The Atlantic and Its Enemies

‘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 Andre 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-Elysees of Culture’, including Versailles.

Much of this 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 Chereau 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 Theatre de Chaillot, in 1974, having destroyed the art deco frescos that had once seen Gerard 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 reflexion were set up, and no doubt various useless institutes in the education ministry where Alain Besancon’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’eleve un pouvoir immense et tutelaire, qui se charge lui seul d’assurer leur jouissance et de veiller sur leur sort. Il est absolu, detaille, regulier, prevoyant et doux. Il ressemblerait a la puissance paternelle, si, comme elle, il avait pour objet de preparer les hommes a l’age viril; mais il ne cherche au contraire qu’a les fixer irrevocablement 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 idees recues; Francois 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, Leger, Irene 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 Pensee Francaise, 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