Our Man in Paris: When the 'internut' drives out reality

Apart from his impudent, mournful expression, Thierry Meyssan is an unlikely looking left-wing activist. He wears a suit and a tie and he has short, dark hair. He looks like a door-to-door insurance agent from the 1950s. To France's shame, Mr Meyssan, 44, is a bestselling author. His breathtakingly silly book L'Effroyable Imposture ("The terrible imposture") has been hanging about in the French bestsellers' list for weeks.

The book suggests that the attack on the Pentagon on 11 September last year was carried out, not by al-Qa'ida, but by agents of the "US military-industrial complex", using not a hijacked airliner but a planted bomb or cruise-missile. The simultaneous attacks on the World Trade Centre, Meyssan believes, were carried out by the same high-level plotters, using advanced US military technology to tele-guide the airliners into the Twin Towers.

Why on earth would the plotters go to all that bother? To persuade George Bush to spend lots of money on new military hardware, which is, er, what he planned to do anyway.

To France's credit, Meyssan's book has been rejected and mocked by all the country's mainstream media (who are therefore part of the plot, according to Meyssan). Now, to France's further credit, two genuine investigative journalists – Guillaume Dasquié and Jean Guisnel – have taken the trouble to research and write an excellent book, L'Effroyable Mensonge ("The terrible lie") which dismantles Meyssan's accusations word by word.

The great investigator, they point out, never even travelled to Washington DC. He did not bother to interview a single witness or American official. All his suppositions and extrapolations come from photographs and from wild allegations published on the internet.

Meyssan has become a hero for the America-hating, French far left. And yet, much of his disinformation was lifted, Dasquié and Guisnel point out, from the American, anti-government, anti-Semitic far right, including the dotty Lyndon LaRouche, the man who believes that our own dear Queen is an international, drugs-smuggling mastermind.

Unabashed, Meyssan, who runs an internet crusade dedicated to liberty and truth called the Réseau Voltaire, has edited a new book of essays and lectures – Le Pentagate – which repeats and extends his original lie. The events of 11 September, he now implies, were a plot to begin a war between the West and the Islamic world.

His first book has helped to fuel a bonfire of exaggerated French-bashing in the US media. It will be interesting to see how well the English-language edition, soon to be published, goes down with the Anglo-Saxon world's own conspiracy-fanciers of the internet and X-Files generation. Remember the nonsense that apparently rational people believed – and still believe – about the relatively straightforward car accident that killed Diana, Princess of Wales?

There are two worrying aspects about the Meyssan saga.

First, there is the evidence of a shared paranoia, an internet-assisted short-circuit of lunacy, between the far left and the far right. The same delusions and distortions that feed Meyssan's imagination feed the darkest pools of the "internut", such as the British-run, neo-Nazi website selected by President Jacques Chirac's would-be assassin last week to announce that he would soon become a "star".

Second, there is the poisonous spillover from the fantasies of the "internuterrati" into the mass media. Thierry Meyssan's ideas would have been ignored if they had remained on his website. They started to seem respectable when they appeared in a book.

Even then, the book sold few copies until Meyssan was given a sycophantic interview on a populist French television chat show, hosted by Thierry Ardisson, who models himself on Jerry Springer and Oprah Winfrey. The very next day sales soared.

The internet makes an extraordinary amount of information instantly available. It also make an extraordinary amount of rubbish instantly available. In a world of tabloid television and tabloid publishing, rubbish easily drives out reality.

If the "internut" starts to set the agenda, we risk returning to a pre-journalistic, pre-intelligent age: an age of rumour and superstition. Marshall McLuhan predicted in 1964 that modern telecommunications would turn the world into a global village. What he did not foresee is that we might all become global village idiots.

Trust the French to come up with gourmet food for cats and dogs

If I ever wrote a book, it would be about the similarities between America and France, two countries which love to hate one another. Both are large, empty countries founded on abstract ideals. Both veer between self-flagellation and a conviction (partly justified) that they can teach the rest of the world how to live.

They are also both dotty about pets. America has more pets per human head than any other country in the world. France, with 16,000,000 cats and dogs – marginally more cats than dogs – has the largest pet population in Europe.

French pets are pampered in a particularly French way, through their stomachs. (The French also have perfumes for dogs, but that may not be such a bad idea.)

The latest canine luxury to hit France is the packed lunch for dogs. Available for only €6.85, it contains a poultry and carrot terrine, a packet of duck and chicken-flavoured dog-biscuits, a cake, a drink, as well as two disposable bowls, a fork and a paper napkin.

A French publisher, Noesis, has also commissioned gourmet cook-books for cats and dogs. A noted, gastronomic critic, François Simon, has compiled Miam, Miaou, conseils et recettes pour chat moderne (advice and recipes for the modern cat).

Its offerings include "tofu à la levure" (tofu with yeast); "méli-mélo de poissons en gras" (medley of fish in fat); not forgetting, of course, "delicé de crevette au saumon" (shrimp and salmon delight).

The canine equivalent, written by a celebrated chef for humans, Frédérick E Grasser-Hermé, offers such culinary delights as "os à moelle au caviare" (jelly bone with caviar); "langoustine au chocolat" (crayfish with chocolate) and – the pièce de résistance –"rattes farcies à la brandade de morue truffée" (rats stuffed with salt cod and truffles).

Rats? OK, I admit that is a mistranslation.

A "ratte" is in fact a small type of potato.

Euro rarissimo

My collection of euros from different nations received a distinguished addition this week: a Monegasque two euros coin, which is the euro-collectors' equivalent of a penny black (unless you happen to live in Monaco). Apart from the 12 euroland countries proper, three micro-states have issued their own euro coins. In my change in Paris, I have now discovered 12 of the 15 different types of Euro. No sign yet of the rarissimo Vatican and San Marino coins, but no sign either of a Finnish euro. Do the Finns never leave home?