New Book Coming Soon: Collective Volume on Le Bureau des légendes (Vrin)

Coming soon: The collective volume on the TV series Le Bureau des légendes (Vrin) under the direction of Thibaut de Saint Maurice and Sandra Laugier (ERC DEMOSERIES, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne).

Broadcasted by Canal+ between 2015 and 2020, with 5 seasons of 10 episodes each, Le Bureau des légendes is a series created by Eric Rochant, set in the DGSE—Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure—and specifically focused on the service of clandestine agents who infiltrate abroad. The show follows the work of ordinary agents of an intelligence service, far from the stereotypes of the “secret agent”—those of the man of action succeeding in his mission almost every time—conveyed by most series and films featuring the work of counter- espionage or counter-terrorism.

Le Bureau des légendes is a breakthrough series, first within French production, as one of the rare series to bring out a French-style showrunner. Its creator, Eric Rochant, is at the same time the main scriptwriter, co-producer, and supervisor of all the creative elements of the series, and he works with the press to promote the series. The show also stands out for its successful reception, both with the public and critics, in France and abroad, as it is one of the French series that is best exported, and several adaptations are underway, including one in the United States produced by George Clooney.

But Le Bureau des légendes is also a breakthrough series within its own genre because it proposes another image of the intelligence services, rid of the “hodgepodge of testosterone of the North American versions” and in which “the narrative focuses on an activity that is more laborious than novelistic” (Lamendour, 2016). This dilation of the time of the action allows the staging of the work of espionage, counter-espionage, and intelligence. Surprisingly, the series then becomes a communication and recruitment platform for the DGSE, once again throwing into question the link between popular fiction and the intelligence services (Jenkins 2016; Willmets 2016).

Le Bureau des légendes thus proposes “to imagine a world that by definition evades the gaze” by compensating for “the dearth of information that characterizes the world of intelligence” (Blistène, 2018). The show, like many spy series, participates in the education of its audience, not only because it provides a “realistic” representation of the actual work of the DGSE agents— which has been widely debated and discussed (Trotignon, 2018)—but because it reveals “the ambivalence of democratic regimes” (Blistène, 2018) which continue to practice a certain political violence even though they are based on principles of transparency and democratic rhetoric. Through this, it transmits and constructs political, but also ethical, themes and issues through a set of characters that have left a lasting impression on viewers.

The goal of this collective volume is to bring together contributions from different academic disciplines, including philosophy, political science, international relations, sociology, history, information and communication, film studies, etc. in order to consider the importance of this series from the point of view of both its production context and its reception, as well as the inventory of the “behind the scenes” of a contemporary democracy that it contributes to presenting.