I know! A 50 year old billionaire has a PDA with a 20 year old Belgian swimsuit model, and this is news. In France! Quelle horreur!
It just goes to show how much a little YouTube combined with a little YouKnowWhat can go a long long way.
To understand why France suddenly cares about an old rich dude, not even a married old rich dude, having fun with Ms Jade Foret and her “twins”, requires you to know three things:
- The old rich dude is Arnaud Lagardere, head of the powerful Lagardere Group- you may not know the name, but it owns a lot of publishing and print media. Publishers such as Hachette and Hodder & Stoughton are probably known to many of you. They also bought 40% of Vivendi’s publishing arm in 2004. Outside media, Lagardere have massive interests in television, retail and sports, with total assets valued at over 10 billion Euros. Oh, and did we mention aerospace and defence giant EADS, the parent company of Airbus and a bunch of other companies with important military contracts around the world? Lagardere owns a stake in that, and Arnaud Lagardere is already scheduled to take over as chairman next year.
- France has really strict privacy laws for public figures. Like, really strict. President Mitterand had a child in an affair, and no media outlet dared report it until the child was 20 years old and was photographed with him by the paparazzi (ironically, the photograph was published by Lagardere’s Paris Match magazine). They usually need to look to their neighbours for these little scandals. And here’s one of their own making the whole thing public of his own free will! Which leads us to…
- Agreeing to let a magazine video you canoodling around your mansion with the swimsuit model and post the video on YouTube for all France to see? Not a bright idea. Nor were the now-deleted blog photos of the two of you getting each other’s names as tattoos. Or the Tweets of undying love for one another.
Added all together, and one of France’s most powerful men is suddenly regarded as a man of poor judgment, widely disrespected, mind not on the job, a liability to his businesses. Headlines such as “Paris high society reaches for the sick bag” are bad, headlines such as “Lagardere Group Fell 41 Percent In First Half” are disastrous. Publically, his accession to the chairmanship of EADS remains assured, but one can only suspect that it won’t take many more PDAs with his model lover before Monsieur Lagardere finds himself the one brought to his knees.
And seeing as how the Lagardere Group’s media properties and Arnaud Lagardere personally are big backers of President Sarkozy, it’s not hard to see how this apparently little scandal may end up having a role to play in changing the government of a nation.
Image: Screenshot taken by the author
