Jacques Chirac is signing up with Jean-Noel Jeanneney's campaign to launch a European competitor to Google Print (previous Language Log discussion here and here). French Minister of Culture Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres
...denied the French initiative was an "anti-Google operation".
"It is about a desire for everyone to be able to put forward their talents, heritage, history and culture," he told French newspaper Le Monde. "There's nothing hostile about it."
The article in The Times quotes M. Jeanneney to the effect that
...the "heavily biased" British and American version of the French Revolution would be all about "valiant British aristocrats triumphing over bloodthirsty Jacobins and the guillotine blotting out the rights of man".
I wonder if he really said this. It's bizarrely disconnected from the reality of the situation. Looking through the first couple of pages of returns from Google for { French revolution} or (limited to French-language pages) { revolution francaise}, I couldn't find a single mention of a British aristocrat, heroic or otherwise...
Posted by Mark Liberman at March 23, 2005 08:50 PM