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He said that the defence of French exceptionalism, alone, was pointless. Yesterday the station’s chief, Pierre Lescure, also departed.Since the struggling cable TV company is one of the biggest investors in new French movies (£100m a year), Mr Olivennes’ departure was seen in France as another nail driven into the coffin of French cultural exceptionalism.The argument with Mr Olivennes (who resigned in a three line e-mail) seems to have been more about Mr Messier’s autocratic style of management and his insistence that Canal Plus should break even within two years. The Vivendi boss is said by insiders to believe that Canal Plus should be more inventive and spend more on creativity, not less. That is not the way the story played in France.With all these troubles, and with the shareholders’ meeting approaching, this was not perhaps the best moment to announce a €2bn package of stock options for Vivendi senior management, however routine.The small shareholders revolted.

So, according to one account, did many executives within the company.Earlier this week, Mr Messier tried to douse this fire. Vivendi issued a statement saying that there was no quarrel between its remaining executives, over stock options or anything else. Mr Messier announced that he would not take up his own portion of the options unless the Vivendi share price had climbed back to €60 by September and so long as the market as a whole did not collapse.All in all, the Vivendi, and Messier, story is one of profound and as yet unresolved conflicts in French and American styles of business. Vivendi is an attempt to create a new kind of French company, but its culture, and Messier’s, remains rooted in the autocratic, opaque traditions of the semi-public companies and complex family holdings that have traditionally dominated the French corporate world.Mr Messier himself is a classic French technocrat by training, who has tried to reinvent himself as a global entrepreneur, a kind of Gallic Ted Turner or Rupert Murdoch. When Mr Messier took over in 1996, the company had already diversified into waste-treatment, energy and transport, such as the Connex company, which owns British railway franchises.Mr Messier plunged into a rapid transformation of the company into a media and communications giant, which he rebaptised Vivendi (now, by some estimates, the second-largest media company in the world).

Unlike Ted Turner or Rupert Murdoch, Mr Messier had little background as an entrepreneur.Born in Grenoble in 1956, the young Mr Messier took the traditional route of a brilliant, young French provincial into the Paris elite.He went to the Ecole Polytechnique (nominally an engineering school, actually a springboard into business or politics) and then the celebrated (or notorious) civil service college, the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA). (His ENA dissertation was a laudatory examination of Margaret Thatcher’s early privatisations.)After a couple of years as the youngest head of a ministerial private office in French history, he went into business, first with the Lazard bank and then G?rale des Eaux.Messier is married with five children. The family continues to live in France, although he announced, famously, that he was setting up home in a $17.5m (£12.2m) penthouse in Manhattan.Not all Mr Messier’s acquisitions have been disastrous. The Universal Music Group, which brings together Universal’s music portfolio and the music interests of Seagram, is now the most powerful and successful music business in the world. The claimed “synergies” with other parts of the media business, such as Canal Plus and the mobile phone arm, Cegetel, are less obvious.Most opaque of all is Vivendi’s continuing activities, as Vivendi Environnement, in its original core businesses, which are now marginal in the group as a whole. There have been continuing rumours, even announcements, that Vivendi intends to divest itself of its water, energy and transport businesses.