LETTER FROM PARIS : The Culture Ploy
Harris, Joseph A.
l e TT e R f R o M P ARI s The Culture Ploy by Joseph A. Harriss T hough i have never had the gall to try it, France is the only country I know where a writer could...
...The art scene is moribund...
...Also on view under suggestive red lights are ever-so-cultural inflated genitalia, sadism, and, of course, bestiality...
...Limited to serious researchers until now, the collection includes nearly 400 items, ranging from a handwritten manuscript by the Marquis de Sade, to 17th-century engravings of sexual gymnastics and English flagellation novels...
...But Charles de Gaulle, a military man, thought culture, anarchistic by nature, needed organizing and subsidizing...
...Today its 11,000-odd functionaries rain millions in subsidies on everything from movies to museums, archaeology to architecture, public television to public gardens and graffiti artists...
...APRIl 2008 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR 53...
...Its director is American...
...It’s an admirable trait, paying respects to culture heroes the way other countries revere businessmen, players of ball games, or Stakhanovites...
...Films...
...Despite official disapproval, American novelists dominate best-seller lists, American films draw nearly half of French cinemagoers—in an access of hysteria, the culture arbiters stigmatized Spielberg’s Jurassic Park as a “threat to French identity”— American music fills French airwaves...
...Paris auction houses have lost most business to New York and London...
...Another result of government involvement in creativity is France’s cultural chauvinism...
...Periodicals...
...On the other hand, French museums, filled with plundered treasures from places like Vienna, Venice, and Egypt, still attract crowds...
...Whatever...
...l e TT e R f R o M P ARI s The Culture Ploy by Joseph A. Harriss T hough i have never had the gall to try it, France is the only country I know where a writer could officially list his profession as “Man of Letters...
...Having passed Canada in answering children’s letters to Santa, it sends out 1.4 million replies to 126 countries...
...Righteous rebuttals were fired from all sides...
...It’s “Jingle Bells,” or alternatively, “Jingle Bell Rock...
...The big event this year is the arrival of a French edition of GQ magazine—yes, the very one that judiciously picked Bill Clinton as its man of the year...
...are very big in the U.S., it was claimed...
...No matter that his main achievement as culture czar was to decree the sandblasting of Paris buildings every few years, a noisy, dusty activity that inconveniences the citizenry but does wonders for the country’s wretched unemployment statistics...
...Even those incubators of French culture, the universities, have begun aping their American counterparts...
...Until then French culture had gotten along nicely without a government ministry to look after it—check out Montaigne, Molière, and Monet if you have any doubts...
...A ll this understandably causes considerable distress to officials trying to promote the country’s international claim to a “cultural exception” that bans foreign cultural products while subsidizing its own...
...The replies are written, naturellement, only in French...
...The paper’s knockout punch: “This land has been for centuries, and we hope, will be for centuries to come, the land of culture...
...Despite the best efforts of the Francophonies, French today is only the world’s 12th most widely spoken language, well behind English, Spanish, and Chinese...
...Meanwhile, the insatiable French craving for Americana reaches improbable heights—or depths...
...The ministry he founded, true to Parkinson’s Law, prospered mightily...
...shrieked Le Figaro on page one...
...The trend accelerated in the modern era, when non-French artists from Van Gogh to Picasso and Chagall did their best work in France, along with American writers like Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway...
...So far they can’t...
...Today the dozens of mostly mediocre, government-subsidized films produced annually go unnoticed by the world at large...
...Let’s compete with them intelligently, without demagoguery—if we can...
...The 1950s nouvelle vague that revitalized world cinema is a distant memory...
...Now, you gross, uncouth, culturally challenged Anglo-Saxons, take that...
...Years ago they turned a deaf ear to the late actor and singer Yves Montand, usually a staunch supporter of leftist causes, when he wryly counseled, “Sure, let’s bombard the Americans with great novels and films...
...Santa Claus is French, there’s no question,” explains a spokesman...
...He created the ministry of culture as a cabinet-level government job for his favorite conversation partner, the brooding, enigmatic André Malraux...
...W ith polls showing that Americans consider French cooking much more interesting than French culture, it’s easy to see why the European edition of Time would be tempted to publish a cover story impishly entitled “The Death of French Culture...
...And despite “Anglo-Saxon hegemony,” artists like Buren and Boltanski (ditto) bestride the international art scene...
...The big current museum attraction, though, does cause some concern about the direction of French cultural offerings...
...That means high import duties on American films (except, perhaps, those with such French favorites as Jerry Lewis and Michael Moore) and television productions...
...True, hundreds of new novels are published in France every year, but their subjects and Hundreds of new novels are published in France every year, but their subjects and treatment are so parochial, obscure, or otherwise boring that only an exceptional few will be picked up by foreign publishers...
...The average Frenchman’s idea of a really cool evening watching the tube is either an American serial like Desperate Housewives or a western, preferably with John Wayne...
...The exception is The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which won a Golden Globe for best foreign language film...
...With scary masks and pumpkins filling Paris shop windows in October, some have tried manfully 52 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR APRIl 2008 JosePH A. HARRIss to explain, ex post facto, that it must originally have been Breton, or maybe a custom of the prehistoric Gauls...
...Along with immortality goes an ornate ceremonial épée and snazzy swallowtail uniform, topped off with a whimsical bicorn hat...
...Creativity in the theater is anemic: the hit of the recent theater season was still another version of a 50-year-old American musical called West Side Story...
...And what do we hear now at Christmas instead of the charming traditional hymn, Il est né le divine enfant...
...Rather than laughing it off, which would require confidence, a sense of humor, and a certain detachment from one’s self-importance, the French Cultural Establishment took to the field of honor as one man to strike back...
...Although his writings were often incomprehensible to the rest of us, Malraux personified postwar French literary culture...
...Can anybody name a contemporary French artist...
...With a little imagination,” sighed one Paris paper happily, “you would think you were on the Harvard campus...
...meanwhile, nearly a third of the fiction in French bookshops is translated from English...
...The subject may be obvious, but the reaction has been injured outrage...
...Thus can be inferred the importance that France attaches to the very idea of culture...
...In recent years they have imported, wholesale, Halloween, an American creation with no connection whatever to French history, tradition, or culture...
...It’s also one that long attracted talent from the world over...
...The official French attitude toward culture changed subtly in the 1960s, when it started to become a political instrument rather than an end in itself...
...treatment are so parochial, obscure, or otherwise boring that only an exceptional few will be picked up by foreign publishers...
...It also sponsors something called the International Francophonie Organization, with membership including such unlikely countries as Bulgaria and Moldova...
...French philosophers like Marcel Gaudchet and René Girard (who...
...Instead of simply informing successful graduates without ceremony, they are contriving commencement exercises copied on the American model, with profs in gowns and degrees suitable for framing...
...One area where France is gaining fast, however, is Santa Claus...
...Today’s signs of the times don’t bode well for the vitality of French culture...
...Defying the common fate of mankind, they can even become an “immortal” if elected to the august Académie Française...
...This culture ploy takes forms such as the far-flung activities of the Alliance Française, a global APRIl 2008 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR 51 leTTeR fRoM PARIs network of some 1,000 centers with language courses, libraries of French publications, and screenings of French films...
...Such an insolent, perfidious attack could only be the result of still another wave of virulent anti-French sentiment in the U.S...
...Non, French culture is not dead...
...With nearly half of by programming on radio and television now required by law to be French, protectionism against “American cultural imperialism” has followed as night the day...
...The usually staid Bibliothèque Nationale, apparently groping for a blockbuster exhibit, has put its secret archive of erotica on public display...
...And the only place where certain members of the Culture Establishment are honored with a higher place at the dinner party table than government ministers, just after cardinals and princes of the royal blood...
...The ministry also makes French notions of culture a surreptitious tool in the country’s determined effort to spread its influence in the world, spending about $1 billion a year to promote them abroad...
...That began big-time with Leonardo da Vinci, who spent his last three years comfortably ensconced in a French chateau on the Loire at the invitation of François I, leaving behind a painted thank-you note known as the Mona Lisa...
...Publishing...
Vol. 41 • April 2008 • No. 3
