The Atlantic and Its Enemies

15. 1968: A Generation

This disintegration of the Marshall-NATO world had a cultural aspect. The biggest sign of this by far was in France, and perhaps not by chance. De Gaulle had greatly angered the Americans, with his withdrawal from NATO and his torpedoing of the dollar. France, in 1968, appeared to be extraordinarily successful, but de Gaulle received, out of the blue, a vast humiliation. In a moment that summed up the sixties, the students of Paris rebelled against him, and would have brought him down if the Communist Party had not, for Moscow’s sake, saved him. The episode in itself was farcical, but it was farce with a sinister side, edging into terrorism; it also did great damage to education in general, and particularly to European universities, which since then have declined. In 1914, as a foreigner, you beat your path to Paris or Berlin if you wanted to study anything of seriousness. By 1980 American universities were all the rage, and foreigners made for the universities of France or Germany only if they had no American (or at least British) alternative.

As so often, it was in Italy that the European starting gun was fired. She, much poorer than France, had nevertheless been another European miracle in the sense that her exports boomed. The Italian State was another matter. Parents cared about schools, which were very good, as was the press, but universities were of much less interest, and here Italy, living in the tailwind of a demographic storm, faced a crisis. Student numbers had doubled, from 1959 to 1969, to nearly half a million, while the curriculum remained the same, and there were no textbooks or classrooms. The extension of the school-leaving age to fourteen had gone together (in 1965) with abolition of university entrance examinations. Governments as ever found it easy to economize on education, because at least in the short term it could not mobilize discontent, and headlines as to educational improvements made for good politics. The university system, according to Paul Ginsborg, was therefore in ‘an advanced state of malfunction’: Rome had 60,000 students, Naples 50,000, Bari 30,000 — each institution designed for 5,000. There were too few lecturers, and they also gave few lectures — one per week; and examinations were oral, no poorly paid lecturer wanting to spend time on thousands of scripts. It was true that there was much failure, but a merciful providence decreed that the failures could go on repeating years, perhaps with some part-time job to keep them going. Even middle-class students in the then fashionable subjects of sociology or psychology would easily find that they had no job at the end of it all. Therefore the universities simmered. An absurd cult of ‘Che’ developed from 1967, when the university of Trento was occupied; then came troubles at the Catholic University in Milan and then again at Turin, in opposition to entirely sensible reform. All of this came with the usual paraphernalia of lumpish clothes and ready-made ‘anti’ talk: thus R. D. Laing’s remarks, critical of the family, in Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964), had much resonance in family-bound Italy where one graffito read, ‘I want to be an orphan’. Such students could at least claim partnership with ‘the workers’ — a matter generally fanciful elsewhere. One and a half million metalworkers struck; they wanted a forty-hour week and equal wages. Other workers, including state and local government ones, followed, sometimes with a view to keeping their relatively higher wage levels.

France was next. One of the wisdoms of the age was that education produced prosperity. The logic was simple enough: university = knowledge = technology = prosperity. Sputnik was in the end a deadly weapon, because it destroyed the Western university. Bureaucrats could brandish statistics of expanding education at each other, quite independently of the deeper factors involved, which were not subject to measurement. All advanced countries therefore saw a vast increase in the number of students, a raising of the school-leaving age, and a proliferation of institutions of higher learning. The number of teachers also increased, though not as fast, and the overall budget rose less fast again. French higher education had been both very exacting and unfair: there had not even been a retiring age for professors until the 1930s and aged, comic figures occupied posts at which the aspiring young resentfully gazed. They, meanwhile, would have to undergo examinations that were not just extremely demanding, but were even competitive, meaning that, to pass, you had to be classed in the top twenty or whichever number the organizers reckoned was needed. It was called agrégation, and qualified you to go on with research. Even then, if a place did not fall open, you would have to go and teach in a school. This was not in itself a bad thing, because the highest forms of a French school were themselves, in terms of what was expected, a sort of junior university, and discipline in the class was kept by a special supervisor while the teacher concentrated upon the lessons. There were other routes to success, particularly through the selective ‘Grand Schools’ which were designed to produce an elite — engineers in the Polytechnic, administrators in the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA) (others, some fifty, great and small, covered transport, bridges, archives, etc. and business schools followed). ENA had been supposed to be classless but in practice, with, somewhat later, business schools, became a near preserve of the bourgeoisie. Young would-be academics worked in the highest two years of a secondary school towards the École Normale Supérieure, which produced schoolteachers. It was a hard life, made tolerable by a sense of mission, and that sense was overtaken by ENA’s. Not surprisingly, the schoolteachers were on the Left. University teachers had similarly undergone an ordeal. There was a diploma that took ten years, and you could be under some old tyrant; if you were lucky, it might be Professor Labrousse, who saw his students on a Sunday morning or a Saturday afternoon. If you were senior you got the less uncomfortable chair, otherwise you were posé du bout des fesses far from the professorial desk and hoped for patronage in a system that was generally far from transparent in its workings. Again following a Soviet model, research was partly detached from the university system, with a Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) to sort it out, and of course that body was prey to politics. Communists were particularly good at the game, and in time the great historian Fernand Braudel (who had taught once upon a time in a school in Algeria) ran his section of the CNRS like a Valois court, all over you one minute, the trapdoor the next.

Out of the blue in 1968 came troubles that caught world headlines: there was a mass revolt in universities, Paris easily in the lead. The immediate cause was the mishandling of educational expansion. France in 1958 had had a quarter of a million students and ten years later 630,000. Student-staff ratios stood at 15:1 in Germany in the Humanities, but 27.5:1 in Law, whereas in France the figures were close to 60:1. Then again, academic staff was expanded but quality declined: in France there had been 5,600 teachers in 1956 but there were 22,500 in 1967, and their salaries had not kept pace with the times. Nor had buildings. The temper of the times was made concrete in the new university of Nanterre, miles away from the centre of Paris, in an area of migrant shanty dwellings beset by mud and wire. It was hated, as Annie Kriegel remembers:

un horrible cul-de-basse-fosse où grouillaient, aveugles et sourds aux bruits du dehors, des humains anonymes qui se ressemblaient tous par l’accoutrement, la tenue avachie, une langue de bois formée d’onomatopées, de sigles et d’injures ordurières, et des discours insensés.

In all countries, new universities (and hospitals) became bywords for expensive ugliness: they were crammed with students; taught by men and women appointed all of a sudden in great numbers, without regard for quality. The humanities came off least well, and yet the expansion with relatively new subjects, such as economics, sociology and psychology, meant that there were young men and women a-plenty who imagined that they had the answer to everything. It was a terrible cocktail, superbly written up by Richard Davy in The Times. The British at that stage could afford to sneer: their universities were still of the older model, and selected students quite rigorously. When, at Cambridge, an attempt was made to occupy the central administrative building, the students had to be told that its functions were quite vague, that a committee met from time to time. The building was occupied, and the reactionaries at Trinity College were mobilized, some of them arriving with hunting shotguns. The occupants had to be protected by the police as they left the building.

Government financing of universities had been generous enough to start with in France, but in the later sixties there were cutbacks, and the education minister, Christian Fouchet, proposed a new system of selection, to cut numbers by one third. He also announced that ‘the university’ should be ‘industrialized’, precisely the language to annoy anyone working in one. There had been student strikes in the French system before, at Nanterre most notably in the previous November, but now the dam burst. One particular grievance was that boys could not spend the night in girls’ residences: the sort of prescription which in the past would just have counted as common sense. Now, perhaps because of the Pill, there was a climat de saturnales in places where l’austérité faisait prime. It was exploited by a vedettariat delinquant with l’histrionisme dont Cohn-Bendit fut un talentueux prototype. Daniel Cohn-Bendit was a clever manager of groupuscules that would otherwise have collapsed in squabbling; and he was also well aware that, as de Gaulle challenged the supremacy of the dollar, any sign of trouble in France would be welcome in Washington. Although a fatuous American political scientist had pronounced France to be one of the two most stable countries in the world, the temper was rising outside the glossy world of the new technocracy and the film-set sparkling buildings of André Malraux’s cleaned-up beaux quartiers. At Nanterre a minister (of ‘Youth’) called François Missoffe visited in January 1968, to open a swimming pool. There he encountered Cohn-Bendit, who complained that Missoffe’s book on ‘Youth’ had nothing to say of sexual problems. Missoffe said that he was not surprised, given Cohn-Bendit’s looks, that he had sexual problems and that he should dive into the swimming pool to sort them out. It was the start of troubles. The sociology building was ‘occupied’, the administration called in the police, and the ‘Tet Offensive’ in Vietnam supplied the students with an occasion for militancy, complete with denunciations of l’école des flics et des patrons. There were counter-attacks by extreme right-wing students (and there were thick rumours, to the effect that the CIA were behind these, because it wanted to destabilize de Gaulle). At any rate there was ‘a mass of manoeuvre’, its strength increased because of the half-hearted attempts at repression by the Nanterre rector. The thing spread, on 3 May, to the Sorbonne itself. There, there was an affray with the police, semi-encouraged by the rector, and eighty of them were injured by flying brickbats. Magistrates sentenced four students to brief terms of imprisonment, and tempers rose, elsewhere, as well as in Paris. By the night of 10/11 May barricades had been put up in the Latin Quarter, the highest — three yards — rather suitably in the rue d’Ulm, where stood the poor old ENS, the teachers’ training school that had produced the grave ancestors of whom these students were a weird offspring. The students attempted to produce their own left-wing ideology.

However, it was sloganeering: ‘the beach lies under the street’, ‘bourgeois medicine does not cure, it repairs’. There was an odd cult of Maoism and the names of sages were invoked, but as Leszek Kołakowski says, 1968 yielded no political thought worth mentioning, and although François Maspéro and others produced a spate of writing, none of it lasts. The extraordinary thing was that France fell into a sort of paralysis for the month of May. This was because the Paris events gained momentum through various other elements, which had nothing to do with them. There were younger workers at the Renault automobile factory outside Paris, just waiting to escape from trade union and Communist control so as to make their own ‘demands’. The order police, the creation of which dated back to the conditions of near civil war in 1947, were quite widely hated, and were made up sometimes of Corsicans who had organized ratonnades against Algerians back in 1958: even solid middle-class neighbours of the barricade-manning students would offer them food and drink. There was a sexual element as well — an English homosexual with a white Rolls-Royce drove along the embankment having the time of his life in the back of it and the Communist poet Louis Aragon, whose wife, Elsa Triolet, had died not long before, emerged in pink to cheer on a demonstration on that side of the fence. The television and radio journalists were vastly annoyed at efforts by the State to control their output, and when de Gaulle wanted to make a speech rallying the people, he could only do so under heavy guard, from the top of the Eiffel Tower, with technicians from outside, and — another by nature left-wing group looking for State money — the film-makers set up a ‘States General of the Cinema’ to try to stop the Cannes Film Festival on 18 May. By 21 May 10 million people were on strike. There were of course academics, delighted with their quarter-hour of fame, and even a cohort of high-school pupils ritually joined in. One of them, chased by police, jumped into the river and was drowned when caught in the mud of the Seine. That soul provided the martyr. May the 23rd and 24th saw a further explosion of violence, with burned cars and an attempt to set light to the stock exchange. The automobile workers at Boulogne-Billancourt even turned down a large wage increase and for a time struck revolutionary attitudes.

But this was of course just an accumulation of self-importance and holiday-wanting; Annie Kriegel in her memoirs bubbles over with contempt, and so do many others, whose writings easily outlive the contemporary celebratory literature (the historical echoes, of the ‘June Days’ of 1848, were obvious enough: the outstanding comments on these were made by Tocqueville in his memoirs or by Flaubert in L’Éducation sentimentale, mocking the Iberian accent of an international windbag; even Victor Hugo in Les Misérables shook his head and thought that, in the end, the rebelling workers would have to be ‘shot down, but respectfully’). Of course the State deserved 1968, because it had expanded education far too fast, and its supposed ‘technocratization of the university’ was leading, quite predictably, to the manufacture of clones — bearded sloganeers and shrieking girls on the one side, besuited briefcase sandwich-lunch know-it-alls on the other. But 1968 was in itself a fiasco, if a sinister one; it would fizzle out unless there were a revolutionary party organized enough to take advantage. It was here that the French Communist Party might have moved. It did not. Lenin had already spoken viciously of left-wing infantilism; the trade unions did not want control to slip into anarchist hands; and in any case de Gaulle had proved very useful to the USSR. He had stood up to the Americans, especially in matters of world finance, and he had disrupted NATO; by a fitting twist, he had even departed on a state visit to Communist Romania when the May events were under way. The French Party therefore did not move. De Gaulle himself staged a theatrical coup, vanishing for three days at the end of the month (he consulted the army in Germany, and got assurances of support, in return for release, from prison, of the military dissidents of 1962). His prime minister, Pompidou, cleverly announced that there would be elections, and the various potential political successors then got busy with campaigning (Mendès France and Mitterrand were both involved, in a cautious way). Students in any case had their exams to think of, and by mid-June the last occupants were cleared from a Sorbonne area that had now become rat-infested. Come the elections, there was an enormous governmental majority — 358 seats out of 485.

France had been there before, and such majorities made for what had been called the ‘unrepeatable Chamber’ (Chambre introuvable) — a reactionary majority so large as to threaten moderate and sensible voices within the government itself. But in this case, the boys and girls of 1968 had understood how to deal with a bureaucracy: a box-ticking culture which would run scared, and politicians in any event knew perfectly well that education brought cantankerous postbags and endless self-important lecturing, for no political gain. The government resolved on compromise and consultation; in other words, ran away. The politicians had been terrified, and simply gave in to demands for ‘autonomy’ and the rest; from that day to this, the universities in France have had to admit anyone with the right paper qualifications, themselves a very debased currency. French higher education survived with the ‘Grand Schools’; the state universities became, as Besançon said, ‘third world’ and vast damage was done to the cultural resonance of which French governments were enamoured. This coinage, worldwide, was now debased.

Not much noticed at the same time, there was another university crisis which portended far more than the circus of May 1968 in Paris. In all of the university disturbances, there was one that took a lead for perversity, and it was not to do with left-wing infantilism. The University of Louvain in Belgium had a very long and sometimes outstanding history. Its official history (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) is a noble book, and an epitaph. Humanism and its greatest figure, Erasmus, had flourished there. In the eighteenth century it had somewhat fossilized, students having to discuss (in Latin) such questions as ‘Did Adam and Eve pay each other compliments in the state of innocence?’ There was an inflation, and the window-cleaners had to be paid in gold; the clerical elite flourished while the juniors were starvelings. In 1794 came one of the great scenes of university reform, when, after their victory at Fleurus, revolutionary generals in their twenties occupied the place, stabled horses in its precincts, eventually, in 1797, abolished it, and exiled the Rector to French Guyana. It was restored in the nineteenth century and became a greatly respected Catholic university. In Belgium at that time French was the language for educated people, although Louvain itself stood in a Flemish hinterland. The university was an elite place of the old-fashioned sort, with a considerable intellectual and social life, ‘characters’ abounding; as such it attracted envy and resentment, but its products spoke for themselves, and Louvain was a leading European university with much international resonance. Its library was famous. With the student expansion, there were by 1960 more Flemish-speaking students than French, and some of them demanded Flemishization (‘Netherlandization’ as it was called, though almost no one thought of joining up with the Dutch, who had no objections to the use of French, a world language). In fact the halls of residence had already been ‘Netherlandized’ in part in the fifties, and some classes were already ‘parallel’. But nationalism of this sort was an itch only made worse by scratching. There was a further problem, that French-speaking (or French-leaning) parents at the university naturally wanted French-language schools in the town itself. There were demonstrations against these supposed ‘caste schools’ and it did not help that the university hospital doctors used French, sometimes unable to understand a distraught Flemish peasant mother with a sick child. In fact the doctors took a lead in what followed, and some of them made a property fortune out of the scouting of planning laws (the town acquired the usual hideous academic concrete). The real problem in Flemish eyes was that nearby Brussels, cosmopolitan and French-speaking, would spread like an oil slick (tache d’huile) and Frenchify a corridor to Louvain. In 1965 there were Flemish demonstrations to the effect of ‘All Walloons Out’ and Flemish students solemnly turned their backs on the procession of professors coming out of St Peter’s Church at the start of the academic year. The most that can be said for all of this is that at least no-one was killed, though there were some bruises. The Rector, Mgr Honoré Van Waeyenbergh, lost control, and though the bishops solemnly said in 1966 that the idea of two Catholic universities, one French and one Flemish, was absurd and expensive and impossible, they could not control the situation either. In January 1968 the French section was transferred to another concrete place at Woluwe, a suburb of Brussels, and has hardly been heard of again. Neither has the new Flemish university, which now, quite absurdly, uses English to express its international character. This time round, there would be no Fleurus, no horses stabled in ancient colleges, no deans sent to Guyana, but a great institution had died just the same.

But the fall of French at Louvain was only a small piece of a far larger picture: the wrong road taken in 1968. The European university also died, becoming, as the German equivalent of George Orwell, Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, said, a ‘karst’. A brilliant French commentator, Marc Fumaroli, wrote an essay in 1992, ‘The Cultural State’, lamenting what had happened: France, he said, was turning into a huge version of Venice as she stood in the 1790s, before Napoleon had annexed her: wonderful architecture, many displays that impressed the tourists, but an air of deadness just the same. The State had built up an empire over Culture, studding Paris with grands travaux — a new opera house at the Bastille, a new and huge library, various ‘culture houses’, including a glass pyramid at the Louvre, the largest museum in the world, and ancient palace of the kings of France. There were enormous exhibitions and shows, and many references to ‘spaces of culture’ or ‘places of culture’. The greatest of these was the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, in 1989. It was supposed to represent the Rights of Man, but the best thing that came out of it was another clever book, René Sédillot’s Le Coût de la Révolution française. Yes, France had had a revolution in the name of equality and liberty, but she had then lost her leading position in Europe, being overtaken by England and Germany. Still, in the 1950s, French civilization had attracted vast numbers of foreigners, and in the 1960s the Fifth Republic began to support it more lavishly than ever before as a national asset. The results were supposed to impress foreigners with the grandeur of France, and the monuments of Paris were scraped clear of centuries of grime, to look like filmsets. However, the effects of state patronage bore out what Charles Fourier had said a century before: ‘What the State encourages, withers; what the State protects, dies.’

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 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.

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.