The Atlantic and Its Enemies

by Norman Stone

  A mania for public support of Culture spread over France, sometimes with preposterous results. In Provence you could read that ‘the Regional Council dynamizes the plastic arts’; there was ‘a microclimate of contagious euphoria’ with publicly funded art, and museums, spreading all over the place. The château de Chambord only very narrowly escaped acquiring what was described as an enormous breughelian pyramid, supposedly to celebrate the Renaissance. All of this was supposed to protect French culture, but its output compared quite badly with that of the 1950s, when, in small, private theatres, Ionesco and Beckett were performed. The new managers of French culture were very often anti-American, denouncing the establishment of McDonald’s on the boulevard Saint-Michel, but they themselves were really in the grip of another dictatorship altogether, that of East Berlin and Moscow: on the tower block outskirts of Paris there were ‘avenues Maurice-Thorez’ or ‘stades Rosa-Luxemburg’ that were as grimly Communist as anything you might have met in Romania. In fact, ‘State Culture divided Arts and Letters into functionaries and clients’. Typical of its output was a film, Germinal, which sought to revive a world of working-class passions, of the old French Left, with France’s best-known actor, Gérard Depardieu, in the heroic role. The film had no effect: it was, as Tocqueville had said of an earlier French revolution, that of 1848, ‘men warming their hands at the ashes of their grandfathers’ passions’. A more interesting film was Andrzej Wajda’s Danton, which showed a gloomy picture of a revolution eating its children. But Wajda, having lived through a genuine revolution, in Communist Poland, knew what he was talking about, whereas the French were only turning out wooden propaganda.

  Most European countries had public support for the Arts. The Germans had inherited a tradition by which several, sometimes quite small, territories or towns had proudly maintained their local arts; the British, as ever, were better when it came to private gatherings and support — for instance, for the Hallé Orchestra — but they also had, in the BBC, a sort of Ministry of Culture, promoting music and literature through the radio. France, from the 1920s, tried to keep the language ahead, in a world role, subsidizing schools all over the globe; in the 1930s French film and theatre had been well ahead. However, much of this had to do with education, rather than public support for culture: it was simply a fact that the French were very well-educated indeed. In 1959, when the Fifth Republic was set up, Culture became a national totem; in fact, a sterile, old-Venice form of it was superimposed onto an educational system that, notoriously, declined, and a national television that was both censorious and comical. In Germany, state-led art sometimes reflected self-hatred. In France, matters were more complicated: the shapers of culture were motivated in part by the claims of national grandeur, but in large part also by contempt for what was bizarrely called the ‘French desert’.

  It was said that the State had neglected its artists. This was in some measure quite true: it had not given great public commissions to, say, Cézanne. It had also allowed the sale of many modern paintings to foreigners. In the Third Republic, there had been a reaction against the cultural pretensions of earlier French governments, but there is no evidence at all that the civilization as a whole suffered — quite the contrary: the world beat its way to Paris. In the sixties cultural pretensions returned; but France interested the world less and less — though, to be fair, some of this was the world’s, and particularly the Anglo-Saxon world’s, fault, as knowledge of foreign languages ran down. In the fifties supposed decentralization of culture had been encouraged, at least in the theatrical world. What, in practice, this meant was that small versions of the Paris model went up everywhere, to the detriment of local character. This went together with a Communist notion that literature had been corrupted (‘bourgeois’) since the Revolution, that it needed to purify itself: such was Sartre’s attitude, in 1948, and, in 1953, Roland Barthes’s (Le Degré zéro de la littérature). They were contemptuous of cliché, dismissing even genuine, interesting and highly successful figures such as Édith Piaf or Charles Aznavour or Maurice Chevalier or Georges Simenon. The accent was on Brechtianism — ‘angry young men’ — as against the boulevard theatre: it was all modernism, and the hope was that the epicurean, avant garde dilettantism of the art déco world would be generalized. As Fumaroli says, this did indeed happen: within a generation, robustly bourgeois figures were going in for their version of bohemia, and popular culture more or less collapsed into out-of-date copies of Atlantic rock music. In the Third Republic, academe, not ‘culture’, had reigned: as a young education minister, Jean Zay, said in his memoirs, the greatest test was not to speak in the Senate, but before the professors gathered in the higher education council. In fact he did very well — commissioning the Palais de Chaillot, and getting Robert and Sonia Delaunay to decorate the technical pavilion of the exhibition of 1937. It was simply nonsense to write off the Third Republic as a cultural desert, but such was the tone. Later, Communist influences became very powerful, but an initial impulse came from Vichy. In 1940, with the great defeat, there were calls for a cultural purification of the country, and a General Secretariat for Youth was established, in which Catholicism and the army played their part. At Uriage a new school for administrators was set up, the beginnings of ‘technocracy’, and a Catholic thinker, Emmanuel Mounier, ‘the poor man’s Heidegger’, developed ‘personalism’. One of Vichy’s cultural ministers wrote, ‘Diriger l’art, c’est lui permettre de s’accomplir.’ A central part of this thesis was that the French universities had somehow let the national culture be frittered away in scholarly aridity, in egalitarianism. Mounier did have a reading list, but it was skimpy, and his accent lay elsewhere: he wanted to escape from the alleged academicism of literature and museums. These ideas were well-meant, in the sense that they were inspired by a feeling that ordinary people deserved a higher culture than, hitherto, they had had.

  Such were the germs of the technocrats’ attitude to Culture, and after the war they were filtered through Communism, which won an enormous influence. Vichy even launched an idea of great public fetes. In this, it could rely on Rousseau, who disliked the Italian theatre and wanted demonstrations of unity; Wagner was a similar influence, and led straight to the megalomaniac producers Max Reinhardt, Gordon Craig and Erwin Piscator manipulating the whole theatre, and using light, especially, to dominate a mass. The idea of theatre as awakening — here applied for left-wing purposes — was very old, and into the 1970s it was being used in western Europe, sometimes absurdly. Could television and film take its Brechtian place?

  These notions came together, in 1959, with André Malraux — one-time hero of the Left, now de Gaulle’s minister of culture. Like so many intellectuals, he was out of touch with the liberal democracy which had in effect triumphed in 1945, and, like so many, he talked of some ‘Third Way’ between capitalism and Communism, which was a false way of putting the whole problem. France thus became in 1959 the first democratic country to acquire a Ministry of Cultural Affairs, and it went on to spread far and wide, in the very propitious environment of the French State, larger than elsewhere. Malraux’s budget had been small, and his Maisons de la Culture did not flourish, but, under Pompidou, elements of grandiosity took over. This especially concerned the Centre Beaubourg, but throughout the provinces and even in Paris small replicas pullulated. There was an entirely misleading idea that this was a continuation of Louis XIV’s practices, but, now, there were far more bureaucrats than artists, and it all had to do with a very modern phenomenon, ‘leisure’. The State’s monopoly extended, notoriously, to television, with a great noise as to protectionism against supposed cultural imperialism, cheapening, etc. and in the 1980s proceeded to grandiose nonsense — ‘the clangorous fiasco of the Bastille [opera], or the absurd project of creating a National Library, by its nature a private matter, in the very centre of a gigantic Leisure Complex’ or even some enormous French version of the Las Vegas Strip, a ‘Champs-Élysées of Culture’, including Versailles.

  Much of thi
s came about with the ministry of Jack Lang, in 1981. On one level, it was popular, his team grinning away in the Kennedy- Servan-Schreiber manner. Culture, said Lang to Playboy, was to be fun. As the eighties drew to a close, Culture even gave the socialists a new lease of life, their original inspiration having failed: there was indeed fun, even though the other ministries — the economy, foreign affairs — became grim-faced as the problems began to accumulate. To begin with, the Malraux project had been very serious indeed, as befitted a country that had gone through so much, up to the Algerian war. Then 1968, an explosion of imbecile hedonism, had occurred. Theatre had begun this process and Lang himself had run a festival at Nancy that was supposed to be innovative, thought-provoking, etc. in the Brechtian manner. At least it had some sparkle, whereas the cultural commissars were taking over elsewhere (Louis Althusser’s Notes on a Materialist Theatre, or Sartre’s thoughts as to ‘a proletarian theatre’). In 1969, the Nancy Festival started a sort of annual commemoration of ‘the revolution of 1968’, the general idea being a French Wood-stock or Berkeley. Patrice Chéreau added the war of the sexes to the Brechtian war of the classes; or there was an American, in 1971, who staged a seven-hour dumb show, brilliantly illuminated, which Aragon said was the best thing he had ever seen. Lang was sacked from the Théâtre de Chaillot, in 1974, having destroyed the art déco frescos that had once seen Gérard Philipe’s triumphs, but took his revenge, claiming that France was still a cultural desert. In 1981 the ministry announced there would be ‘recognition of the cultural habits of the young, rock, jazz, photo, scientific and technical culture. Local radio… Introduction of the cultural dimension of the politics of social and professional inclusion for the young’ (sic). Six groupes de réflexion were set up, and no doubt various useless institutes in the education ministry where Alain Besançon’s one-time Communist friends found their places, burrowing away in the State like some sort of termite, pre-programmed and leaving nothing to record their passage but little heaps of pulverized dirt. Tocqueville had written a famous passage:

  Au dessus (de cette foule innombrable) s’élève un pouvoir immense et tutélaire, qui se charge lui seul d’assurer leur jouissance et de veiller sur leur sort. Il est absolu, détaillé, régulier, prevoyant et doux. Il ressemblerait à la puissance paternelle, si, comme elle, il avait pour objet de préparer les hommes à l’âge viril; mais il ne cherche au contraire qu’à les fixer irrévocablement dans l’enfance.

  Lang in 1981 even announced that ‘culture is the abolition of the death penalty! Culture is the reduction in the hours of the working week! Culture is respect for countries of the third world! Each member of the government has an obvious artistic responsibility.’ Wooden language followed:

  the ministry entrusted with culture has, as its mission, to permit each and every French citizen to cultivate their capacity for invention and creation, to express their talents freely, and to obtain the artistic training of their choice… to contribute to the spread of French art and culture in the free dialogue between the cultures of the world.

  France now adopted the stereotypes of Greenwich Village, giving up her own clothing and popular music, but a good part of the inspiration was really Soviet, in that Lenin had maintained a commissariat for culture, under Lunacharsky, together with various Bolshevik women — Krupskaya, Trotskaya, Dzierzynska, Kameneva, etc. It had Lito — Direction of the Book, which purged libraries, Muzo for music, Izo, Teo, Foto-Kino and Chelikbez, the special commission for the elimination of illiteracy. Lunacharsky had said, ‘taking power would be pointless unless we could not make people happy’. Narkompros collected its avant-garde, and there remained, for Malraux’s generation, an illusion — ‘an ultra-modern Parnassus, working together with an ultra-modern state to ultra-modernize a people that was innocent, but stupefied by religion and the old order’. But the library purging was soon followed by poets and artists. Fascism, with dopolavoro and Kraft durch Freude, followed.

  Against this European happiness-by-State came the American style, happiness by democratic entertainment, an immense force. Even by 1946 there was an initial test — one condition for an American loan was that American films should be freely distributed, as against the existing quota, by which French films had to be shown four weeks out of sixteen. American films then invaded — in 1947, 388 were shown, whereas French ones fell from 119 to 78 that year. In 1948 the US films were taxed, and the money was passed on to French film-makers. But the fact was that Holywood was very good. State protectionism in France turned the cinema over to coteries, anxious to do down the idées reçues; François Truffaut alone, or nearly, holding out for the older values in the national tradition. Fumaroli remarks that it has been a good thing that French wine-makers never had a state subsidy or were forced by coteries to make an avant-garde wine. But the way was now open for a Ministry of Cultural Affairs, with the inevitable coteries frightened by popular success and denouncing ‘Americanism’ while being dazzled by its techniques, though this ultra-modern America was in reality at variance with America’s own traditions. French Communists took up the cause, and the Central Committee collected some big names — Picasso, Aragon, Léger, Irène Joliot-Curie, quite in the style of Comintern media mobilization in the thirties. Russian films, etc. were shown in fellow-travelling organizations such as Les Maisons de la Pensée Française, and Fumaroli wonders how far these ideas percolated, as the state ‘structures’ spread, and of course culture offered at least relief from the endless wooden language and the tiresome agitprop. In time, many left the Party but stayed, at state expense through Maisons de la Culture, etc., with ‘gauchisme’, and 1968 showed how Brechtism replaced Marxism of the old sort. Kremlin-Beaubourg, Kremlin-Bastille then got going. Jack Lang, for instance, said of Cuba in 1981 at a Unesco conference in Mexico that it was ‘courageous’, that ‘culture is above all the right of each people freely to choose its political order’, as against the supposed domination of culture by a multinational financial system. There was much denunciation of the American film festivals at Deauville, but the denunciation itself was really that of Greenwich Village, sexual liberation, drugs, etc. Lang subsidized French rock groups that imitated obsolete American ones and made a great fuss of rap. That ministry was even encouraging a confrontation for alleged creativity between the museums and a noise called ‘tag’. The only answer would have been to defend French culture via the schools, but instead Lang tried to fight Americanization by adopting what the American liberals made of it — alternative life-styles, marketing, social and racial problems — and bringing Disneyland to France. There were gruesome events such as a Fête de la Musique, endless music of all sorts launched simultaneously, everywhere, in the manner of a campaign against smoking or for seat belts. There was in June 1995 a business on the place de la Concorde for SOS Racisme, a nowadays discredited organization, with reggae and pop groups subsidized by the ministry, looked on with favour by Jacques Attali, and Jack Lang, with 300,000 people there for the weekend, including tourists, with huge screens and amplified music, the ministerial faces projected. It was supposed to be an enormous campaign against racism, complete with campaign buttons (touche pas à mon pote), in connection with the celebrations of 1789.

  There were of course in the Ministry of Culture (as it was after 1976) the older institutions, the museums and archives, with enormous international authority, with well-chosen exhibitions, in the usual dusty and slow-moving scholarly atmosphere. Now, the ministry introduced dynamism, etc., and its exhibitions were glossy and shallow as against the older style of long-lunch apparent laziness (in the great days of the BBC Third Programme, three-gin lunches were standard). Fumaroli says ‘the ready-made smiles of the modern, dynamic technocrat disguise a mourning’. Hence the saga of the Bibliothèque Nationale. Even with Malraux (who instituted the Maisons de la Culture) there had been ideas of juxtaposing the modern and the medieval, and the idea won after 1988, as the socialists ran out of any other ideology. This led to imitation of the Grand Louvre scheme, and I. M.
Pei’s absurdly misplaced Maison de la Culture. Lieux culturels followed, with all the audiovisual paraphernalia. Strange it was that these artifacts were not really shown on television at all, where they would indeed have had access to millions if that was the intention. The State did not let go of television, and a modest cultural channel, la 7, can only be seen very expensively, on cable, and by fewer people than watched the original Eiffel Tower transmitter in 1935. Besides the electoral considerations, the ministry’s own assumption, that there is a huge public for culture, would automatically be disproved as there would indeed only be a small number of viewers for such a channel, and in any case they were quite likely just to ignore television. There is the example of the Centre Beaubourg, getting in a year as many people as watch a successful TV show in a single night. But the museum itself attracts no more people than when its pictures were tucked away in the Palais de Tokyo. Visitors spend time in the side-shows but do not pay to enter as they were supposed to do. There was conscious imitation of the Eiffel Tower (1889), renowned worldwide, and Beaubourg, the Louvre pyramid, Opéra-Bastille, the Géode de la Villette, l’Arche de la Défense, and then the tower-books of the Tolbiac library were repetitions on the theme. The crowds that visit do indeed silence criticism but the real visitors remain quite stable in number. The things have been a touristic success, and nothing else. Books got the treatment as well, and libraries acquired multimedia trappings, until the Direction du Livre had the idea of the Très Grande Bibliothèque (Paris libraries generally being understocked). The Beaubourg’s own library took in as many visitors as the museum upstairs, people sitting on the floor and notices warning of pickpockets. The Très Grande Bibliothèque was supposed to keep the old French books and as well to be an ‘information library’, but the two purposes (however much talk there was of the technical difficulty of keeping books in the old BN and the need to computerize the catalogue) were different. The old library was meant for an elite — or a minority, if that is the right word — and yet it was supposed to coexist with a crowd of sightseers (badauds). Fumaroli remarks that no-one expects non-sportsmen to come onto football pitches, or non-dancers to take the floor in discos. ‘The superposition of two libraries, by nature incompatible, on the same architectural site, itself in any event conceived to attract the robot-tourist’ caused a debate that had been simmering all along, since 1959. The public who had always gone to the museums and the Comédie-Française were oppressed by this supposed cultural democratization. The Lang ministry was the apogee of modish bureaucratic creationism, all geometry and Le Corbusier, with a vast budget. But what was there to show for it all? This ‘Culture’ was used as a grandiloquent, triumphalist alibi for the ruining of the old university and the humiliation of its scholar-teachers, as ‘social sciences’ take over from the old humanities, which truly had the apparatus of scholarly disciplines to offer. Television became the real queen of the battlefield, a mighty engine of egalitarianism, which simplifies and coarsens to the point of caricature the worst features of what Montesquieu called the general spirit of a people. Curiously enough, the men (much more often: it took time for the women to catch up) of 1968 frequently went on to prosper in the media, as they did in Germany as well. That year had much to answer for.