Lacking any clear political direction, especially one that marks a break with the social and economic damage caused by his first presidency, Emmanuel Macron is trying to maintain tight control over his public relations. And he is doing so even if this means putting pressure on the media.
This is what happened recently to Paul-Max Morin, a doctor in political science, research fellow at the CEVIPOF political science research centre and author of the book 'Les Jeunes et la guerre d’Algérie' ('Young people and the Algerian War') published by PUF in 2022. On Thursday September 1st the academic wrote an op-ed article in Le Monde following the French president's return from his trip to France's former colony Algeria, where Macron had spoken about the long history between the two countries. And in doing so the head of state had used the words “love story”.
In an extremely rare move, the newspaper later depublished this article, which was entitled: “Reducing colonisation in Algeria simply to a 'love story' completes Macron's rightwards drift on the issue of remembrance”.
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Le Monde's first attempt to justify this action stated: “This article was based on extracts from quotations that do not correspond to the essence of what the head of state said. While it can perhaps be subject to various interpretations, the phrase 'a love story which has its tragic side' pronounced by Mr Macron during the press conference did not specifically talk about colonisation, as stated in the article, but about Franco-Algerian relations over a long period. Le Monde offers its apologies to its readers as well as to the president of the Republic.”
The decision to remove the article prompted considerable criticism from political leaders and academics. The renowned economist Thomas Piketty Tweeted: “Inexplicable and inexcusable censorship by Le Monde newspaper. One can disagree with the article, not delete it because the Élysée doesn't like it.”
Several leaders on the Left, such as communist Fabien Roussel, socialist Olivier Faure, green Sandrine Rousseau and Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the radical left also reacted. Mélenchon, who created the NUPES leftwing alliance in the French National Assembly, wrote on Twitter: “Removing an opinion article over a Macron quote that he doesn't like! New stage in the collapse of what used to be a paper of record. Le Monde slants quotes the whole year. But when Macron frowns … I won't buy this newspaper next week.”
An op-ed that left the Élysée 'fuming'
Libération newspaper dissected the story in its CheckNews section, and gave Paul-Max Morin his say. The academic explained that following the publication of his op-ed in Le Monde he had “received an initial phone call from the newspaper [editor's note, on Thursday September 1st] informing me that 'the Élysée was fuming' and that changes had to be made”.
“I agreed to these changes because the wording didn't undermine the basic analysis,” said the political specialist. “But it wasn't able to be modified because half-an-hour later I received a second call telling me that the comment article had been withdrawn, because I had wrongly or over-interpreted the president's comments and that this analysis was shared by the special correspondents in Algeria who were opposed to its publication. I then proposed a new version putting the president's comments in a new context but this final draft was rejected.”
Meanwhile the newspaper's own explanation, said Paul-Max Morin, had “suggested that my interpretation was erroneous and justified apologies to the readers and to the president of the Republic. That harms my reputation as an academic,” he said. “My analysis is the result of lengthy research. I published a thesis on memories of the Algerian War, I questioned 3,000 young people, carried out hundreds of interviews. For years I've analysed Emmanuel Macron's actions and speeches, and the policy of remembrance [editor's note, in other words, how French involvement in Algeria is remembered] in a wider sense. In my view the shift to the right by Emmanuel Macron, noticed by my colleagues on other issues, also involves the question of how Algeria is remembered - a subject on which until now the president had had a left-leaning stance.”
The Élysée's anger was apparently due to the fact that, a few hours after Emmanuel Macron's initial declaration, the presidential communications service had issued a clarification about what he had said. In a message sent via a WhatsApp group to the journalists who were on the official visit to Algeria, someone from the comms department said: “Hello, I'd like to draw your attention to the quote below from the president just now at the press conference when he was of course speaking about the current relationship with Algeria and not of colonisation.”
Confronted with these different reactions, late on the afternoon of Friday September 2nd Le Monde published a second explanation of its actions, in which it said that the comment article had been approved “too quickly”. The newspaper explained: “After it was put online, several correspondents, among them a person in charge at the Élysée press office, informed us that the op-ed contained an error which led to a wrong interpretation of the comments made in Algiers by the head of state during the impromptu press conference that he held on August 26th when leaving the Saint Eugene Christian cemetery in Algiers.”
Taking the view that the comment article was based on a “factual error” and that it had not been able to “modify the content of the comment article in a way that made it factually accurate”, the newspaper once again backed its decision to depublish it.
However, the explanation remains rather tortuous. For on the very day that Emmanuel Macron had uttered the ambiguous phrase that his press office claimed to have clarified, the head of state had reiterated those remarks when he told members of the local French community that France's relationship with Algeria was “a story which has never been simple. But which is and will remain, because we want it to, a story of respect, of friendship and, I would go so far as to say, of love.”
While the French head of state thus never explicitly said that colonisation was a love story, he clearly used these words to cover the entirety of Franco-Algerian relations. Yet between 1830 and 1962 – the year of Algerian independence – this relationship was simply one of colonisation, a colonisation that had been started by a brutal conquest and which had ended with one of the dirtiest wars ever conducted by the French state.
What's left of the story if you take colonisation out of it? What are we speaking about?
As Paul-Max Morin told CheckNews: “In the end Le Monde offered to republish my comment article but without talking about the 'love story'. So it's therefore impossible to debate the president's comments. While the latter did not explicitly refer to colonisation, he certainly described the Franco-Algerian story as a love story. What's left of that story if you take colonisation out of it? What are we speaking about?”
Moreover, you do not have to be a blinkered disciple of post-colonial studies to understand that a colonial relationship does not end on the day that the former colony proclaims its independence, and that the infrastructure of domination and how it is represented lingers long after the formal colonial structure has gone.
Indeed, it is perhaps in this respect that the French head of state's words are most dubious and unfortunate. By employing the idea of a “love story” to describe relations between France and Algeria - in which colonisation and its legacy are the main determining factors - Emmanuel Macron is out of step with current historical scholarship which is studying the specific nature and centrality of rape in colonial relations. He is also at odds with an historic moment in society where there are attempts to clarify the 'grey area' that is used as a pretext by attackers to confuse rape and consent, or abuse and love.
A backwards-looking approach
As was noted in the collective work 'Sexualités, identités & corps colonisés' ('Colonised sexualities, identities and bodies') published by the CNRS research centre in 2020 “sexuality and racial hierarchies were part of the organisation of power in empires and the invention of trans-national popular imagination. Deconstructing the colonial viewpoints which are omnipresent in our representations means facing up to this globalised sexual hegemony and this past, as complex as it may be. This is the price for making possible the decolonisation of our imaginations.”
Many works have shown how the bodies of colonised women have always been at the centre of the colonial process, not just as potential bounty, but also because their supposed emancipation – of which the well-known “unveiling ceremonies” that took place during the Algerian War were the most spectacular form – was part of the justification for France's so-called mission to “civilise”.
So likening the story of relations between France and Algeria to a love story is to completely miss the dimension of violence – in particular sexual violence – that has been present for a long time, certain representations of which still persist to this day.
This is true even if, as the Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe wrote in an introduction to the 2018 collective work 'Sexe, race et colonies. La domination des corps du XVe siècle à nos jours' – which caused a row because it republished unbearable images of bodies being groped – the colonial relationship cannot simply be boiled down to one of rape.
“In the implementation of sexuality in a colonial situation there is more than just the pleasure of an object, and the phallocracy is not the only aspect of desire,” he wrote. “It doesn't all come down to sexual grabbing and taking. The ability to experience emotions, to form attachments and to feel love remains, even if, because of the racist structure, they manifest themselves in opaque ways.”
Although as a presidential candidate in 2017 Emmanuel Macron had insisted that he was part of a new generation that wanted to finish with the war of words over how colonial rule in Algeria should be remembered, and although during a visit to the country he spoke of colonisation as a “crime against humanity”, in 2022 President Macron is now evoking a view that is at best one of compromise, and at worst backwards-looking.
Publisher François Gèze and historians Gilles Manceron, Fabrice Riceputi and Alain Ruscio, who write the blog 'Histoire coloniale et post-coloniale' on Mediapart Club, ended their entry on Saturday September 2nd with these words: “We are also loyal readers of the daily Le Monde where talented journalists provide useful analysis. This incredible decision taken in the name of the newspaper appears to have been imposed on these journalists by shareholders. That is what worries us.”
Our journalists are in no sense and never will be a tool to serve your comms and your policies.
However, it is the title of their blog, 'The Élysée's shocking intervention after an op-ed in Le Monde' which surely raises the greatest concern - even if a reaction from the paper's union branch [editor's note, the Société de journalistes or SDJ] would be welcome - given that the decision to depublish the article in question seems to have been more of a political than a journalistic one.
The desire of the Élysée to see the media more as a mouthpiece for its comms than as a vehicle for journalism was also evident very recently in a different case. Speaking to France's ambassadors on September 1st President Macron urged them to “use the France Médias Monde network [editor's note, the FMM is the international branch of France's public broadcasting network] to “confront Russian, Chinese or Turkish narratives”.
This earned the president a stinging rebuke from the SDJ branch representing journalists at RFI, the radio arm of this network. Under the title “No, Mr Macron, the FMM is not the Élysée's spokesperson” the SDJ said in a statement: “ Mr President, while the editorial teams at RFI, FRANCE 24 and Monte Carlo Doualiya [editor's note, which broadcasts to the Arab world] work ceaselessly and conscientiously to deconstruct 'the narratives', and to track down fake news from where it comes, our journalists are in no sense and never will be a tool to serve your comms and your policies. FMM's stations are not 'state media' like those which exist in the countries cited in your speech to the ambassadors.”
Another sign of the Élysée's strong desire to controls its comms is the announcement of a new advisor in this area, Frédéric Michel. This replacement for Clément Léonarduzzi – who has worked for the president for two years – is a 50-year-old Frenchman who has forged his entire career as a spin doctor in Great Britain the United States, first of all as an advisor to former British premier Tony Blair and then to media magnate Rupert Murdoch, chair and CEO of News Corp and the man who set up Fox News in the US.
Frédéric Michel later became close to Rupert Murdoch's son James Murdoch whom he advised to finance – along with the film producer Renaud Le Van Kim – the French digital media firm Brut. He has also worked with the French banker Matthieu Pigasse and became, just a few months before this year's French presidential election, managing director at the cultural magazine Les Inrocks. At the Élysée he will have the title of advisor on communications but also on strategy. This suggests he will play a role similar to that performed by Ismaël Émelien at the start of Macron's first presidency in 2017. Émelien, who resigned in 2019, was often described as the “brain” behind Macron’s 2017 election and subsequent policy decisions.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter