He observes the underlying trends behind the advertisements. Raphaël Llorca is one of those intellectuals who, in the manner of Jérôme Fourquet or Jean-Laurent Cassely, draws their inspiration from the daily lives of the French, to perceive where, behind the apparent banality, profound social movements nestle. . Thursday September 14, he published The national novel of brands. The new French imagination*an intuitive and well-researched essay on the advertising world’s unexpected takeover of political speech.
His thesis? Brands today manage to embody everything that politicians seem incapable of doing: speaking to as many people as possible, celebrating the daily lives of the French, producing a truly unifying speech. Some brands are even going further by now offering their own vision of the national story. Raphaël Llorca’s reflection, nourished by multiple examples and a study carried out with Ifop and the Jean-Jaurès Foundation (which has just taken co-direction of its new observatory, “brands, consumer imagination and politics”), is convincing.
L’Express: Why devote a book to what brands say about France?
Raphaël Llorca: I have gradually become aware that brands have not only participated in consumer society for fifty years. They shape our political imaginations, with a form of innovation in their discourse. Basically, since the President Camemberts or Jacques Séguéla’s advertisements, there has always been France implicit in the brands’ discourse. Today, it is no longer just about the decor or the background. France sometimes became the main character in their speeches.
We learn that brands tell the story of France better than politicians in the eyes of the working classes. How can we explain this dizzying observation?
Yes, this is one of the lessons of the study that we carried out with Ifop and the Jean-Jaurès Foundation. First of all, the first lesson is that, when we ask people who talk about France today, and we propose 10 categories, they choose the 11th, which we added at the last moment: person. So, the first observation is that of a gaping void. And as nature abhors a vacuum, new players have rushed in. We notice the emergence of the figure of comedians, even though satirical humor, which corrects the major failings of society, has almost disappeared. We talk a lot more about personal failings, with figures like Blanche Gardin or Florence Foresti. And the other lesson is that brands understood that there was a void left by politicians, and they took ownership of this void. They have developed their own national narrative.
But how can we explain that where politics is inaudible, brands are listened to?
The first reason is that politicians speak a dead language, with the word “France” repeated all the time, with acronyms. Paradoxically, the language of advertising is much more true. And, in the same way, advertisements speak much better about the daily lives of the French. “Hexagonal” advertising [NDLR : pour la SNCF] could be the contemporary adaptation of a book by Ernest Lavisse on the life of the French. The use of slam, in this campaign, with Gaël Faye, or in the Nike advertising, with Oxmo Puccino, is interesting. We take out dead images, we add creativity, but starting from everyday imaginations. We don’t hesitate to talk about kebabs, while politicians stick to a mythologized, romanticized vision of France.
You also compare the brands of today and the serial novels of the 19th century century.
Yes, I see real similarities between these two genres, advertising and literature from the suburbs in the 19th century. It was not a genre perceived as prestigious, but it brought together the general public, because it spoke about people’s daily lives. I think about These ladies in green hats or to The little girl with matches. I like the idea of brands playing this role today.
Aren’t brands also perceived as more reliable? When you look at a hamburger ad and then buy it, you get the feeling of a promise kept. With politics, it’s more complicated.
Yes, and besides, this gap between the effectiveness of brands and the ineffectiveness of politics is reinforced when Michel-Edouard Leclerc says: “I press a button and 1,000 products are at a blocked price.” Can politics do this so easily? No. But that’s why I also say that brands lead unfair competition against politics. It can be dangerous when it undermines the pillars of democracy. The marks come to make us forget the importance of collective deliberation, of Parliament, of the long term. All that counts is efficiency. Behind this observation, there may be an attraction for an authoritarian model. But it’s not the brands’ fault, it’s up to politicians to seize the national narrative. Otherwise, we will become a society where, as François Sureau pointed out in [Sans la liberté,] his “leaflet” for Gallimard, we will mobilize the value of freedom but above all to sell cars.
What about Marine Le Pen, whose electorate partly overlaps with this category of French people more seduced by the brand story than by the political story?
I noticed that Marine Le Pen understood that she had to speak the language of consumption. I noticed this when she posed as a candidate for purchasing power, in 2022. She did so by explaining that she was going to eliminate VAT on a “basket of 100 essential products”. That’s Leclerc in the text, or Auchan, Carrefour. And it’s clever. Because she speaks the language that millions of French people are confronted with every day. This makes it possible to address sections of the population who may have dropped out of politics. The other element is that it feeds a strategy of demonization. It’s hard to object to this type of micronarrative. I also cite this concept that I took from Alexis Ragougneau, a science fiction author: “national-consumerism”. It is the idea that we could quite live in an authoritarian society in which freedoms would be restricted, provided that the freedom to consume is preserved.
But I also want to say that Marine Le Pen is not the only one to have understood the importance of consumption codes. During the 2020 municipal elections, Montpellier mayoral candidate Michaël Delafosse led his campaign in supermarkets. He explained that he moved from markets to supermarkets. He won. François Ruffin, in the same way, when he launched his campaign for the legislative elections, he did karaoke with the comedians Shirley and Dino in front of a supermarket. It’s fascinating, because there is a consumption software to rethink on the left, where it has long been synonymous only with alienation, according to the Marxist vision.
Ultimately, should we be concerned or welcomed by the emergence of brands as political actors?
The powerlessness of politicians to tell the story of France is worrying. In this, the place taken by brands can be dangerous. But I also observe something profoundly positive in the current discourse of brands: while brands tended, in the 1990s, to increasingly segment their discourse, they observe a growing appetite for a unifying discourse, which speaks to the whole country. Against the idea of an archipelago or the definitive fracture of a country into hundreds of small pieces. It remains to be grasped.
* The national novel of brands. The new French imagination (Ed. de l’aube, 380 p., €24.90).