The Madrid train bombings had a particularly chilling effect on France. Exactly one week earlier, to the hour, a French regional newspaper, La Deche du Midi, had broken the news that there were eight bombs under the French railway network. Jean-Christophe Giesbert, editor of the Toulouse-based paper, broke the story and revealed that for several weeks the government and some journalists had known about the threat, but kept the public in the dark. As far as anyone knows the bombs are still there.
In December last year, a previously unknown terrorist group, AZF, began sending ransom demands to Jacques Chirac: $4m plus 1m euros or else ten bombs, eight in the railway system, would be detonated. To prove their determination, AZF gave the police the precise co-ordinates of one of their bombs, which was found on 21st February, well buried under a section of railway track. When detonated, it blew lengths of track 25 metres away. The death toll on a train travelling at 186mph can be imagined. Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister, began to take AZF seriously: 600 agents were assigned to the investigation, without result. Horrifying deadlines approached.
At this point, very few reporters had the story. Paris journalists rely on a close relationship with those in power, and it is tacitly understood that the continued flow of information depends on their steering clear of detrimental stories. In the AZF case, the government's decision to keep the public ignorant of the danger was not an official directive. Nevertheless, editors obediently waited for the green light. Protected by their silence, Sarkozy gave in to the ransom demands. But the drop on 1st March went wrong - the helicopter pilot failed to find the agreed place. A major explosion on the rail network seemed imminent.
This was the moment that the editor of La Deche du Midi got wind of the story. Giesbert knew the government didn't want him to say anything, but decided to break the pact of obedience: "In France, journalists connive too closely with those in power," he tells me. "The journalist's raison d'?e is to inform the public. Imagine if a bomb exploded and afterwards people discovered that the press had known all along." French regional papers are much more important than British local papers: Ouest France, the largest regional daily, has a circulation greater than Le Monde and Le Figaro combined. Giesbert's Deche, number eight in the regional stakes, still sells more than the excellent Libetion.
Giesbert thought that one national paper was ready to go with him, but at the last minute it bent to government pressure. He decided to publish anyway. Within hours, a furious Sarkozy publicly rebuked Giesbert for irresponsibility, and accused him of "carbonising" the investigation. "Nonsense," says Giesbert. "The investigation was dead on its feet - 600 men, three months and everything bungled." Other journalists sided with the government, headlining Giesbert's treachery. The minister of justice, Dominique Perben, abruptly cancelled a planned interview with him, "following the publication of your article." The same ministers who froze him out immediately showered his rivals with all the secrets they could digest. Le Monde was shown AZF's December letters to Jacques Chirac, to make it look as if it had known about the group all along. The weekly Nouvel Observateur was given open access to the head of the investigation, producing a piece of gripping journalism whose detail and intimacy overshadowed Giesbert's much braver disclosure.
Furthermore, it turned out that the dialogue between government and terrorists over the ransom had been conducted through the pages of Libetion: investigators had informed the paper they were placing coded messages concerning a grosse affaire in its personal columns. "This collusion between journalists and power creates a real problem in our society," says Giesbert. "We must regain our credibility, and the one way we can do that is to underline our independence from those in power, especially now, when those in power are themselves discredited."
The problem of the press toeing the line in France keeps resurfacing. The government is currently being sued for withholding information about the effects of Chernobyl. And, in a recent book, La Guerre ?utrances, Alain Hertoghe described how, as deputy editor of the online version of La Croix, a national daily, he was alarmed to note the differences between the picture of the Iraq war coming from correspondents on the ground and the war presented by the French press. Headlines all conformed to the Chirac-Villepin view that the Americans were intractably bogged down, Bush was panicked, and that Iraqi resistance was so solid the battle for Baghdad would make Stalingrad look like a bun-fight. "When Saddam's regime collapsed, the panic-driven disarray of his partisans was not dissimilar to that seen in the editorial offices of French newspapers," Hertoghe wrote. He was sacked.
