France Analysis

Macron takes on the press with move to sue paparazzi

French president Emmanuel Macron has lodged a legal complaint for “harassment” and “violation of personal privacy” against a photographer he alleges entered the private property in Marseille where the president and his wife Brigitte were holidaying. The photographer, Thibaut Daliphard, denies trespassing but was arrested and questioned for six hours in custody, when his computer and images were studied by police. Thomas Cantaloube and Michaël Hajdenberg report on the events which highlight Macron’s very firm control of his public image and the journalists who follow him, and also the highly questionable legal move of a president who is by virtue of the French constitution immune to prosecution.

Thomas Cantaloube and Michaël Hajdenberg

This article is freely available.

French president Emmanuel Macron last weekend filed a legal complaint against a photographer who he alleges had entered the private property in Marseille where Macron and his wife Brigitte were holidaying.

The photographer, Thibaut Daliphard, disputes the claim that he trespassed in the gated residential park where the Macron couple were staying in a villa, but he was held by police for six hours of questioning and faces possible prosecution, if Macron’s complaint for “harassment” and “violation of personal privacy” is upheld by the justice system.

With the exception of Nicolas Sarkozy, no French president since 1974 has ever taken legal action against the media, and Macron’s move raises questions about his perceptions of his relationship with the the press – and also justice system.

The refusal of his predecessors, save one, to file legal complaints was for reasons of principle, as former president François Hollande underlined after the celebrity gossip magazine Closer published photos of him riding pillion on a scooter for a tryst with the actress Julie Gayet, and which led to his separation from his long-term partner Valérie Trierweiler. “I am president of the republic, I am protected by [legal] immunity,” said Hollande, speaking on January 14tth 2014, days after the publication of the photos. “I cannot be [legally] attacked. Can I attack others? It’s a question of principle. Everything should lead me, as a citizen, to take action against this publication. If I restrain myself, it’s precisely because I don’t want there to be two sets of rules.”

Illustration 1
Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron photographed on a bike tour together in Le Touquet on June 17th. © Reuters

No law prevents a president from taking legal action, and Charles de Gaulle, who established France’s current constitution of the Fifth Republic in 1958, took legal action on several occasions against publications, essentially those of the far-right, for “offending the head of state”. His successor, Georges Pompidou, was successful in his legal action in 1973 against the newspaper Combat which had been critical of his use of the presidential right to pardon convicted criminals. Nicolas Sarkozy took legal action on several occasions at the beginning of his presidential term, from 2007 to 2012, notably in 2008 against several companies marketing T-shirts with slogans that were mocking of him.

Article 67 of the French constitution says that “the president of the republic is not responsible for acts carried out in that function”, (although the constitution does allow for a process of destitution). “During their term of office, they cannot, before any jurisdiction or administrative authority, be required to testify nor also be the object of [legal] proceedings, investigation or prosecution,” details the text of the Article.

With the legal action now taken by Emmanuel Macron, who by virtue of the constitution is immune to investigation and prosecution, there vis a danger that the balance of justice will tip in his favour. The arrested photographer firmly refutes the allegations against him. “I’ve been doing this job for ten years,” Thibaut Daliphard, who runs a photo agency called E-Press, and which falls into the category of paparazzi photography, said in an interview with RMC/BFMTV on Wednesday. “I have never intruded in a private property, [and] I certainly wasn’t going to begin with that of Emmanuel Macron.” Daliphard, because of the legal protection afforded to French presidents, is not able to launch a legal counter attack against Macron, should he wish to.

Meanwhile, the reason that the president has not lodged a complaint against the photographer for trespassing is unclear, the Elysée Palace offering Mediapart the explanation that, “The photographer was not on the private property when he was arrested”, which suggests that the law requires that the photographer be caught in the act of so doing. But questioned further, the presidential office refused to offer any additional comment, arguing that this was because Macron’s complaint was now the object of judicial proceedings. It also refused to give the name of the lawyer representing the president, nor would it comment on Macron’s break with the attitude of numerous past presidents who refrained from such legal action.

The complaint is being considered by the Marseille public prosecutor’s office, which must decide if there are grounds to take further action. Contacted by Mediapart, the Marseille prosecutor’s office refused to comment on the case, a spokesperson saying “communication by phone” was not possible. Its written response was hardly more informative.

The public prosecutor’s office is an institution ultimately answerable to the Minister of Justice, which prompts the question as to whether the status of the person who lodged the complaint exerts a pressure, albeit perceived and indirect, on the magistrates in charge of the case. Could they decide to throw out the complaint without fear of consequences from their political hierarchy? For one of the issues raised by Macron’s legal action is that of the relationship between political power and the justice system.     

In September 2016, just after Macron had left his post of economy minister in Hollande’s government to run as candidate in the presidential elections, he declared that he had launched legal action against French weekly France Dimanche for having published a headline under a photo of Macron and his wife which read “He’s divorcing”, an ambiguous reference to his resignation. It is unclear if the complaint was ever lodged with a public prosecutor’s office or whether Macron’s announcement was intended as a warning shot fired across the bows of the press. The Paris public prosecutor’s office, the most likely to have been in charge of considering the complaint, told Mediapart it had never received notification of it. The prosecutor's office in the other possible legal jurisdiction where it may have been lodged, that of Nanterre, west of Paris, was unable to reply to Mediapart’s questions before this article was first published in French on Wednesday.

Until then, however, Macron did not appear concerned about the massive media coverage centring on him, when he staged photo calls involving himself and also his wife, with the Macron couple pictured together in supposedly private moments, such as walking hand in hand on a beach.

The SNJ-CGT journalists’ union issued a statement in reaction to the news of Macron’s legal complaint against Daliphard last Sunday. While critical of the celebrity gossip press for which Thibaut Daliphard supplies pictures, the SNJ-CGT said it “cannot accept seeing the president of the republic, who has largely used and over-used the press, both ‘celebrity gossip’ and news [types], lodge a complaint against a photographer”.

“We note that a few hours after [the arrest of the Daliphard], Emmanuel Macron multiplied poses [for photos] and used several social media to immortalize his visit to the footballers at the Olympique de Marseille [football club] on August 15th,” added the union, which concluded that it believed Macron’s action against Daliphard was both “another demonstration” by the president of his control of PR communications “and to address a message to the journalistic profession”.

The action against Daliphard has caused irritation and a degree of concern among press photographers contacted by Mediapart, including those who are not among the paparazzi. None wanted to be named in this article, for fear of being blacklisted from official presidential coverage, but the annoyance at the control exerted by the presidential office over the pictures they are allowed to take was expressed in very much similar terms. “Macron uses photographers, and in particular the paparazzo, since the beginning,” said one veteran photographer who has worked for numerous press agencies. “He has mounted a whole system of communication around so-called stolen shots which are in fact perfectly managed by his staff.”

One press photographer wrote on his Facebook account: “This complaint for harassment takes the cake! The ‘official’ photographer (apart from Soazig de la Moissonnière) who follows Emmanuel Macron since the election campaign, with his agreement and the complicity of the presidential couple, is none other than the paparazzi Sébastien Valiela, who took the pictures of Julie Gayet and François Hollande, and also Mazarine, the hidden daughter of [the late former French president] François Mitterrand. He works for Michèle Marchand, the director of Bestimage, photo agency specialized in celebrity coverage. With this complaint, it is certainly not a question of ‘the protection of privacy’ but above all the total control of the image and to protect the deal that ties the Macrons to ‘Mimi’ [Marchand].”

Michèle Marchand, nicknamed “Mimi”, is well known, at least by reputation, among the world of photographers in Paris. In a detailed portrait of her published in April, the French edition of Vanity Fair said she “pulls the strings of the celebrity press”. The magazine reported that she became close to Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron as of spring 2016 and constantly advised on, and organised, the official public image of Macron during his election campaign. It was Marchand who conceived the photo sequence in which Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron, the latter dressed in a swimsuit, were seen walking hand in hand on a beach.

According to Vanity Fair, she offered her advice on how to deal with the wave of rumours circulating among the tout Paris, when he was economy minister, that Macron was homosexual. The magazine said the Macrons met with paparazzi  Sébastien Valente (who was previously also an officially commissioned photographer for Nicolas Sarkozy when he was president), to find out where the rumours were coming from. Valente would later cover Macron’s presidential election campaign alongside Thibaut Daliphard, both accredited for the latter’s agency E-Press.

Illustration 2
Photographers join a staged scene of Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte walking in the countryside.
Illustration 3
This is how the scene appeared in pictures published in the press.

A number of press photographers told Mediapart that they see Daliphard’s arrest and the complaint lodged by Macron as also being a consequence of the rivalry between photo agencies specialized in paparazzi-style pictures. One of them recalled an interview published in weekly news magazine L’Obs in March this year with Sylvain Fort, who was then a spokesman for Macron’s En Marche! movement (now renamed La République En Marche!, or LREM), and who is now his speechwriter. “There is a contract of moral exclusivity with Bestimage,” said Fort about the photo coverage of Macron and his wife. “That allows for a better control of their image, the choice of photos of them that circulate. When they are victims of a paparazzi they call up a photographer from the agency. That way they’re sure to have the images that are most to their advantage.”

A photographer who is more experienced in covering world conflicts and general news than celebrities told Mediapart: “Macron wants to control his communications and his image at any price. He gave special access to Bestimage, which found through that a super client. Opposite them they have Daliphard and E-Press, which has less access and which knows that a photo that’s not controlled very often has bigger impact and sales.”

But beyond the questions of photo agency rivalry, the world of communications teams, and the habits of paparazzi, the press photographers voiced particular concern over Daliphard's arrest, and the search of his computer and memory sticks. “Six hours in custody for questioning, screening of images, the same practice as in totalitarian countries,” wrote the photographer cited earlier from his Facebook account. Another, with 30 years’ experience in his job, told Mediapart: “I’ve been forced twice to show my pictures in order to control my work. Each time it was in undemocratic countries.”

In an interview with Europe 1 radio station on Wednesday, Laurent Saint-Martin, a Member of Parliament from Macron's LREM party, attempted to justify the president’s decision to lodge the complaint against Daliphard. “The head of state is also seeking through this move to mark a break in his relations with the press,” he said, referring to a break in the relations with the press that Macron’s predecessor François Hollande maintained. “There is the will to tell the media that there’s not an ‘open bar’.”

But creating restricted access to the president, reserved to a few, is another matter, just as journalism is not the same profession as that of public relations communications. This apparent confusion at the Elysée emerged in an article published in French daily Le Monde earlier this month, before Daliphard’s arrest. It brushed a portrait of two of Macron’s closest team, senior advisor Ismaël Emelien, and Elyséee Palace secretary general Alexis Kohler, under the headline “Emmanuel Macron, Alexis Kohler, Ismaël Emelien: this trio that governs France”. It reported that Emelien “has the upper hand on opinion surveys and communications strategy, but refuses to have contact with journalists, who he is wary of and dislikes.”

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  • The French version of this article can be found here.

English version by Graham Tearse