The Revolution on Television

In my youth, self-dramatizing revolutionaries stood on chairs at meetings and waved the Little Red Book of Chairman Mao. Yesterday, Olivier Besancenot sat on the Big Red Couch of Michel Drucker and laughed in complicity when a comedian mockingly implied that his appearance neatly and completely deconstructed every word he spoke. Since I didn't see the show, I will refer you to the interesting analysis by Jean-Baptiste Thoret on Bakchich: "If one can say anything on television--and one can say anything even, or especially, on Drucker's program [with its resolutely nonpartisan, consensual, bluff, unthreatening, unanlytical, and unintellectual tone]--it is as if one said nothing."

In other words, Besancenot can appear on television because no one is threatened by the revolutionary sensibility he claims to represent. Anyone can sympathize--at a safe distance--with a whole litany of good causes: the undocumented, the oppressed, the underpaid, the overworked; for two hours, no one in the implied audience is a racist, a capitalist, a financier, or an overprivileged beneficiary of an increasingly unequal, unbalanced, and uncorrectable set of social arrangements. But who could possibly want to overthrow a system that so cheerfully tolerates the exposure of its worst flaws? Isn't it wonderful that we listen to their denunciation as raptly as we delight in the culinary preferences of Thierry Lhermitte or Rachida Dati's choice of couturier? Then the program ends, and it's on to the football match, the evening film, or the news in which a histrionic Bernard Kouchner all but promises to commandeer a landing craft and lead a commando raid on Burma, dagger in teeth, to bring food and medicine to yet another group of victims with whom we sympathize cathodiquement for 7 minutes and 30 seconds.

For a contrary though not altogether perspicuous view of Besancenot and the media, see Philippe Bilger.