Representation of the People through the Camera and Parliamentary Cultures – Parliaments and Television in France and the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1960s and 1970s

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The project aims at a comparison of the television coverage of the parliaments in France and the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. The central questions revolve around new forms of audio-visual presentation and modes of staging the Assemblée nationale and the Bundestag in the new dominant national medium. It will also deal with the different institutional and personal “entanglements” between parliaments and television broadcasters, thus showing how parliamentary debates became a constant part of political television. In the “era of scarcity” with only one or two television channels the “whole” nation gathered in front of the television screen to an extent that does not exist anymore. In doing this it became familiarized with parliamentary speeches and debates. This pertains, above all, to parliamentary speeches on the occasion of government policy statements or budget debates, but also to special broadcasts on “May 1968” in France or on the debates about the emergency legislation in 1968 and the “Neue Ostpolitik” in the early 1970s. The preparatory work for this project also suggests that the case of France and West-Germany allows for an exploration of different ways in which television became part of an established media ensemble that covered parliamentary politics. Based on written and audio-visual sources in particular the project plans, firstly, to analyse selected cases of the presence of parliamentary debates on television from the mid-sixties onwards. This involves a reference to sophisticated methodologies to look into different modes of parliamentary communication (e. g. sequence analysis of recordings, performance of deputies and the role of journalists); secondly, to elaborate the emerging networks of relationships between parliaments and television broadcasters and also to distinguish them in regard to the different political cultures and media systems; thirdly, to contrast the above mentioned selected cases of parliamentary television with the continuous television coverage on parliament. The aim is to embed both in the context of (political) television of the 1960s and 1970s and to highlight the highs, lows and persistent patterns of parliament in the new “culture de masse visuelle”. From this international comparison of early parliamentary television, the applicant expects significant advances in our knowledge of the historical interrelations between political cultures and media change in France and West-Germany. Given the different political regimes and media-systems in both countries, the case offers the opportunity for a review of the “mediatization”-paradigm that has been formulated for the politics of Western democracies. By focussing on the structural problem of parliamentary communication with the sovereign via television, the project will contrast the Franco-German couple in an unconventional way, aiming at a more differentiated view of both countries’ political “history of entanglements”.