ABSTRACT
During the past century, French terminology often differed from that in use in Britain and America to describe ‘press barons’ or ‘media magnates’. Hollywood, however, is the great leveller. The ‘movie moguls’ of yesteryear are the forebears of the multi-media moguls of today. French journalists now refer to les moguls (des médias) – a nice touch, as the term nabab used to be the title of Moslem officials acting as governors of provinces of the Mogul Empire. Perceptions of French moguls, marked as much by the history of the Press as by Hollywood, have in Robert Hersant, the quintessential mogul of the old school, both in the papivore, the ogre devouring individual newspaper titles, and the French ‘Citizen Kane’.1
