Something strange happened at this year’s Cannes Film Festival: A number of French films were greeted with loud boos and cries of “Fascist!” The audiences were not booing the films themselves, or castigating the films’ directors. Rather, they were responding to the opening credit for Canal+, the company that financed them (and around half of all French film productions). To be specific, they were booing the largest shareholder in Canal+, the billionaire entrepreneur Vincent Bolloré, whose Vivendi group has effective control. Canal+ remains an exemplary organization that produces excellent films, many of them about oppressed populations and created by African and Caribbean filmmakers. But during press conferences for this year’s slate of Canal+ films, journalists only wanted to talk about Bolloré. The immediate context for their interest was an open letter that appeared in the venerable left-wing newspaper Libération shortly before the festival opened. In it, 600 cinema professionals denounced Bolloré and, by extension, Canal+, by asking, “Do we want to take the risk that tomorrow it will only be films of propaganda in service of an ideology that will be financed?” The most-quoted phrase from the open letter alleged a “fascist seizure of control of the collective imagination.”
The head of the company, Maxime Saad, reacted by saying that all 600 signatories were now blacklisted and would never work on Canal+ funded films again. “If they are going to call Canal+ ‘crypto-fascist’ then I can’t accept working with them,” he said. But the online petition associated with the original letter has since grown to 3,500 signatories, including a number of international cinema heavyweights such as British director Ken Loach and Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki. Bolloré has indeed imposed a far-right agenda on his myriad media properties. Notable instances include the Journal de Dimanche, which he acquired in 2023, provoking a strike by journalists against a sudden swing to the right; the radio stations Europe 1 and RFM; the iconic magazine Paris Match; a roster of celebrity and women’s magazines; and a number of book publishers owned by his Hachette group. But so far, journalists have only dredged up one possible case of such interference with Canal+, involving an allegation he personally quashed financing for a film that dealt with child abuse by French Catholic priests. Bolloré has indeed imposed a far-right agenda on his myriad media properties. This would track with Bolloré’s politics. A supporter of various religious groups and projects over the years, he is an old-fashioned fanatical Catholic who carries pictures and medals of saints with him at all times. He supports various “traditionalist” Catholic causes, which in France is code for extremely conservative, if not fascist-adjacent. While not all far-right groups in France claim Catholic inspiration, many do, and Bolloré describes his politics as “Christian democrat,” the Christianity in question being of the ultra-right-wing variety. Over the last 20 years, Bolloré has drifted further and further into political action. He has selected and backed particular candidates, and at the same time gone on a media buying spree, snapping up publishers, TV stations, newspapers and other media operations — and changing their editorial policies to back his favored candidates. The delayed furor over his cinema operations was triggered by his takeover of UGC, a large chain of movie theaters, which the Libération signatories claim will give him control over the entire production chain of cinema in France. Bolloré denies any political agenda. He points out that he doesn’t watch TV, and claims he only chose to invest in the media sector because it is so profitable. The signatories of the Libération petition plainly don’t believe this. But since there is no direct evidence of a project to turn French cinema into a propaganda machine, they draw attention to other activities, such as his long involvement in French-speaking West Africa, where he has been before the courts for alleged interference in presidential elections in Togo and Guinea. The idea seems to be that this is proof he will try the same thing in France itself. The question is whether there exists an untapped electorate for Bolloré-style “traditionalist” Catholicism. While recent demonstrations against gay marriage have brought out large crowds, no important political party — including Marine Le Pen’s National Rally — has dared to adopt his fringe religious worldview.
The first candidate Bolloré ever backed was Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France from 2007 to 2012. It was not an auspicious start to his career as a kingmaker. Days after Sarkozy’s election victory, he was photographed aboard Bolloré’s yacht, taking a family cruise to Malta. This did not go down well with the new president’s working-class supporters, and may have been an early kiss of death for Sarkozy’s presidency. Denied a second term, Sarkozy in 2025 became the first president of the republic to see the inside of a jail cell, for campaign finance violations and other questionable moves. While in prison, he claims to have found God, and last December Bolloré thoughtfully took the former president to Lourdes on his private jet to wash away his sins in holy water. They both seem to have believed (wrongly) that this would lead to a miraculous political second coming for Sarko. In the meantime, Bolloré had identified another unlikely contender: the anti-Islam journalist-turned-political-candidate Éric Zemmour, who ran for president against Emmanuel Macron in 2022 and received a fair amount of media coverage, partly due to Bolloré pulling strings. After getting 7% of the vote, he tried to set up as a deputy in southeast France’s Var region, but he and all the candidates from his party were eliminated in the first round. He has also been condemned before the courts several times for racism, incitement to racial hatred and related offenses.
But if Bolloré’s track record in backing political candidates is reassuringly terrible, his media agenda is only gaining momentum. What typically happens is this: He buys a media operation and all the writers leave, sometimes encouraged by the editors he has put in charge, but mostly because his name is toxic for the intellectual left and the entirety of Gen Z. In Bolloré’s own words, the young view him as “the common enemy. The worst of the worst.”
He wisely avoids giving media interviews, but in March this year he was summoned before a parliamentary committee investigating public financing of TV and was questioned before the cameras for two hours. He shrugged off any suggestion of fascist sympathies. “I tick all the boxes of everything they hate,” he said, referring to the left-wing media elites. “A family business. Happy employees. I even have a chapel in the garden.” During the questioning, he discussed his new think tank, the Institute of Hope, which is expected to release a manifesto this spring dominated by familiar Catholic themes, such as opposition to abortion. What typically happens is this: He buys a media operation and all the writers leave. It is not yet clear how Bolloré fits into the equation of next year’s presidential elections. When Macron’s presidency comes to an end after two terms, it looks as if the coalition of centrists and democratic socialists that has kept the far right out of power for decades may collapse, leading to a polarized confrontation between the hard left, with Jean-Luc Mélenchon of France Unbowed leading the charge, and the far right, led by Le Pen, who is currently banned from holding public office after a financing scandal. If her appeal against her sentence fails, her deputy, the glamorous but rather lightweight Jordan Bardella, will stand on the ballot. They are at present in first and second place, respectively, in national popularity polls — well ahead of Macron and Mélenchon.
Bolloré has not yet taken any concrete steps to favor a presidential candidate for 2027, but the fear is that he has learned from his mistakes, and this time will put the weight of his media empire behind the Le Pen machine, rather than trying to push an outsider. Although many analysts claim this has already happened, there is no word from the man himself. As he is officially retired at 74, the Bolloré Group is run by his son, Cyrille, and on May 27 the sixth-generation CEO of the family business attended a shareholders’ assembly to address the accusations of fascism. “Neither I nor my father understand what political position it is that the family is supposed to be taking,” he said. “It is all a huge lie.” One question looming over the election is how far the National Rally may move toward Bolloré’s traditionalism. Although his last political protégé, commentator Éric Zemmur, came from a family of North African Jews with a Berber background, the candidate propounded the Catholic Church as the basis of French identity in his electoral message. This is farther than Le Pen has been willing to go; the hereditary leader of the French far-right describes herself as a “nonpracticing Catholic” and has completely avoided the kind of aggressive Catholicism that matters most for Bolloré. Aligning herself with his views would suggest that the anti-Islam position that is her biggest vote winner was based on a Holy War concept. Given the explicitly secular legal environment in French politics, that is unlikely to fly. Marine Le Pen is a canny, experienced politician in a way that Bolloré certainly is not. She has spent her life in the far-right movement founded by her father, and knows that “nonpracticing Catholic” is a good summary of her voters’ religious feelings. If Vincent Bolloré is really going to use his immense power in the media to push a kind of Catholicism that more or less died out in France 50 years ago, he could find himself pushing a futile agenda, without a party or a viable candidate that takes him seriously, in spite of his media reach and despite all the excited shouting and booing in Cannes.
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