Dozens of blanks fleck the landscape of France on Geoportail, the state-financed bird’s-eye view of France that M Chirac opened with a mouse-click ten days ago as a French alternative to Google Earth. The white zones cover a list of sites that the State deems sensitive under a 1973 law. Photographing them is banned.

The sites include the harbours of Toulon and Brest, as well as power stations and government buildings. There are so many no-look zones in Brittany, with the Brest naval base, aerodromes and other sites, that French bloggers have renamed it “Emmenthal country”.

Yet all are visible on Google’s satellite views — some, such as Toulon and the Avord air force base, with the high resolution that Geoportail offers for the rest of France.

“French law requires us to hide sensitive sites,” Bertrand Levy, director of the National Geographical Institute, which runs the site, said. “We have just been authorised to blur these zones rather than hide them. Obviously, one can wonder about the point of blurring zones if they appear on other sites but we are a public service and have to obey the law,” he told The Times.

At the US Government’s request, Google blurs detail on a few American installations, including the residence of Vice-President Dick Cheney — but not the White House. India, Israel and other states have also put pressure on Google to hide sites that could be sensitive to enemies or terrorists, but nowhere have so many zones simply been blanked out as on Geoportail’s France.

The 400,000 aerial photographs covering non-sensitive parts of the country have made www.geoportail.fr a runaway success. In contrast, the American sites focus on French cities and tourist attractions, giving astonishing views of the Eiffel Tower and the Mont-Saint-Michel abbey in Normandy, but leaving la France profonde as a low resolution blur. The French site, which is free, offers a detailed ordnance survey map that overlays the aerial shots. The site crashed the moment that M Chirac opened it and it was jammed with 20 million attempted connections for the first three days. It has become available, in a shaky way, this week, with half a million visits a day. The service, run by the equivalent to Britain’s Ordnance Survey at a cost of £4.8 million, is the fruit of M Chirac’s campaign to promote French and European alternatives to what he sees as US digital hegemony.

The French National Library has put more than 80,000 books and newspaper articles online since early 2006 on a portal called Gallica, in response to Google Book, and M Chirac has initiated plans for a Franco-German search engine to rival Yahoo! and Google. He was also the driving force behind Galileo, Europe’s £3 billion project for a satellite navigation network, due to open by 2010, that will end dependence of the US military’s global positioning system (GPS).

M Chirac’s campaign to digitalise France’s heritage included the opening in spring of free online access to the archives of the National Audiovisual Institute, which has all TV and radio broadcasts from the public networks since the 1940s.

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