The Google version
vs. the French version

The International Herald Tribune examines the French campaign to find offense in Google's establishing of a virtual online library, scanning tens of millions of books from great libraries in the U.S. and the U.K. The man behind the growing populist and nationalist cause is the same fellow who in a different decade introduced the quota system to French radio that prevented too many American songs from being aired. He is advocating not only introducing a competing books scanning effort - which would no doubt be welcomed heartily by academics and readers of all nations - but also exerting some form of control over the page ranking system that the major search engines employ to nominate which content is anointed as most relevant.

For instance, he noted that when a student looks up "Robespierre" on Google, the information provided characterizes the Revolutionary dictator as the man who came to take advantage of violent political terror to aggrandize what descended into a cult of personality, setting a pattern followed by many of the great human criminals of the 20th Century, like Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung. This isn't the version French nationalists like to see. Google points to the picture above, part of a snarky commentary created as a grammar school project in the U.S. Some French are offended that the information found initially in the search engines tends to gloss over the often-quoted words about liberty that Robespierre said while he presided over the terror.