“Politicians must tell the story of France again”

2023-09-13 17:00:17
Raphaël Llorca, essayist and communicator associated with the Jean Jaurès Foundation, in August 2023. MATHIEU DELMESTRE

Essayist and communicator, Raphaël Llorca has published several notes, studies and reports on the connection between brands and politics. The co-founder of the “Brands, consumer imagination and politics” Observatory believes that “politics has dried up in image strategies” between sequences “terribly codified” and language elements.

You publish “The National Novel of Brands. The new French imagination” (L’Aube, 380 pages, 24.90 euros) which addresses the role of brands in the collective imagination. What did you want to demonstrate?

This book culminates five years of work on the role of commercial brands in society. For a long time, I believed that they only structured consumer society, but I gradually became aware that they had become a sort of invisible architect of our political society. Ikea, Netflix or Renault are no longer content with shaping our consumer imaginations: they have left their initial enclosure, the economic and commercial sphere, to plow a much more structuring field, the political, that is to say that holds us together as a society.

I tell the story of this takeover of power by brands over political imaginations, by approaching it through a specific dimension: the “national novel”, that is to say the romanticized narrative that a nation has about itself. -even. Until now, a phenomenon had gone under the radar: a growing number of brands have made France not just the background, but the main subject of their discourse. My thesis is that they rushed into the gaping void left by politicians. Hence my question: to fight against the privatization of the national novel, politics must tell the story of France again.

How did you arrive at this observation?

To support this, we conducted a survey with the IFOP and the Jean Jaurès Foundation, to question the French: according to them, who best tells the story of France, its ideals, its values, its identity? In the list of ten categories of actors proposed (writers, politicians, journalists, brands, etc.), it is the eleventh option which is cited first, by far: ” Person “ (34%). None of the listed broadcasters are considered capable of producing an articulate and powerful narrative around these essential questions: where are we, as a nation? What do we believe in? Towards what common horizon are we destined? To summarize, the national novel is broken down, due to lack of storytellers. This “narrative suffering” is felt even more strongly by the working classes. 71% of workers believe, I quote, that“today, no one [les] thrills when talking about France, and [qu’ils] regret[nt] ».

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