ABSTRACT
Television is a vital medium for the dissemination of the French language and francophone culture to European audiences who are resident outside of metropolitan France. Its programme output can help maintain a sense of a francophone community which often looks towards the ‘mother country’ as a source of cultural values and artefacts. However, the French-speaking audience outside of France is not extensive, and the francophone audiovisual product has to compete with a wide range of non-francophone programming in the fast-expanding multichannel environment of late twentieth-century Europe.
