With the French broadcasting regulator due to reallocate the roughly 15 digital terrestrial television frequencies in a few months' time, the media outlets owned by French billionaire Vincent Bolloré are under fire – particularly CNews television channel, which has been accused of featuring only far-right-leaning platforms.

Today, at the head of a media empire that includes Groupe Canal+ channels (C8, Canal+, CNews), the world's third-largest publishing group Hachette, radio stations (Europe 1), newspapers (Paris Match – which is about to be bought by Bernard Arnault – Le Journal du Dimanche, etc.) and the Havas group, a global communications giant, the Breton tycoon first appeared in Le Monde on November 5, 1985. He was 33, an age that at the time was considered "young" for a businessman making his debut on the "second market of the Paris stock exchange." At the head of a family-run capacitor components business, the heir to the Bolloré paper mills (who produced the famous OCB brand of cigarette rolling papers) seemed ambitious and promising.

Less than four years later, on April 9, 1988, journalist Erik Izraelewicz covered the irresistible rise of this still-young Breton businessman. The man to whom French economic newspaper Le Nouvel Economiste awarded its Manager of the Year prize and who was nicknamed the "little prince of cash flow" had been doing very well. He no longer ran a small family business, but a group with 15,000 employees and "sales revenue of more than 12 billion francs": He had just bought a logistics company, the Commercial Chartering and Fuel Company (SCAC), from Suez.

The man who would often be referred to as conservative senator Gérard Longuet's "brother-in-law" both amazed and worried observers, as a fierce businessman and a devout Catholic. A man "who would have passed through Lourdes," wrote journalist François Renard in a profile published on February 25, 1989, describing his "remarkable ability to put companies back on their feet and raise the necessary capital" and his "eternally adolescent smile and open face."

The 1990s saw his increasing involvement in the shipping business, particularly in Africa, leading to Le Monde closely covering his actions, like his assault on the Bouygues group, just a few months after he had become its second-largest shareholder. "The war is total," wrote Le Monde on August 11, 1998. "The blond angel," as Bolloré was nicknamed, had boundless ambition and one major dream, wrote journalist Martine Orange: "to get his hands on TF1," France's most-watched television channel.

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