built up over time and for which narrativity constitutes a privileged mode of adding value. This is an economy that derives its substance from the past. Thus it relies primarily not on industrial mass production of standardized products that are sold when they are new but, rather, on the addition of value to things already present, such as objects from antiquity, “vintage” items from a less remote past, or monuments, buildings, or sites – in short, everything that makes up the vast domain of a country’s heritage. But this also holds true for works of art that, even when they are by contemporary artists, are presumed, if their value is recognized, to be inscribed in a temporality that pulls them out of the present and considers them from a vanishing point in the future, as if they already belonged to the past, or, to put it another way, to confer on them a sort of immortality, since they are destined to be preserved indefinitely; this is the role assigned to museums.
Let us note, however, that exploitation of this type of wealth has so far been quite uneven from country to country, in relation to variables of which the primary one is obviously the degree to which, in the various nation-states, the holders of capital could count on a workforce that was readily exploitable even though its members had no special skills or training. While direct investments abroad were made chiefly in emerging countries with an abundant proletariat accustomed to low wages, investments in the enrichment economy were oriented primarily toward the countries of Western Europe. These countries were marked by a very substantial expansion of secondary and especially higher education in the 1960s, thus making a large, well-trained, and completely unorganized labor force available to the enrichment economy. Its members, especially when their competencies were mainly in literary or artistic areas, had trouble rising to stable salaried positions in large industrial, commercial, or financial companies, so that, facing the threat of unemployment, they tended to be willing to accept temporary, unstable, and poorly paid jobs which were often below the level they should have been able to expect based on their diplomas (that is, based on what the same diplomas had been worth in the previous job market), as long as those jobs corresponded to the cultural aspirations they had nurtured during their studies.
But a second factor also came into play: the existence, in Western European countries, of abundant strata of heritage sites. Resources constituted much earlier had been systematically exploited, preserved, and rehabilitated – in France, this process has been under way since the Revolution – because the central government saw them as internal instruments fostering national unification and as external instruments fostering national prestige; efforts to develop museums and catalog their holdings through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries exemplify this movement.13 The resources exploited by an enrichment economy are never simply warehouses full of old things; they always require efforts to highlight the past, endeavors that rely on more or less consistent traces but that, in principle, any political entity should be able to undertake, insofar as that entity bases its legitimacy on a past that it can then exploit.
It must be noted, however, that, in France, this highlighting of what came to be called the national patrimony14 also stemmed from what we may call – paraphrasing Marx – a primitive accumulation of cultural capital. The latter, on the same basis as the form of capital Marx discusses, did not have a purely commercial origin. It resulted to a significant extent from violence – that is, from the military and predatory action of the central government, which, in France, especially after the Revolution and the imperial wars, proceeded to dismantle large numbers of chateaux, abbeys, churches, and other sites and to loot the countries it had conquered and/or colonized. As Bénédicte Savoy shows, in the early nineteenth century the first director of the Louvre Museum, Vivant Denon, orchestrated the transfer to Paris of a great number of works of art that had belonged to the German nobility, with the justification that, because “works of art” were “the fruit of the spirit of freedom,” they ought naturally to “reside in the country of freedom.”15
Changes in French cultural policy
To what extent can we see in the contemporary development of an enrichment economy a process clearly marking the shift from the twentieth century to the twenty-first? It can certainly be argued that the domains we have chosen as examples to indicate the contours of such a process (the luxury economy, works of art and antiquities, historical monuments, tourism, culture, contemporary art) are in no way really new. For each of these domains there is an abundant historiography – indeed, one that has been considerably enriched in recent decades – focusing on the way processes rather similar to the ones that interest us were deployed in earlier times, especially in Italy, Great Britain, and France. Exemplary studies have shed light on the luxury economies in Italian courts during the Renaissance,16 the spread of luxury in eighteenth-century Paris,17 the luxury industries in nineteenth-century France,18 and the links between heritage creation, the development of museums, and the formation of national or regional identities in France, especially since the Revolution. Other studies have looked at the way tourism was stimulated, in the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth, by the Romantic quest for the sublime and the picturesque; beginning in literary and artistic circles,19 this tendency was extended in the first half of the twentieth century by efforts on the part of local elites to highlight the identity of a given region by celebrating both its natural beauty and its rich folklore.20 As for the domains of art and culture, both popular and elite forms came to the fore in the preoccupations of historians, partly owing to the latter’s fascination with social anthropology, especially in the second half of the twentieth century – all this to the detriment of factual political history, denounced as “event-driven.”
We could invoke the increase in digital resources in the domains that interest us, of course, and stress the intensification of the economic role of these domains. But, as is always the case when one is dealing with phenomena unfolding gradually over time, the threshold effects are hard to distinguish. This is why we rely in particular on indices that point to converging changes in the way these domains have been apprehended by different types of actors operating in the political, cultural, or economic spheres, and on the way these changes have interacted. In France, as we see it, these changes began to take hold between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s. During that period, which was marked by declining industrial employment (after 1975) and increasing unemployment, new preoccupations and new horizons started to emerge.
To simplify, we can say that this same period was marked by a decline of hope in the unlimited development of industry on the national level. During the previous decades, industrial development had been an objective shared by the Gaullist and post-Gaullist right, which had focused exclusively on the necessity of growth,21 and the communist and socialist left, whose progressivist and reformist critique bore essentially on the uneven and unjust way the “fruits” of this growth were distributed among the various social classes.22 The turn away from faith in industrial progress led not to the abandonment of progressivism but, rather, to a profound reorientation of that outlook, stimulated by the recent spread of ecological awareness23 that was developing on the libertarian, anti-productivist left, in both scholarly and popular forms.24
Whereas the progressivism of the decades following the Second World War was centered on devaluation of the past, and most forcefully of rural areas and the agrarian way of life, the new progressivism that emerged during the subsequent period went hand in hand with rehabilitation of the past: emphasis on the past was viewed as one of the conditions for thinking ahead and, indeed, for the very possibility of a future. This development tended to modify the connotations of the reference to national heritage and, most notably, to orient that reference toward the left. One example among many: the destruction of eleven of the twelve Baltard pavilions constituting Les Halles that had been built between 1850 and 1870 to house the central food markets in Paris. These historic structures were demolished following a decision made in the late 1950s to transfer the markets to Rungis. (The sole surviving pavilion was dismantled before being purchased in 1976 by the city of Nogent-sur-Marne.) The destruction, which began in 1971, was undertaken in a spirit of modernization (the construction of a shopping complex, the Forum des Halles),
