The Cité de la Musique

Abstract

The capital projects known as the grands travaux are perhaps the most ostentatious legacy of François Mitterrand’s fourteen-year presidency. Yet while the grands travaux are widely seen as standing ‘among the purest expressions of sovereign presidential power in the Fifth Republic’ (Harrison, 1993, p. 210) and often taken as proof that cultural policy has, since Pompidou, moved into the presidential domaine réservé, the diversity of the projects concerned, and their rather dissimilar ‘histories’, nonetheless suggest a more complex reality. This chapter considers the policy process with regard to a single grand projet, the Cite de la Musique, the last phase of which was inaugurated in January 1995. The Cite comprises the new buildings of the Paris Conservatoire, a medium-sized concert hall, and a ‘museum of music’.