Skimming the French headlines over the past year, anyone would assume that France is a torpedoed ship with only one way to go. Many French people are starting to agree. However, luckily, France is greater than the sum of its politicians. Ideas have always been its strength, and nowadays, harnessed to Europe, they have provided unmatched technical marvels, from the highest viaduct to the largest aeroplane. Current projects are centred on internet technology like Quaero, a French-driven project to develop an internet search engine using images and sound, where the present generation depends on text. Play a sequence of notes and you'll get every similar guitar riff; say "Rivers of blood" and you'll hear Enoch Powell's speech as well as receiving the full text and all subsequent references to it; scan a photograph of Carette and you'll be able to watch, on your television if you like, every extract of every film in which that pre-war French character actor appeared. Hours of fun for the terminally bored perhaps, but Quaero will also have enormous applications for the cinema, television and music industries. The French firm Thomson, which is co-ordinating Quaero's research, is already an established force in Hollywood post-production.
Officially launched by Jacques Chirac in April, Quaero is a Franco-German co-production. Its development budget of €250m combines public subsidy and money from a consortium of French and German private enterprise, universities and research establishments. The fact that France is willing to mix private and public money should not surprise even those who see the country as the last outpost of lumbering state monopolies. Competition, especially against Anglo-Saxons, is thriving: if institutionalised French anti-Americanism serves any useful purpose, it is to stimulate bold, creative, off-the-wall thinking.
In December 2004, Google announced that it would put 15m books online within six years: specifically the entire contents of two major American libraries and sizeable chunks of three others, including the Bodleian. "The first reaction could be purely and simply jubilation: all the world's knowledge freely available to the entire planet," said Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF). "But beyond that is a deeper concern, the risk that overwhelming American domination will determine how future generations form their world picture." The example he gives is the French revolution, whose bicentenary celebrations he organised. "It was harmful, hateful to go and search for an account or an interpretation in the English and American databases, which are biased in so many ways. The Scarlet Pimpernel coming before Hugo's Quatre-vingt-treize, the guillotine blotting out the rights of man and the dazzling insights of the Convention." He cites Simon Schama's Citizens, which "outrageously confirmed the hostile vulgate of the counter-revolutionaries, so no French publisher dared translate it."
Jeanneney is not a run of the mill librarian: he is one of France's cultural tigers. A historian by training, he has been president of Radio France and secretary of state for communications. He particularly objects to Google's classification method—there is none. "There's no point in having a profusion of books with no definition, no organisation, no classification, no inventory. There has to be order, there has to be a logic. A bunch of flowers is not a bouquet." Information is not knowledge.
The BNF over which Jeanneney presides already has its own online library, Gallica, with some 75,000 books and 70,000 images. Gallica is unique in that, like a real library, it is a research tool: books are chosen according to their academic value and classified by theme—16th-century science, 19th-century travel in Africa. The other major difference with Google Books is that Gallica respects authors' copyright. "Google puts everything in a collection online, then if a publisher complains, it withdraws that particular book," says Agnès Saal, director of Gallica. Using Gallica's charter as a model and its collection as a basis, Jeanneney decided to create a European alternative to Google Books. Chirac immediately saw the national interest and the project was taken to Brussels, where, with unaccustomed speed, the commission and five other heads of state gave it full backing. It is hoped that by the end of this year all the national libraries of the member states will be collaborating, so that within two years there will be 2m books available, rising to 6m by 2010. The greatest challenge, of course, is translation: having the Finnish national library's 19th-century newspaper archives online is impressive, but unless it is available in every European language it may as well stay in Helsinki—a problem that doesn't bother Google. But that's where ideas are important, and French and German research centres are developing technology the Americans don't even dream about. It may be that culture unites Europe where politics so dismally failed.
