How easy is it to seize control of culture and turn it into a tool of an inhuman ideology? And how difficult is it to resist that advance? I imagine a long history of modern humanity could be written around these questions. And it would certainly devote a major chapter to everything we have been witnessing in recent years.

A recent example is France, where the publishing industry is facing its biggest crisis in years as hundreds of writers demand the withdrawal of their books from publishing house Grasset. The authors are protesting — with good reason — the removal of the historic director Olivier Nora, and fear that Grasset, like another historic publishing house, Fayard, will become a Trojan horse for the far right. Both publishers have now been acquired, along with television channels and magazines, by billionaire ultra-conservative businessman Vincent Bolloré.

Bolloré has played a key role in normalizing far-right and racist rhetoric in France in recent years, particularly through the television network CNews and an expanding media empire. “We do not want our ideas, our work, to become his property,” wrote some of the country’s most recognizable female authors in an open letter. “We will not become hostages in an ideological war that seeks to impose authoritarianism everywhere — in the media and in culture.”

In the same spirit, six hundred people from across the film industry signed a statement on May 11, at the opening of the Cannes Film Festival, condemning the spread of what they called the “Bolloré phenomenon” into cinema. Beyond publishing and media, Bolloré has gradually been buying cinema chains and expanding his stake in Canal+, the private broadcaster that has financed French cinema for decades through its funding programs.

Under the title “Zapper Bolloré” — roughly translated as “Change the Channel, Switch Off Bolloré” — the collective of film workers insisted that they did not want to remain passive spectators to this wider transformation of the cultural landscape. Among the original signatories were actresses Juliette Binoche, Adèle Haenel, Ariane Labed, director Arthur Harari — whose film is screening in Cannes’ main competition — as well as hundreds of technicians and workers in film production and distribution.

We often forget how much people risk in these industries simply by signing a text like this. Canal+ executives reminded everyone of that only days later when they effectively blacklisted the signatories, saying they would not wish to collaborate with those individuals in the future. In response, signatures on the original statement multiplied — they have already surpassed 1,600. And this despite the looming threat hanging over directors, technicians, actors, writers and screenwriters that they may never work again.

The story is deeply instructive in showing how the extreme concentration of media ownership in the hands of a technocratic oligarchy is now penetrating every level of cultural production — and what this means for the profound far-right political shift shaping contemporary societies. But it is equally revealing in another way: it reminds us of the importance we still attach to publishers, publishing houses, literary magazines built slowly by communities of writers, theater and film organizations, festivals and independent film distribution networks.

They may represent only a small fraction of the culture consumed on a mass scale. Yet there is a reason we still consider their role in the free circulation of ideas and democracy so important. It is simple: cultural expression and its creative dissemination occupy a crucial place within what we usually call the “collective imaginary” — that constantly shifting horizon through which our world is produced and understood.

If the collective imaginary is the way we think about the world we inhabit, then its defining characteristic is that it is shaped slowly, not according to the logic of bestsellers or television ratings. More often, it leaves room for dialogue, for quiet voices, for the foreign and the strange, for the handcrafted, the original, the radically libertarian and the unexplored.

FILE PHOTO: A newspaper vendor holds a copy of the JDNews magazine, a weekly magazine owned by French billionaire Vincent Bollore, featuring on the front page a portrait of Charles Alloncle, member of parliament from the UDR (Union des Droites pour la Republique) party and rapporteur of the Commission of Parliamentary Inquiry into Public Broadcasting, at a newsstand in Paris, France, April 27, 2026. REUTERS/Abdul Saboor/File Photo

The fundamental principles of coexistence — what we often describe as human rights or shared values — are both created and renewed within this laboratory of the collective imaginary. It is also at this level that resistance to old and new forms of oppression is organized and, to speak plainly, where fascism itself is confronted.

It is no coincidence that the filmmakers’ letter against Bolloré made exactly this point: “To leave French cinema in the hands of a far-right boss means risking not only the homogenization of films, but also the occupation of the collective imaginary by fascist domination.”

I am not describing a storm in a teacup — I hope that is obvious. We have been witnessing this raw attempt to control and violently colonize the collective imaginary everywhere in recent years. It takes many forms.

That is why, as French writer Virginie Despentes recently reminded us, we must constantly insist on making connections. Notice, for example, how the vocabulary of violence and destruction used by President Donald Trump can also be heard in descriptions of hostile publishing takeovers — and often in the very same words used to describe gender-based violence or the treatment of prisoners. Not because these acts are identical, but because the methods and the effort to normalize them are structurally similar.

Explaining to Le Monde why he signed the filmmakers’ statement, Robin Campillo — director of the acclaimed film 120 Beats Per Minute, about the struggle against AIDS — also reminded me how necessary it is to draw inspiration from earlier forms of cultural resistance and solidarity if we are to confront this new devastation.

That, I believe, is precisely why there is now such a determined effort to “demystify” past stories of resistance. To make them seem as though they never existed, as though they carried no cost and achieved nothing. By diminishing cultural resistance, collective action, courage and the price they demanded, the goal is always to normalize the opposite — to make fascization appear natural, a game, a simple possibility, both then and, above all, now.

And it is, I want to say again, just like that old song: “I know what hides behind his teeth as he smiles and shakes my hand…” — a lyric from the song Fascism Does Not Come From the Future, with lyrics by Fontas Ladis and music by Thanos Mikroutsikos.

Dimitris Papanikolaou is Professor of Modern Greek and Cultural Studies at the University of Oxford.