Culture and the State in France

Abstract

In few liberal democracies does government policy towards the arts occupy as prominent a position in political discourse, or does government involve itself as directly and as intimately in the cultural life of a nation, as in contemporary France. Indeed, many countries have chosen to devolve responsibility for arts funding to quasi-autonomous ‘arm’s length’ institutions: not so France, where both Presidents and Ministers have amply used their powers to create cultural institutions, to allocate funding among existing ones, and to bestow favours on individual artists. The institutional arrangements of the Fifth Republic have heightened the tendency for cultural affairs to be perceived as a matter for the highest echelons of political power. In a regime often remarked upon for its near-monarchic traits, the power to dispense not only political, but also artistic patronage, and to leave a lasting mark on the cultural life of one’s ‘subjects’, has come to be seen as a natural prerogative of the ‘republican monarch’. Yet the conventions of the Fifth Republic only reinvigorated and perpetuated a tradition firmly anchored in French political history: if interpreted broadly, ‘cultural policy’ could be said to have been invented by France’s absolutist monarchy, and subsequent regimes only built on the absolutist core, adding layer upon layer of later priorities and preoccupations — traces of which persist to this day.