Defending the Vote: France Acts to Combat Foreign Disinformation, 2021–2022

This Princeton ISS case study is among the most granular practitioner accounts of how a democratic government constructed an institutional response to foreign information manipulation in real time. Bernigaud traces the creation of VIGINUM — France's dedicated foreign digital interference detection unit — from its conceptual origins through its operational deployment during the 2022 presidential and legislative elections. The account is particularly valuable for its attention to the governance design choices that shaped VIGINUM's mandate: the deliberate separation of detection from response decision-making, the interagency structure that prevented any single body from controlling the full cycle, and the explicit effort to insulate the unit from accusations of politically motivated intervention.

What makes this case study instructive beyond the French context is the transferability of its institutional design logic. The challenge of building a unit capable of rapid threat identification while remaining legally constrained and politically credible is not unique to France — it is the central tension in counter-FIMI institutional design across democratic states. Bernigaud's account of the five interference operations VIGINUM identified during the 2022 campaign, and the coordination process that determined the appropriate response in each case, offers a rare operational-level view of how this tension was navigated in practice.