A “Wonderful Program of Economic Pedagogy” in France

Abstract

Abstract This article deals with a French TV program that was launched in the late 1980s and that is devoted to the economic dimensions of life. It became very popular and still exists today. This article proposes an analysis of this unprecedented success in France, through diversified and complementary perspectives. It aims to characterize the novelty of the program. The article relates the appearance of the program to various broader transformations of the relations between the economic and journalistic fields that occurred in France in the 1980s and 1990s. It focuses on the charismatic leader who created the program and hosted it for the first fifteen years of its existence: he was a former business school student, representing a completely new profile of a journalist at the time. The appearance of the program is then shown to be inextricably linked to the emergence of private TV channels in France at the end of the 1980s. It then proposes an analysis of the style and content of the program, trying to characterize the vision of economic life conveyed by the program.