I'm French as well and, quite frankly, I don't see anything special here. It's just business as usual as it has been for the past 5 years. It goes like this:
1) A tragic but isolated incident occurs.
2) Our dear President jumps into action, calls a press conference and, with a dramatic tone of voice, announces that he will pass a new law that will protect us all against this happening again.
3) The media happily reports this. The public is happy - our dear President is looking after us. The media however blissfully ignored the fact that, in French democracy, the President has no power whatsoever to create new laws, let alone to tell Judges who should be punished for what. There is this thing in our constitution called "separation of power" that both our President and the French media seem to be unaware of.
4) What happens next depends on the PR situation:
If another story quickly takes the top spot at the 8 o'clock news programme, the new law proposal is quietly buried by the legislators never to be heard of again.
If a new law really needs to be passed for PR purposes, a new law, comprised of nothing more than a rehash of existing laws, is passed. It's then added to the already huge pile of laws that never get enforced due to lack of resources in our judicial system. The end result is an ever growing and more and more complex set of laws containing an increasing number of redundant and useless laws, resulting in an even slower and inefficient judicial system. Maitre Eolas's blog is worth a read to get a better understanding of what actually happens with these new laws: http://www.maitre-eolas.fr/
So yes, business as usual. I'm sure there are plenty of lessons to be learned here and applied to doing PR in a startup though.
1) A tragic but isolated incident occurs.
2) Our dear President jumps into action, calls a press conference and, with a dramatic tone of voice, announces that he will pass a new law that will protect us all against this happening again.
3) The media happily reports this. The public is happy - our dear President is looking after us. The media however blissfully ignored the fact that, in French democracy, the President has no power whatsoever to create new laws, let alone to tell Judges who should be punished for what. There is this thing in our constitution called "separation of power" that both our President and the French media seem to be unaware of.
4) What happens next depends on the PR situation:
If another story quickly takes the top spot at the 8 o'clock news programme, the new law proposal is quietly buried by the legislators never to be heard of again.
If a new law really needs to be passed for PR purposes, a new law, comprised of nothing more than a rehash of existing laws, is passed. It's then added to the already huge pile of laws that never get enforced due to lack of resources in our judicial system. The end result is an ever growing and more and more complex set of laws containing an increasing number of redundant and useless laws, resulting in an even slower and inefficient judicial system. Maitre Eolas's blog is worth a read to get a better understanding of what actually happens with these new laws: http://www.maitre-eolas.fr/
So yes, business as usual. I'm sure there are plenty of lessons to be learned here and applied to doing PR in a startup though.