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 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.