ABSTRACT
During the first five years of the Mitterrand presidency (1981-86) the French broadcasting system underwent a near-revolutionary upheaval. The 1982 broadcasting statute echoed the 1881 press law in proclaiming that audiovisual communication was free. The substantive application of this principle saw the traditional postwar framework of the state monopoly being swept away, first in radio and then in television.1 In addition, a new regulatory agency, the High Authority for Audiovisual Communication, was set up in an attempt to distance the state from day-to-day control of broadcast output and to remove its power of appointment to top broadcasting posts. Two years later Europe’s first terrestrially transmitted pay-television channel, Canal Plus, began transmissions. While initially received with considerable public scepticism, Canal Plus quickly became a major force for innovation within French television and, by the end of the decade, was a key media player at both the national and supranational levels. Finally, at the start of 1986, two commercial television channels were established, financed from advertising revenue and free to the viewer at the point of reception. The sum of these changes was of such magnitude that by the time the Socialist government fell in the 1986 general election, key features of the French broadcasting system of the pre-Mitterrand era were little more than a distant memory.
