Narratives of powers, the power of narrative

A new battle of narratives is being waged before our eyes. Our competitors seek to impose narratives to undermine our image and our democracies.

Yet this is nothing new, which can be seen in the diplomatic archives displayed here today. From the “Artois fakes” to “Potemkin villages” and the “Great Patriotic War” glorified beyond what’s real by a succession of Russian regimes, countries have consistently sought to impose their narratives, with some not hesitating to manipulate information.

But although parchments, documents, images and newspapers were used as instruments in the past to spread propaganda, their circulation was limited because it took time. Today, manipulators have social media, sometimes their algorithms, artificial intelligence and expertise amassed over centuries at their disposal to spread and amplify their subversive campaigns in just seconds.

In this information space for new conflicts, France is taking an offensive stance. The Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs is leading the effort by strengthening its ability to analyse and identify foreign information manipulation, address it and make France’s voice heard in this global battle of narratives.

From manipulations of the past found in diplomatic archives to the soft power strategies of today, this exhibition explains the way in which certain narratives are formed that seek to shape the way we see the world.

Distorting and disguising

“A decadent France”
“A moribund West”
“A continent of the past”

Powers have long used information manipulation weapons to further their strategic objectives. Distorting the facts, reinventing a genealogy, disguising a façade: the archives of the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs have kept proof of this forgery, intended to take advantage of the adversary on the regional, national or continental level.

The vocabulary of foreign interference and information manipulation is more recent. However, techniques date very far back in time.

The “Artois fakes” are a textbook case of manipulation of a historical and genealogical narrative for political ends. This case pitted Robert III d’Artois (1287-1342) against his Aunt Mahaut, who inherited the County of Artois to the detriment of her nephew. Robert III first attempted to reclaim his title lawfully and brought his case before the Paris Parliament. Despite support from the Artois lords, who were also against Mahaut’s administration, the Parliament ruled against Robert III and Mahaut was able to keep the County of Artois.

Years later, Robert III reopened the case with trickery. Rather than using legitimate arguments, he had his accomplices produce fraudulent documents, going so far as to forge the seal of King Philip IV, known as Philip the Fair. The County of Artois was supposed to be for him. However, upon review, the documents were proven to be fraudulent and Robert III’s efforts failed. A deliberate act to rewrite family history was clearly conducted for the purposes of his inheritance.

When summoned by the King and told not to use these documents, Robert III refused. Banished from the Kingdom of France, he was forced to go into exile. Driven by revenge and taking refuge in the Kingdom of England, Robert III urged Edward III to claim the crown of France by using yet another historical narrative to the benefit of the King of England. King Edward III demanded the throne of France. This political manipulation would lead to the start of the Hundred Years’ War, in which England would be defeated.

The case thus illustrated how the fabrication of “proof” can help impose a narrative challenging established legitimacy, and how failed manipulation can lead to much graver consequences.

The expression “Potemkin village” is today used regularly to refer to a false construct intended to promote political propaganda.

Its origin can be traced back to Grigory Potemkin, a minister and favourite of Russian Empress Catherine II. According to legend, he allegedly had fake and elaborate façades of houses built and placed in front of poor villages in Crimea to impress the Empress when she visited this region conquered by Russia in 1787.

Historians today have challenged the veracity of this story as diplomatic letters of the time cannot provide proof that this truly happened. This legend illustrates a recurring strategic process: building a positive image of reality to hide a situation that is considered embarrassing or disadvantageous.

This method was broadly used by authoritarian regimes in the 20^th century seeking to convince Western visitors that their model was solid and successful. Officially invited to the USSR on 26 August 1933, Édouard Herriot, Mayor of Lyon and Prime Minister, who was in favour of a rapprochement with the USSR after a non-aggression pact was signed at his insistence on 29 November 1932, made a carefully controlled five-day tour in Ukraine. Despite the articles in the French press already reporting on the horrible Holodomor famine in Ukraine, causing the deaths of 5 million people from 1932 to 1933, upon his return Édouard Herriot failed to see that his visit was staged. The expression “Potemkin village” still refers to a gap created between what one sees and what one is made to believe.

Manipulating and deceiving

The “Ems dispatch” is one of the most well-known examples of information manipulation for strategic purposes. Communicated at the time through French public opinion that was hostile towards Prussia, its status could be compared to what today has been achieved by social media in terms of massive dissemination of distortions of facts.

In July 1870, Napoleon III’s France was concerned about Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern’s possible accession to the throne of Spain. Supported by the Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, his candidacy made those in Paris worry that France would be surrounded by two monarchies linked to the Hohenzollern dynasty.

On 12 July, Leopold’s father announced the withdrawal of his son’s candidacy. This crisis appeared to be over. The next day, in Ems, Count Vincent Benedetti, the French Ambassador to Prussia, asked King Wilhelm I of Prussia to give his assurances that he would never again permit the candidacy. He refused to make such a commitment
and considered the affair to be closed.

An account of the exchange was then sent by telegram to Bismarck. The Chancellor shortened the account and made the wording harsher before releasing it to the press. Without inventing facts, he turned the account of a diplomatic exchange into an affront: upon reading it, French people would think that their Ambassador was dismissed with contempt, while the Prussians would have considered that their King was importuned by repeated French demands.

Bismarck knew that a war against France could serve his political objective, which was to rally German southern states with Prussia and achieve the reunification of Germany. The altered dispatch rapidly spread in the press and inflamed public opinion on both sides of the Rhine. On 19 July 1870, France declared war with Prussia.

Bismarck did not invent the event: he just altered its account. A few deletions, a change in tone and a calculated dissemination helped to transform this diplomatic crisis into a casus belli, motivating a declaration of war.

After France’s military defeat, an armistice with Germany was signed. The National Assembly granted full powers to Marshal Pétain.

On 10 July, the Third Republic gave way to an authoritarian, anti-Republican and anti-Semite regime, which made the “National Revolution” its political project. “Work, Family, Homeland” replaced the Republican motto “Freedom, Equality, Fraternity”.

Controlling information became one of the instruments of the new regime and the first anti-Jew laws were passed in October 1940. The press and radio were closely monitored, dissident opinions were censured and the cult of Marshal Pétain were widely held. Posters, film releases, articles, radio programmes and songs spread the values of the National Revolution and presented Marshal Pétain as the protector of a France that needed to be rebuilt after its defeat.

But France was divided and authors of this propaganda were many. In the occupied zone, German authorities imposed their own censorship and propaganda. In the “free” zone until November 1942, the Vichy regime closely controlled the media. German and Vichy propaganda were aligned on many themes, including anti-communism, hostility towards the Resistance and General de Gaulle, and especially, anti-Semitism.

Propaganda never served the purpose of just praising the regime. It also intended to establish who were its enemies. Jews, communists, resistance fighters and Gaullists were, depending on the time and medium, presented as being responsible for France’s misfortunes, as foreign agents or as threats to the nation. Naming them as such made their large-scale exclusion and repression acceptable. The Vichy Government’s anti-Semitic policy became even more clear with the roundups of Jews in the Paris Vélodrome d’Hiver on 16 and 17 July 1942 in Paris, alongside the massive persecution conducted by the occupying Nazis.

Controlling what a population could know, imposing a counter narrative of the defeat and naming those who were allegedly responsible, all contributed to the fact that information became an instrument of power and a way to hunt “foreigners and enemies from the inside”.

What is France’s narrative?

Jean-Noël Barrot, Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs

Digital diplomacy and war communication

Today, war is being waged on the ground and on our screens. Overt digital diplomacy co-exists with diplomacy of closed-door negotiations.

With footage taken by citizens, videos filmed by drones, official messages, eye-witness accounts, letters and open-source intelligence, conflicts have never been as documented in real time. But never has information been as easy to manipulate either. With social media, the digital realm has become a new virtual battlefield.

Each side seeks to impose their narrative, convince public opinion, rally support and discredit adversaries. Cyber attacks, piracy, fake accounts, distorted images, fake content and coordinated campaigns now round out military operations. A video can provide proof of an attack; a few minutes later, it can be taken out of its context, reinterpreted and transformed into an instrument of propaganda.

Beyond a battle of narratives, in light of wars in Yugoslavia and then Ukraine, not to mention those in the Middle East, a genuine information war is being waged in contemporary conflicts. Diplomats, journalists, citizens and influential figures are now active in the same digital space, where narratives circulate often faster than they can be verified.

With artificial intelligence, this battle has stepped up and boosted the creation of fake content or messages being widely circulated. Authenticating an image, identifying a source and pointing out manipulation have become strategic challenges.

But these distortions of the information space made with the aid of powerful tools can create other substantive challenges in terms of diplomacy. Election interference, for example, has become a strategic tool that remains invisible internally.

This new strategy enables foreign powers to use influential figures to post messages in a targeted area. This could include discrediting defence agreements, advancing anti-NATO discourse, and promoting withdrawal from a war.

This hybrid war allows those behind the operations to advance without their identities being known.

For example, the Malaysia Airlines aircraft over Ukraine shot down by a Russian missile on 17 July 2014 with 298 passengers aboard led to an orchestrated information manipulation campaign by Russian services. It took nearly ten years of investigations and diplomatic efforts within an international tribunal to uncover those who gave the orders for a crime that remains unpunished.

In these new forms of war, the control of the narrative has a major impact on the course of events.

Fighting back in the battle of narratives

French diplomacy going on the offensive

In the 21^st century, diplomacy is no longer confined to negotiations between States.

It also takes place on social media, digital platforms and news channels, that spread a steady flow of narratives designed to influence public opinion, and, through it, policy decisions.

In this context, letting a misleading narrative gain a foothold can be all it takes to permanently sway public debate.

To face this challenge, the Ministry has adopted a three-part strategy: monitoring, response, and assertion of France’s narratives.

1. Monitoring: between 2022 and 2024, the Ministry equipped itself with tools to understand our adversaries’ narratives and track their campaigns.

2. Response: launch of the first French account to counter disinformation, French Response. Currently followed by over 200,000 people on X and now present on TikTok, these accounts aim to:

- refute and denounce information manipulation;
- defend French and European interests when they are attacked;
- protect French diplomatic positions.

The Ministry’s response tools contribute on a daily basis to defending democracy, in response to propagandists attacking Europe, for example by deconstructing in real time Russian lies about Ukraine, or turning around accusations made against France in Africa.

3. Constructing our own narratives: to move away from a purely reactive stance, French embassies have been given new tools to roll out the French narrative in information spaces around the world.

March 2026 – Decoding a Russian influence operation in France

On 26 March 2026, Russian minister Sergey Lavrov was interviewed on the France 2 evening news – at the same time that a G7 meeting was taking place under the French Presidency. Why can this be considered a Russian influence operation in France?

A Russian propaganda narrative during prime time

Sergey Lavrov, by putting forward disinformation narratives about Ukraine, minimized the war crimes committed by Russia, denied the threat posed by Russia, and presented Russia as a reliable partner of Iran despite its lack of support.

Instrumentalizing the moment: a diversion technique

The choice to air these messages during the 8 pm evening news on France 2, during the G7 Foreign Ministers Meeting under the French Presidency, was not insignificant. Russia used this as a diversion strategy, allowing it to spread its messages while taking advantage of the media attention drawn by this international event.

Re-legitimizing the narrative among Russian and international audiences

At the same time, the Russian Foreign Ministry published a falsified transcription of the interview on its site, altering the questions asked by the journalist to distort their meaning and support the Kremlin’s official narrative.

This manipulation was part of an information laundering operation relying on the authority of a recognized Western television channel. Russia seeks to give its own claims an appearance of legitimacy and credibility. A falsified narrative can thus be fed back to the Russian and international public as though it had been confirmed by a reliable Western source.

Creating a strategic narrative

No society appears to have a monopoly on shaping a narrative. Beginning in the late 19^th century in France, history taught in compulsory primary schools had to present a “national narrative”.

Until the 1950s, this narrative was based on the original ideas of positivist historian Ernest Laviste, which were challenged by the Annales school. This historical narrative contributed to a mythologized collective imaginary based on conquests and epic stories around heroicized figures. From Vercingetorix and Charlemagne to Joan of Arc and Napoleon, new heroes embodied the elements of a national narrative.

In Europe today, a wealth of research work has allowed us to see another history, shedding light on subjects that long remained taboo or overlooked, such as colonization and its impacts, the Vichy regime and its consequences, and unknown figures robbed of their place in history. Today, more numerous and diverse new sources of history are giving shape to counter-histories and counter-narratives. Multiple histories now coexist side by side, some evoking nostalgia for bygone eras and others imposing new confrontations.

In 1921, historian Marc Bloch, marked by his own experience in the First World War from 1914 to 1918, examined in his essay “Reflections of a Historian on the False News of the War” how “false news” also prompts reflection on the relationship between the historian and the historical record. False news and rumours spread among the soldiers, confronting the historian in times of war with a new “age of suspicion”.

Marc Bloch examines the progression of a rumour that spread across Great Britain and France “toward the end of August 1914”. A false report was spread across borders of an invasion of “tens of thousands of Russians, disembarking, some said, in Scottish ports, or, others said, in Marseille”, to swell the ranks of the Western Allies. Perceptions circulated among soldiers that were “correct in principle”, but “misinterpreted” and “unanimously distorted” to “conform with the ardent desires of all”.

In this very particular context, Marc Bloch implicitly highlights how the spread and impact of content can ultimately have historical significance. Even back in 1914, faced with the challenge of interpreting documents, we were entering a new “age of suspicion”.

How can we distinguish between what is true and what is false? In his film Letter from Siberia, Chris Marker shows the same images of Yakutsk three times, accompanied by three different commentaries. Depending on the choice of words, the city appears modern and dynamic, sinister and oppressive, or simply ordinary. The images do not change; the meaning they convey is transformed by the narrative accompanying them. This lesson remains essential for understanding information. In Timișoara, in December 1989, images of mass graves falsely presented as portraying victims of the repressive Romanian regime were broadcast on television around the world, before they were later verified.
These images precipitated the fall of the Ceauşescu dictatorship.
During the Gulf War (1991), sociologist Jean Baudrillard and later historian Marc Ferro each examined how the media can cloud our understanding of reality. At a time of overabundant images and fake news, it is important to have the right reflex: to not merely view an image, but also examine its source, its context and the commentary that gives it meaning.

A century of propaganda

From the USSR to Russia today

The Cold War (1947-1990) epitomizes a fundamental battle of narratives. It pit East against West, as well as North against South, in an enduring confrontation that was above all ideological. Extending well beyond the military and diplomatic spheres alone, this war marked global political, economic and cultural balances over several decades.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the two blocs faced off in a clash of competing narratives designed to legitimize their respective models to assert their supremacy.

After the death of Stalin in 1953, the “Khrushchev thaw” offered a period of unprecedented exchange between East and West. The Soviet film The Cranes Are Flying, awarded the Palme d’Or in Cannes in 1958, illustrates this dialogue in the form of a neo-Stalinist misunderstanding about pacifism, between the invasion of Budapest (1965) and the Cuban missile crisis (1962).

The Helsinki Process (1973-1975), dedicated to easing tensions, strengthened the circulation of ideas around academic and cultural cooperation, as internal repression intensified against writers and artists in the East. At the same time, Paris became a refuge for such dissident voices. The dissolution of the USSR in 1991 led to the breakup of the communist bloc.

From 2004, former Eastern Bloc countries began to join the European Union, then NATO. This shift was seen by Russia as a threat to its sphere of influence. It is one of the factors cited by Moscow to justify its invasion of Ukraine.

Under Vladimir Putin, Russia developed a new influence strategy based on culture, media, universities, scholarship grants and the network of the Rossotrudnichestvo agency (founded in 2008 by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation to promote “an objective image of contemporary Russia” abroad).

This policy aims to counter what is considered to be harmful “Western influence”.

Combining the Russian words agitatsia (agitation) and propaganda (propaganda), agitprop was developed in the Soviet Union post-1920 to spread Bolshevik ideology. Press, posters, cinema, theatre, literature, schools and radio were used to shape mentalities and influence society. The objective was not only to inform, but also to persuade and mobilize, and to legitimize power. Agitprop would become one of the foundations of education using Soviet propaganda, at once a weapon (orujie) and a tool (orudie).

Launched in 2005 and financed by the Russian State, the Russia Today (RT) television network was designed to be a tool for international influence that promotes the Kremlin’s positions to millions of viewers. With channels in multiple languages, RT combines news, debates and entertainment to broadcast an “alternative” narrative to that of the Western media. After the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the European Union banned its broadcasting. In France, RT France was definitively shut down in 2023.

A Russian-speaking world divided in the face of the “collective West”

An alternative narrative

Vladimir Putin is mobilizing all of Russia’s powerful tools of influence to promote an alternative narrative in the face of the “collective West”, portrayed as decadent.

In this way, post-Soviet Russia is framing its narrative around a battle of “Russian civilization against European values”.
In 2023, Russian political scientist Sergey Karaganov theorized the idea of a “civilization-state”, called to confront “Western hegemony”.

This discourse echoes the American theories of Samuel Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations (1993), for whom “the fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future”.

The “Russian world”

The concept of the “Russian world” (Russkiy Mir) seeks to legitimize hegemonic power ambitions, by placing language, culture and diasporas at the heart of this new civilizational strategy. A 2010 Russian law defined “compatriots” as Russian citizens and their descendants living abroad, linked to Russia by a cultural and historical identity. The Kremlin’s discourse uses this notion to create confusion between “ethnic Russians”^[1] (142 million) and “Russian-speaking populations” (280 million).^[1]

Beginning in 2007, the Russkiy Mir Foundation has developed a vast cultural and educational network for Russian-speaking communities abroad to strengthen their connection to Russia.

[1] The notion of “ethnic Russians” refers to populations that identify with a Russian ethnocultural identity and live outside of Russia, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The confusion fostered by Russia on this subject allows it to encompass Russian-speaking populations, more numerous than “ethnic Russians”, within an enlarged concept of the “Russian world”, and to position itself as a protecting State with the legitimacy to intervene militarily in another State that it considers to be in danger.

“Denazification”: 20 Days in Mariupol

The war has placed Ukrainian journalists under double pressure, as they endeavour to report on combats while respecting military security constraints.

Despite bombardments, arrests and numerous casualties among media professionals, they continue to document the conflict.

Documentaries such as 20 Days in Mariupol (2023), which won an Oscar in 2024, bear witness to this struggle to re-establish the facts in the face of Russian narratives denying any abuses committed against civilians.

In Mariupol, a multicultural city and strategic port on the Sea of Azov that was wiped off the map after February 2022, Russian soldiers killed nearly 30,000 inhabitants under the pretext of “denazifying” Ukraine, considerably more than the Nazis who massacred 10,000 Jewish people there in October 1941.

Seeing or believing? Ukrainian filmmakers are taking part in a new form of cultural resistance by sharing wartime images that contradict the messages of Russian propaganda, for example through the documentary Russians at War (2024).

The “Putinisms” of war: what it means to speak

The words of power

Since taking power in 2000, Vladimir Putin has gradually shaped a vocabulary that has had tangible effects: “foreign agent”, “Russian civilization”, “de-Nazification”, “de-Westernization”, “Russian idea”, “Russian World”, “multipolarity”, “special military operation”, “traditional values”.

This lexical field, heavy in neologisms, draws on recent discussions by Kremlin ideologists to highlight the gap between the values of the “Satanic West” and the Russian idea of a new nationalism.

The meaning behind the words

Since the invasion of Ukraine, a new war vocabulary, inspired by reminiscence of Leninism and Stalinism, was gradually formed. The words help reinvent its Soviet past.

The “special military operation” became an actual war, while use of the word “war” itself, banned in 2022, can result in lengthy prison sentences.

The new Russian propaganda uses a range of verbal tools to inflect meaning and influence individual and collective perceptions of reality. “Putinism” does not only refer to the coining of abstract words. It is a real geopolitical programme reflected through its actions. The law on “foreign agents” can also be linked to the climate of terror of the 1930s. The version under Putin, which came into force in 2012 and was expanded in 2021, punishes all opposition and controls expression in public, applying this concept to all dissident voices.

From “enemy of the people” to “neo-Nazi”

Like the Allies who, following the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, suggested “denazifying and demilitarizing Germany”, Putin is seeking to “denazify” Ukraine. Putin’s discourse bases its rhetoric on the idea of “Ukrainian nazism” guilty of collaboration in 1941, which resonates strongly in Russia, considering the enormous Soviet losses in the Second World War.

This depiction of the enemy was a long-standing tradition in the USSR. In 1918, it targeted “class enemies”, then “traitors”. It expanded during WWII to include the “punished peoples of the USSR”.

The punished peoples

While the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945) established the concept of the “Nazi enemy", a second regime of justification grew around the collective imagination involving punishment. This rhetoric, initiated under Stalin, concerned entire peoples located on the outskirts of the empire. These peoples were deemed hostile to the Soviet power if they claimed independence or if they resisted collectivization – like the 5 million Ukrainians decimated during the great famines of 1932-1933. The notion of a “punished people” is interlinked with that of “enemy of the people”.

One after another, the Baltic peoples, the Crimean Tatars, the Chechens followed by others were victims of mass deportation in the Second World War. As for Ukraine, the theme of “punished people” became entwined with that of the “fraternal people” that they had to save from “neo-Nazism”. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, millions of “ethnic” Russians were forced to live outside the Federation. Since 2014, Russian propaganda has dramatized the fate of these “Russians”, whom the 2022 intervention officially aimed to “protect” from a so-called “genocide”.

The war of memories

From monitored narratives to the rewriting of history in Russia

The “war of memories” may be explained as a clash of competing historical narratives. Using history for politics is not new, but these issues differ depending on the societies.

In Russia, these questions have essentially focused on remembrance of the Gulag and how the history of the USSR was written.

Regarding the Gulag, a concentration camp system set up by Lenin in 1923, where some 26 million individuals from a variety of backgrounds were deported, a critical reading of the documents or facts is today done to the detriment of its victims, whereas Stalin has been rehabilitated.

Towards the creation of a Russian nationalist and imperialist narrative

For two decades, those in power shifted towards instrumentalization of a patriotic and anti-Western history. For example, the brief independence of the democratic republics of Ukraine (1918-1920) and Georgia (1918-1921) then annexed by force, has been completely denied in favour of an imperial Russian history.

The official Russian history places great emphasis on the crimes of other powers, spreading its propaganda through a war of memories.

With the war in the Donbas and the annexation of Crimea, Russia adopted a law “on the historical memory of the Second World War”, criminalizing the dissemination of “false information”. In his speech of 12 July 2021, Putin justified the future invasion of Ukraine in the name of the unwavering unity of Russians and Ukrainians in this unfettered exercise of revisionist rewriting of history.

Memorial, Nobel Peace Prize 2022

Founded in 1989 with the support of the human rights activist and Russian academic Andrei Sakharov and the dissident historian Arseny Roginsky, Memorial was established to document mass repression, gather testimonies from victims and restore the memory of the millions of anonymous victims erased from the official history.

When Vladimir Putin took power, this approach came up against the construction of a patriotic narrative glorifying the power of the State. History thereby became an instrument to justify wars, from the Caucasus to Ukraine. Memorial, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, was first accused of being a “foreign agent” and was banned by the Russian government in December 2021, and then criminalized.

Kristian Feigelson is its curator.

He was born in France to a mother from Sweden and father who was a physician and activist who emigrated from the USSR. After studying law and political science and graduating from the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilisations (INALCO),
Kristian Feigelson became a sociologist then professor at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University where he teaches film and media studies. World traveller, navigator, photographer and English and Russian translator, he has published and jointly edited some 30 books. As a researcher at the University of Tokyo, NYU and Stanford University, he has collaborated on different journals in France and abroad. Some of the texts published since 2022 on the war between Russia and Ukraine on telos-eu.com have focused on this exhibition’s themes.

Agir dans la bataille des récits

Photo credit : MEAE/DCP/COM/STUDIO CREA

Narratives of powers, the power of narrative

Distorting and disguising

Manipulating and deceiving

What is France’s narrative?

Digital diplomacy and war communication