How France administers its culture as a public service

Why the state runs so much of the culture

France treats culture as a public utility, and the machinery for administering it is older than the republic. The Académie française was founded in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu to rule on the French language, and it still issues judgements on usage and vocabulary. A secretariat for the fine arts followed in the nineteenth century. A ministry dedicated to cultural affairs was created by founding decree on 24 July 1959, under the writer André Malraux, with a brief phrased as making the works that enrich the human spirit available to as many French people as possible.

Malraux built regional cultural centres across the country to pursue that aim, and the underlying idea, a right to culture written into the constitutional preamble and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, has outlived every government since. The cultural budget was pushed towards a symbolic target of 1% of state spending, rising from 2.6 billion francs in 1981 to 13.8 billion in 1993.

What has changed is who pays. Local and regional authorities now provide around half of public spending on culture, following the decentralisation legislation of the early 1980s, and in some regions they carry up to four fifths of the total. The centre of gravity remains Paris regardless, which is a complaint made continuously since Malraux and acted on continuously since as well.

How the language is defended by law

French is the only language of the republic, and the state has legislated to keep it that way. The Toubon laws of 1994, named after the culture minister who carried them, require French in advertising directed at the general public, so that a foreign phrase in a public advertisement must be translated. The same package obliges radio stations to give two fifths of their music to French-language songs, a quota introduced against the growing share of English-language pop. The reach of these rules is narrower than their reputation. The state does not regulate what private parties say to each other in commercial settings, and it does not require French-language websites. What it regulates is the public sphere it pays for or licenses.

Underneath standard French sit languages that are not dialects of it. Breton is Celtic and close to Cornish and Welsh, Alsatian is an Alemannic form of German, Occitan is a separate Romance language, and Basque is related to nothing else in Europe. For two centuries the state suppressed them in schools and administration, a fact a minister of education acknowledged formally in April 2001, after which bilingual education was extended. Whether that reversal came in time is disputed, and the number of speakers of most regional languages continues to fall.

What the cultural exception protects

France exports the argument as well as the culture. In 1993 it persuaded the other European Community members to keep culture and audiovisual services out of the sectors opened to liberalisation at the World Trade Organization, on the ground that a film is not the same kind of good as a shipment of steel. The principle acquired the name cultural exception, and it was carried into UNESCO in 2005, where a convention endorsing it passed by a wide margin.

Domestically the exception is a financing system. Cinema is supported through a levy on ticket sales, redistributed to production, so that French films are funded partly by the box office of imported ones. Book prices are fixed, which protects independent bookshops from being undercut. 1% of the construction cost of a public building is reserved for art in or around it, a rule that has scattered commissioned work across schools, universities and administrative buildings for decades.

France sustains a large feature film industry on the back of that funding, hosts the Cannes festival, and maintains a distribution network for French-language film across the countries of the Francophonie. The unresolved question is whether a subsidy system built around cinema admissions transfers to platforms that sell subscriptions instead of tickets, since the levy has no equivalent base there.

How the heritage is inventoried and kept

The habit of nationalising culture began with the Revolution, and it began by confiscation. Through the 1790s the government seized and sold the lands of the church and of exiled aristocrats, which left the new state holding more buildings and more art than any private owner in Europe and no established idea of what to do with them. The answer arrived quickly and has not changed since. The Louvre was created in 1793 by the revolutionary regime in the former royal palace, which turned a private collection into a public institution at a stroke and established the pattern for everything that followed: what had belonged to the crown or the church became property of the nation, held in trust and open to it.

That inheritance is now managed as an inventory. France holds 56 properties on the UNESCO World Heritage List, of which 47 are cultural, seven natural and two mixed, and the list ranges from cathedrals and Roman remains to whole agro-pastoral regions such as the Causses and the Cévennes, inscribed in 2011. Domestic protection extends far wider through a national register of protected monuments, which constrains what an owner may do to a listed building and attaches public money to the obligation.

Ownership of that heritage is slowly being pushed downwards as well. The devolution acts of 1982 and 1983 and a further act of 2004 let local authorities take over historical monuments in their territory, and by 2014 the ministry counted 65 of the 176 transferable sites handed over, 43 to communes, 16 to departments and six to regions. Museums were given their own financing law in 1978, and the network they belong to runs well past the capital: municipal museums, theatres, libraries and music schools are maintained largely by communes and departments, which is where the decentralised half of cultural spending goes. The effect is that a French town of moderate size usually has a public library, a music school and a museum, funded locally and staffed as a public service, which is the concrete form Malraux's right to culture eventually took.

How secularism works in practice

The republic broke with the Catholic Church by a law of 1905 that separated church and state, and the doctrine that followed is called laïcité. It is not a hostility to belief. It divides life into a private sphere, where religion is free and protected as a constitutional right, and a public sphere administered by a state that recognises no religion and funds none.

The doctrine has a second consequence that surprises outside observers. Because citizens face the state as individuals rather than as members of communities, France collects no official statistics on ethnicity or religion, and religious minorities have no legal standing as groups. Survey data is what exists instead. A Eurobarometer poll in 2012 found that 60% of French citizens identified as Christian, half of them Catholic, with 8% Protestant, 20% describing themselves as non-believers or agnostics, 13% as atheists and 7% as Muslim.

The Catholic calendar survived the separation intact. Public and school holidays follow it, with Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, the Assumption, All Saints and Christmas all kept as national days off, and only Labour Day and the national holiday of 14 July fall outside it. A state that funds no religion still schedules its year around one.

What food and drink actually mean here

Cooking in France is a codified craft rather than an inherited habit. Georges Auguste Escoffier set down the classical system in the early twentieth century, turning kitchen practice into a written method with defined sauces, cuts and station roles, which is why French terminology still runs professional kitchens worldwide. His codification also flattened much of what was regional, and the twentieth century was spent recovering it. The recovery took a commercial form. Gastronomic tourism and the Michelin guide sent city dwellers into the countryside in search of regional cooking, and appellation systems attached legal protection to the place a cheese or a wine comes from. That link between product and territory is now an economic asset as much as a culinary one, and it is defended in trade negotiations with the same energy as the audiovisual sector.

Eating habits are changing under the same pressures as everywhere else. Fast food and global brands have taken share from long meals, and the low rates of obesity and heart disease that once made French diets a subject of foreign study have moved towards the northern European norm. France: travel deals with where regional cooking is still worth crossing the country for.

Where education fits into all of this

The school system is centralised to a degree that follows directly from the cultural politics above. Curricula are set nationally, the teaching profession is a national civil service, and the state runs primary and secondary education directly alongside a large network of Catholic schools that receive public funds under contract.

Secondary education ends in the baccalauréat, an examination that both certifies school leaving and opens entry to higher education, and its results are a national news event each summer. Universities are public and admission is broadly open to holders of the baccalauréat, while a parallel system of grandes écoles selects by competitive examination after two further years of preparatory classes and supplies most of the senior administrative and engineering positions in the country.

That two-track structure is the most criticised feature of French education, because it concentrates advantage among students whose families understand how it works. It has also, for the same reason, outlasted every attempt to reform it. France: politics takes up the administrative class it produces.

What Paris drew in and sent back out

For roughly a century from the middle of the nineteenth, Paris functioned as the place where European art was argued about. The Bohemians of the eighteen-fifties, the Impressionists, the artistic circles of the Belle Époque around Picasso and Alfred Jarry, the Dadaists and the Surrealists all formed there, and a striking share of the participants were foreigners who had come precisely because the argument was happening in that city.

The openness cut both ways. The School of Paris drew Jewish artists from across central and eastern Europe, among them Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine and Jules Pascin, whose work belongs to French art history and to the histories of the countries they left. The same period produced composers who reorganised European music from the same address, Gabriel Fauré, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel and later Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Boulez, and the impressionist label crossed from painting to music through Debussy's use of scales and harmony that the conservatoire had not sanctioned. What sustained this was partly infrastructure. Free primary education became compulsory in the late nineteenth century, basic literacy became general, and newspapers, then radio, cinema and television widened the audience for all of it. The concentration is also the standing criticism of French cultural policy, and every decentralisation measure since 1959 has been an attempt to loosen it without dispersing what made the capital work in the first place.