Invisible seas: Media agenda-setting and the territorial imaginary of France’s global ocean domain

Although France has a vast maritime domain, the French are not aware of it. However, they do have many and varied ways of finding out about this very special space, and thus possibly building a link with it. In this article, after the presentation of the corpus and of the methodology, we study representations of the sea and ocean in general in the French national daily press, based on a corpus of articles from four national newspapers, published between 2000 and 2022 or 2023. We then focus on representations of the Pacific and Indo-Pacific. We draw several conclusions from this research. The place of maritime areas in the national daily press is marginal. The press gives a geographical representation of the seas and oceans that does not correspond to the geography of the French maritime domain. The French presence in maritime areas is rarely presented as such. In articles about the Pacific and Indo-Pacific oceans, little is said about the French overseas territories. This may be seen as a symptom of the French public's lack of interest in these remote regions, in the maritime spaces that surround them and in the issues that concern them. Conversely, it may be assumed that this distorted and incomplete representation of maritime spaces in the French national daily press plays a role in the low level of appropriation of the French maritime domain by French citizens themselves, and in the low level of appropriation by public opinion of the maritime policies implemented by French governments.