The controversy surrounding Vincent Bolloré, the megarich media tycoon who in recent years has helped finance France’s film industry, evokes a remarkable series of parallels with a British plutocrat of an earlier generation.
Mr Bolloré, of whom most outside France and the Francosphere had never heard until a group of 600 actors and other ‘film professionals’ picked a fight with him, is accused of helping orchestrate ‘the growing grip of the far-right’ on French cinema.
With a deliberate absence of tact, the ‘professionals’ published their assault on him in the left-wing newspaper Libération on the eve of the Cannes Film Festival, while the eyes of the world were fixed on the Croisette.
The tycoon is the main shareholder in Canal+, which funds many of France’s films.
Its subsidiary, StudioCanal, also co-produces films and has a massive international distribution network.
In return, Canal+ has issued an effective blacklist of people who complained about the influence of Mr Bolloré, saying it simply will not work with them.
Christian values of old cinema
To those who know a little about the history of British films, this starts to sound a little familiar.
In the early 1930s, a man called J Arthur Rank, whose family had made a fortune as flour millers in Yorkshire, realised the utility of the cinema in furthering a cause dear to his heart: Christian values.
He was a devout Methodist, and initially funded films to show to Methodist congregations to facilitate biblical teaching.
However, he soon realised that the message could be propagated more subtly, and more widely, in feature films of the sort that people flocked to see in cinemas, often several times a week.
Although Hollywood at the time was famed for its prudishness, Rank felt that the way of life its films portrayed – and American films, then as now, dominated the programming in British cinemas – was dangerously decadent.
To help put this right, he started to use his fortune to fund the British film industry.
By the late 1940s, Rank was not only the biggest producer of British films, his eponymous organisation also owned about two-thirds of the nation’s cinemas (and this at a time when around two million cinema seats were sold a week).
The studios he funded, such as Ealing, had to look over scripts very carefully in case they risked infringing Rank’s moral code.
Britain, of course, had a strict censorship code, but Rank’s, if anything, was even stricter.
'Civilisational project'
Times and mores were different in the 1930s and 1940s, but the strait-laced films that the British cinema generally turned out bore little relation to the often baroque private lives of many who starred in or made them.
They, however, were never so stupid as to complain about the world view of the man who paid their salaries and bills, and who expected conformity in return for his investment in them: they just thought of the cheque.
Cross to France, and fast forward 80 or 90 years, and we come to Mr Bolloré.
Those 600 people in the French acting world published a statement arguing that he “makes no secret of the fact that he is leading a reactionary, far-right ‘civilisational project’”.
They added: “While the influence of this ideological offensive on the content of films has been discreet so far, we are under no illusions: it will not last.”
With an apparent lack of understatement, the signatories also accused Mr Bolloré of engineering “a fascist takeover of the collective imagination”.
There is a strong element of hysteria in this.
Mr Bolloré’s politics are certainly on the right, and he and his various media concerns were influential in securing collaboration at the time of the 2024 elections between the Rassemblement National and Les Républicains.
Some of his news outlets have given what many regard as excessive exposure to Eric Zemmour, the hard-right politician and provocateur.
But it seems there are other considerations behind the creative classes’ loathing of him.
Far right views
Across the world, the acting profession has increasingly allied itself with leftist politics, and in France has not much liked the Bolloré organisation’s chronic taunting of La France Insoumise and its figurehead, Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
But then, to many people, that party and its leader appear inherently extreme to the point of absurdity; and if it has upset some actors, then it suggests that they, and not Mr Bolloré, are alarmingly out of touch.
They accuse Mr Bolloré of having a “civilisational project” based on his “far-right” views: but then doubtless the magnate would retort that all they want is to have a civilisational project based on their values instead, with which he profoundly disagrees.
If the 600 can find an alternative source of funding, good for them.
However, they appear to be on the verge of encountering a traditional obstacle for the left: although they detest capitalism, unless they live in a sort of Soviet-style society they will have to rely on the fruits of enterprise to keep them all in work.
That, in short, is the reality check.
In Britain, the acting profession has bought into the diversity and inclusion agenda – which is good in principle, but has led to the denunciation of JK Rowling for her views on self-declared gender identity.
So far, the forces of capital have not confronted them. Activist actors condemn others for intolerance, but are intolerant themselves of views they do not share.
Around the world, those who fund creativity will watch with interest what happens next in France.
I suspect Mr Bolloré will find plenty of impoverished ‘film professionals’ happy to work on his terms, and that formerly prominent actors will dislike their incomes plummeting, and will seek an accommodation.
