Until 1982 television was a state monopoly in France. Before World War II the state had the monopoly of the Hertzian waves but was, by and large, non-interventionist. After the war the state inherited the organization put in place by the Germans during the Occupation. In 1945 the Radiodiffusion Télévision Française (RTF) was established as a public service attached to the government but placed under the tutelage of the Ministry of Information—and, after 1969, of the prime minister. Until deregulation in 1982 the RTF was—under various guises—the official voice of the state. In 1964, coinciding with the second channel, Antenne 2 (which was geared to broadcast in colour, introduced in France in 1970), the RTF was renamed the ORTF (Office de la Radio Télévision Française). In 1974 the ORTF was disbanded and broken up into seven different offices, a separate office for each radio and television branch (by 1973 the third channel, FR3, had been launched). This attempt at decentralizing did not, however, bring about a lessening of state intervention.
In 1982 the Socialist government voted a new audio-visual policy that would set in place a programme of deregulation, first, to stem state interventionist practices and, secondly, to expand the number of channels available. With regard to the first set of measures, all television channels were by 1990 governed by an independent authority, the Conseil Supérieur de l'Audiovisuel (CSA). The CSA was responsible for the appointment of the director of public-sector television and the allocation of its budgets, fixing of the licence fee, the content of broadcast advertisements (brand advertising was introduced in 1968), and for ensuring that the television channels' respective charters (cahiers des charges) were properly observed. On the more political front, the CSA ensured parity of exposure to all political parties.
With regard to the second measure, France had in 1990 seven terrestrial channels, three of which were state owned (A2, FR3, La Sept); three private (TF1, La5, M6), and Canal Plus, a pay-TV (also private). Apart from Canal Plus (a movie and sports channel) and La Sept (the cultural channel), all the other channels were generalist ones (FR3 broadcast only a small percentage of regional programmes), which meant a predominant tendency towards a similarity in programming, especially in prime time.
On average, the French daily consumption of television amounts to three-and-a-half hours. TF1 is the favourite channel by far, and programme predilection is for game and variety shows, news at 8 p.m., American series, sports programmes, and films.
Deregulation, especially, brought in its wake a decline in programme quality. However, the beginnings of this decline reach back as far as the early 1970s when President Pompidou forced the channels to be ‘homologues mais compétitives’. Ever since, innovation has been on the wane and the science of programming on the ascendant. The golden age of television (1950-70) saw the first ‘journal télévisé’ in the world (1949); France was at the fore-front of investigative journalism in the 1960s with its Cinq colonnes à la Une; literary adaptations abounded, and films were specially commissioned for television (the very first was Bresson's Mouchette, 1966, an adaptation of the Bernanos novel). In 1970, and in the light of Pompidou's decree, everything changed. To secure a faithful audience the idea occurred to TF1 of presenting literary adaptations in serialized form; in 1970 a French version of the BBC's Forsyte Saga was broadcast in 15 episodes. The success with audience ratings was undeniable, and from this moment on most literary adaptations were programmed in this way—structurally resembling soap-opera. In the 1980s, given the increasing costs of making drama productions, the next stage was to transfer this successful formula to less expensive productions (single location, fixed sets, cameo performances by stars, etc). It was in this way that Châteauvallon (France's first soap) was conceived and, a bit later, the sitcom Maguy. The author too has had (and still has) a voice on TV, either through the dynamic but now defunct Apostrophes or the subsequent, more anodine Ex Libris. The tradition of satire is still alive, though on a lesser scale than in the heyday of Jean-Claude Averty's surreal satirical shows (Les Raisins verts, 1960s), in the form of Le Bébête Show.
The paradox for French television remains, therefore, that, although it is more depoliticized than ever before, nevertheless it has become an industry where capital rules, and in so doing has lost its public-service mission to inform, educate, and entertain.
[Susan Hayward]
