Should you judge the quality of a film based on how many people have been to see it? It’s the type of argument you would expect to hear in the context of the “culture war”; but is it what you would expect to hear from French culture warriors? From a country that uses language quotas to maintain its musicians on broadcast media, has fought to promote its language abroad and has always seen itself as a place that radiates art outwards? After all, this is a country that put on an opera for the 2024 Olympic closing ceremony.
Enter Sébastien Chenu, vice-president of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN). Chenu advanced the box-office success argument as a reason for his party’s proposal to eliminate, Doge-style, France’s National Cinema Centre (CNC) – the public body that subsidises almost every nook and cranny of the country’s heavy-hitting film industry. Let the market take over? Quality as a derivative of quantity? If the RN is perfectly happy to surrender Audiard for Avengers 18 (or whatever), why not apply the logic elsewhere as well?
Out would go subsidies to artisanal boulangeries and in with McDo (which, after all, can boast “billions and billions served”). Why bother stipulating a certain percentage of French music on the radio when American labels can easily take over? And, while we’re at it, why not recuperate the funding going to all the Institut Français centres around the world that promote the French language in the face of the numerical superiority of English?
Let’s be clear, the arts and culture subsidies at hand are relatively small – but have outsize impact. The CNC’s €850m in annual subsidies to French cinema amount to about €12.50 per person – or roughly one movie ticket a year for each of France’s 67 million citizens. For that, France – the birthplace of cinema itself – continues to boast one of the world’s most vibrant independent film industries.
Of course, it’s not really the savings that Chenu and the RN are after. It’s that they think they’re fighting a culture war against “le wokisme” supposedly imported from the US; against public media and arts establishments that produce “leftist” output.
Chenu’s reasoning clarifies that if the RN took power, it would launch the biggest attack on French global soft power since the US right’s forlorn attempt in 2003 to make “freedom fries” a thing over the war in Iraq. The irony should be clear to anyone that a party that has spent decades dripping France-first poison into public conversation should attack the funding that has done more than anything else to protect France from a “great replacement” of its culture by an onslaught of things backed by US money.
Though the party’s official manifesto is relatively vague on culture, the flurry of far-right activity when it comes to the arts and media is blazing and neon. Party figures polemicised the funeral in December of Brigitte Bardot, a convicted racist, who was open in her support of Le Pen and the RN’s “vision of France”. That vision now involves a project to reshape French culture around a sclerotic, imagined view of a country as myth, rather than a society that is fervently alive.
The RN has, in the past, proposed eliminating funding for contemporary art, targeted modern dance and, most recently (in a move whose tragicomedy cloaks its underlying cruelty), an RN deputy proposed a budget amendment to strip funding from an avant-garde music festival named Trans Musicales because he thought it was a showcase for transgender musicians. In place of all that, the far right and its ultra-wealthy allies propose mainly to focus efforts on protecting France’s “patrimoine” or heritage – that is, chateaux, monuments and other buildings – while weaving together political project and entertainment when it comes to history with medieval theme parks such as Puy du Fou.
I want to be fair to the RN for a minute: France’s built heritage is stunning, and no expense should be spared to preserve it. Contemporary art? I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t rolled my eyes from time to time at work displayed at Palais de Tokyo. And I’ve written before about the importance of regional traditions and festivals.
But the RN’s approach to preserving heritage puts history on a pedestal that simultaneously denigrates the present. That is not the foundation for a culture that radiates, it’s an attempt to turn culture into an ideological vehicle that, in the end, preserves France in amber.
There is nothing wrong with increasing funding to protect France’s existing heritage – as the Louvre’s recent woes show, it is often necessary. The problem is that the RN wants to use the weight of the state (or its absence) to shape what art ends up being created.
The party plans to privatise France’s public broadcasters. At a time when the billionaire media tycoon Vincent Bolloré has consolidated a business empire in the style of Rupert Murdoch, this would leave everything from journalism to pop-cultural production more dependent than ever on Bolloré-backed rightwing media.
If municipalities already under the control of the party are any guide, the far right would undermine if not destroy the next generation of French art and culture, just as the equivalent of “anti-woke warriors” in previous eras tried to prevent the creation and dissemination of some of the major works now associated with “la vieille France” that the far right purports to defend.
Pablo Picasso? Kept under police surveillance on suspicion of being an anarchist and denied French nationality in 1940. Edouard Manet? Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe was considered scandalous and obscene, barred from the official Paris art salon of 1863 and relegated to the “rejects’ hall”.
In 1930, Luis Buñuel’s L’Âge d’Or was banned for 51 years after far-right activists rioted and stormed a theatre where it was being shown. (Buñuel would eventually win a Palme d’Or for Viridiana at Cannes in 1961.) Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 film Le Petit Soldat was banned for three years by the French authorities over its depiction of the Algerian War.
It is in the DNA of authoritarians everywhere to try to co-opt art and culture to their own ends. Donald Trump is suing the BBC and has slapped his name on the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
But art that is interested in glorifying the leitkultur, in promoting existing power, is not often art that is remembered. Art that endures is frequently art that unsettles. Just glance at the works the Nazis featured in a 1937 exhibition meant to prompt public disgust over “degenerate art” (and which were displayed again, for quite obviously different reasons, by Paris’s Picasso museum last year): they included Chagall, Van Gogh, Kandinsky, Klee.
If the RN takes power, it will deal a savage financial blow to France’s performers and painters, theatres and museums. But a word of comfort to the artists they would target. If history is a guide, the works they produce despite far-right censorship will one day be venerated, and the politicians who tried to stamp them out will be the stuff of a future France’s disdain.
Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist. His memoir, Generation Desperation, is out now
