FRANCE: French politicians, actors, film directors and media yesterday rallied behind Mr Pierre Lescure, the president of the pay television channel Canal +, after he was sacked by the millionaire financier Mr Jean-Marie Messier, widely accused of "selling out to the Americans", writes Lara Marlowe, in Paris
Four days before the presidential election, the confrontation between Mr Messier and staff and television viewers loyal to Mr Lescure is being compared to a factory workers' rebellion, or the student revolt of May 1968.
Mr Messier is the chairman of Vivendi Universal (VU), the world's second largest communications group. In 2000, he engineered the merger between the former French utilities company CGE - which was already the main shareholder of the Canal + channel - and Seagrams Distillers, which owned the Universal film and music studios.
VU is the parent company of Connex, which recently won a €127 million contract to operate the Luas light rail system in Dublin. In an unprecedented example of reality television, Canal + staff took over a live broadcast on Tuesday night to protest at the sacking of their president, chanting "Lescure Pre-si-dent". Visibly moved, Mr Lescure took the floor.
"Messier's ego is as big as the Himalayas," he said. "I find his contempt for myself and the people at Canal + sickening." Mr Lescure was one of the station's founders, and is popular in artistic circles. Mr Messier blamed him for €500 million losses last year, but 80 per cent of those losses resulted from competition with Mr Rupert Murdoch's "Stream" channel in Italy.
The French football team and 250 cinema personalities, including Mr Lescure's former companion Catherine Deneuve, the actresses Carole Bouquet and Juliette Binoche and the directors Bertrand Tavernier, Emir Kusturica, David Lynch and Mathieu Kassovitz, expressed support for Mr Lescure. Under its original charter, Canal + must recycle 20 per cent of its earnings into French cinema production - a commitment that Mr Messier has tried to wriggle out of.
Prime Minister Mr Lionel Jospin asked the High Audiovisual Council to investigate the sacking.
President Jacques Chirac said that Vivendi "must remain French" and five other presidential candidates sided with Mr Lescure.
The communist candidate, Mr Robert Hue, called Mr Messier's action brutal and dictatorial. "Anything that is not financially profitable he sets aside and crushes," Mr Hue said. "It's the American method taken to extremes."
The Green candidate, Mr Noel Mamére said Mr Messier represented "the caricature of globalisation that we are all fighting". Mr Messier was initially hailed as a dynamic Frenchman "taking on the Americans in their own backyard". But his image soured when he moved into a €20 million apartment on Park Avenue, New York, at Vivendi's expense. At a press conference in New York, Mr Messier said the French exception culturelle (state subsidies for the arts) was dead. He compounded the damage by announcing in Los Angeles that he still loved his "small exotic country".
Since it was established in 1984, Canal + transformed French television by broadcasting films before they reached the cinema, live football matches and irreverent news programmes including Les Guignols de l'info , the French version of Spitting Image. The Guignols never liked Mr Messier, whom they dubbed "J6Ms" - shorthand for "Jean-Marie Messier Moi-Meme Maitre du Monde" (master of the world).
In a satirical article in Time magazine, Mr Bruno Gaccio, the head writer for Les Guignols, mocked Mr Messier and summed up opposing US and French visions of the world. "I come from a small, exotic country, France . . . which has a great number of citizens with no ambition other than to have a beautiful life," he writes.
Mr Messier came under pressure from investors as VU's share price fell nearly 40 per cent since January. But his net salary increased 80 per cent, to €2.38 million last year.