Royal Palace Podcast

Since our last episode, President Emmanuel Macron has appointed Sébastien Lecornu as Prime Minister. While the mediasphere may have been caught off guard, our listeners weren’t—Marlon from Flep24 predicted it on our last episode. But who is Sébastien Lecornu? Why did President Macron choose him? And what does his appointment mean for France, as unions and grassroots movements prepare for strikes and protests tomorrow.

Unable to rally support for an unpopular budget proposal, French Prime Minister François Bayrou has decided to go out with a bang by invoking Article 49.1 of the Constitution. Guest Marlon Ettinger from the Flep24 podcast joins Patrick to unpack how we got here and to make predictions about what comes next.

Don't forget to rate and subscribe to Flep24—and support them on Patreon!

Immigration is an often misunderstood area of the law. In this episode, we outline the French immigration regime and discuss how it differs from that of the United States.

At its height, the French colonial empire was the second largest in the world. One of its legacies is Overseas France — parts of France scattered around the globe, from Tahiti in the South Pacific to French Guiana on the South American mainland. In the first of a series of episodes on this strange geographic anomaly that makes France the country with the most timezones in the world, we dive into the islands of the French Antilles: Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint Martin, and Saint Barts.

On our first-ever crossover episode, we discuss the recent conviction of Marine Le Pen and several MEPs on charges of embezzlement, as well as the controversy surrounding her ineligibility to run for public office, with Marlon and Olly from the Flep24 Podcast. We explore whether this conviction amounts to "lawfare" and consider the potential impact it may have on French politics, particularly for the far-right in the 2027 presidential race.

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to the Flep24 (French Legislative Elections Podcast 2024) wherever you get your podcasts and consider finding them on patreon.

On this episode, we sit down with Jathan Sadowski from the podcast This Machine Kills to discuss his latest book, Mechanic and the Luddite: A Ruthless Criticism of Technology and Capitalism. We explore data capitalism, the impact of AI on labor and decision-making, rentierism, and whether Europe should join the tech hype cycle—as so many of its leaders seem eager to do.

Upset over illicit sports streaming websites, Canal+ petitioned a French court to order Google, Cloudflare, Quad9 and Vercara to no longer resolve queries to domains like antenasports.ru. We discuss whether the court's decision to side with Canal+ amounts to "internet censorship" and whether it will have any effect. Check out our accompanying article at royalpalacemedia.com

A few precisions/corrections:

- Canal+ Groupe has been recently restructured such what we said about Vavendi is not longer up-to-date (the firm remains nonetheless under the control of the Bolloré family).

- The acronym for the Inter-planetary File System is "IPFS" but Patrick mistakenly says IFS because interplanetary is arguably one word.

- Our website does not have a certificate issued by Cloudflare, but rather Google Trust Services which is one of the five certificate authorities Cloudflare uses to issues SSL certs.

History tends to forget the Minitel experiment or dismiss it as a system that suffered from over-centralization, heavy state censorship, and a lack of openness. However, in an era when Google, Amazon, and Microsoft control the vast majority of internet infrastructure, with corporate and state censorship on the rise, might these criticisms reveal more about the “free” internet than they do about 1980s France?

Although more ideologically diverse than the American media, French newspapers and television distinguish themselves in another way: their ownership by right-wing billionaires. On this episode, we discuss with our friend Sam the many newspapers, magazines, TV channels and radio stations that make up the French media landscape -- as well as their owners.