But six years later the Titanic was sailing again. The old empire even seemed to have been successful in colonising the new continent. Arnaud Lagardère, heir to France’s biggest arms manufacturer, based his TV adverts on the film Fahrenheit 451 by François Truffaut (in which the censors decree the burning of books) : the implication was that, thanks to the internet services provided by his company, freedom of expression would flourish, freed from the flames of censorship. Something rather distasteful here : several months later, when Lagardère sold his internet subsidiary to Deutsche Telekom, he valued each of his 300,000 subscribers at 9,000 euros a head. At rates like that, there should be a way to make money from them one day.