less reactionary Left”.
This line of reasoning means that not just genuine obscurantists but also others are all heaped together in the same pile: including those people who think that the ideas of liberty and equality extolled by the Enlightenment have been betrayed, and those people who think that from the start it lacked a conception of the universal that was less Western-centred than that used by those involved in the European Enlightenment. This includes people who favour decolonial thinking, something which is, incidentally, a regular target of both Gérald Bronner and Emmanuel Macron.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter