French President Jacques Chirac has vowed to launch a new "counter-offensive" against American cultural domination, enlisting the support of the British, German and Spanish governments in a multi-million euro bid to put the whole of European literature on-line. The president was reacting last week to news that the American search-engine provider Google is to offer access to some 15 million books and documents currently housed in five of the most prestigious libraries in the English-speaking world. The realisation that the "Anglo-Saxons" were on the verge of a major breakthrough towards the dream of a universal library seriously rattled the cultural establishment in Paris, raising again the fear that French language and ideas will one day be reduced to a quaint regional peculiarity. So on Wednesday Chirac met with Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres and National Library president Jean-Noel Jeanneney and asked them "to analyse the conditions under which the collections of the great libraries in France and Europe could be put more widely and more rapidly on the Internet". "In the weeks to come, the president will launch initiatives in the direction of his European partners in order to propose ways of coordinating and amplifying efforts in this field," a statement said. "A vast movement of digitalisation of knowledge is underway across the world. With the wealth of their exceptional cultural heritage, France and Europe must play a decisive part. It is a fundamental challenge for the spread of knowledge and the development of cultural diversity."
It was Jeanneney who alerted Chirac to the new challenge. In an article in Le Monde newspaper, France's chief librarian conceded that the Google-Print project, with its 4.5 billion pages of text, will be a boon to researchers and a long-awaited chance for poor nations to get access to global learning. But he went on: "The real issue is elsewhere. And it is immense. It is confirmation of the risk of a crushing American domination in the definition of how future generations conceive the world. "The libraries that are taking part in this enterprise are of course themselves generously open to the civilisations and works of other countries ... but still, their criteria for selection will be profoundly marked by the Anglo-Saxon outlook," he said.