Highs and lows

Humble beginnings

On the day (21 March 2013) First Minister Alex Salmond announced that the long-awaited referendum on Scottish independence would take place on 18 September 2014, few French dailies or news websites took up the story. The Figaro newspaper dedicated just two and a half lines to the issue while another right-wing media site, Atlantico.fr, merely had two short paragraphs in the news-in-brief section, inspired in part by what RTBF, Belgium's main radio and TV channel, had said about it earlier that day. Les Echos, the daily that specialises in financial and economic news, and Le Parisien, France's biggest daily in terms of copies sold (some 500,000 a day), were apparently uninterested, while Le Monde, surprisingly, preferred to publish an article on David Beckham. Only in Libération, the well-known left-wing daily, did the Scottish referendum make the headlines, with an Agence France Presse (AFP) 650-word contribution on the announcement itself and its possible implications.

Any Scotland-loving reader, or anyone simply interested in international politics, would have been disappointed again on the following day as none of the above-mentioned papers actually took up the subject. True, the French press had plenty on their plate at that time, with Obama's visit to both Israel and Palestine and the announcement that former President Nicolas Sarkozy had been indicted in the Bettencourt case (he was alleged to have taken illegal donations from France's richest woman in the run-up to his 2007 election victory). In the following weeks, it seems the Scottish referendum was dealt with at least once; GEO, France's equivalent to the National Geographic, adopted a pan-EU perspective, the emphasis being on those regions – such as Flanders or Catalonia – that (so the story ran) insist upon no longer sharing their valuable assets with their respective centres.

The summer of 2013 saw little change. The economic going was getting tougher, with both the national deficit and unemployment increasing despite an array of policies designed by the Hollande government to curb them, and so any in-depth article or radio/TV programme about the Scottish referendum was bound to go more or less unnoticed.