used as a space for cultural events by the alternative left; a petition to save the pavilions drew 100,000 signatures. It is highly probable that, ten years later, the pavilions would not have been destroyed but, rather, “rehabilitated,” not only preserved as testimonies to history but remodeled so as to be used in new ways.
It is as though the turn toward an enrichment economy had been imagined and anticipated, at least in part, after the socialist government took over in 1981, as one of the available means to compensate for a possible industrial decline. By contrast, other industrial nations tended to develop financial centers (London, for the United Kingdom) as a way of confronting the expected catastrophe, namely, the extension of unemployment beyond the categories that had been most seriously affected to that point (lower-class youth without educational credentials, workers over the age of fifty, who received special governmental support) to include young people with post-secondary education. Representing the upper class for the most part, but including more and more middle- and even lower-class youth, this cohort of educated young people had increased in number considerably25 with the “democratization of access to higher education” that had been an important objective in the preceding period in response to critics who denounced the unequal distribution of the “fruits” of the recent economic expansion. During the 1980s, big businesses were being reorganized according to emerging management precepts: the outsourcing of numerous functions, a renewed focus on the company’s original activities, just-in-time manufacturing, subcontracting, multiplication of sites identified as profit centers, networked companies, a shifting of responsibilities to operators, a flattening of hierarchies, and project-based production.26 These reorganizations, which were clearly intended to increase productivity, weaken the labor unions, augment profits, and reinforce the power of stockholders, resulted in the firing of a very large number of workers judged “unemployable.” Hiring went down, and the reshaping of the relation between educational levels and job openings led to a devaluation of post-secondary diplomas.27
One major difference between managing companies and managing countries, even though the latter increasingly import their management methods from business, is that the former can distribute their activities over large geographical areas, even worldwide, and above all can get rid of workers they deem superfluous in certain cases, or on certain sites, by reconfiguring themselves spatially. By contrast, it is much more difficult for nations to exclude citizens from their territory, even temporarily, in that the very existence of a nation is justified by the population for which it is responsible. Nevertheless, until relatively recently, nations have sometimes adopted policies leading to the exclusion of certain subsets of their population. The organized departure of large numbers of inhabitants of a country, whether it came about because the central government chose to offer incentives to the most fortunate members of the group or because it forcefully excluded the poorest members, was possible in the late nineteenth century; it took the form of emigration to the New World or, in the first half of the twentieth century, to the colonies with the encouragement of the mother countries. But although the number of workers, especially educated workers, who decided on their own to go abroad was still high in the 1980s, such an exodus was no longer conceivable in the form of national policy on a grand scale; departures were signs that the home country was less attractive than the destination country.28 The question of how to employ young diploma-holders, especially those who had studied literature or the social sciences and were largely scorned by businesses, became a problem for national governments. In France, this problem came on top of other issues involving the organization of the national territory that had accompanied and followed the 1982 decentralization law and the transfer of roughly two-thirds of the public financing of culture to local governments, in view of fostering a better regional distribution of cultural activities. It is in the context we have just evoked that the problems linked to the relation between culture and the economy were significantly reconceived, and that cultural development came to be viewed, from the standpoint of the national government, no longer just as the moral necessity of maintaining the national memory, or as a requirement connected with the democratization of knowledge (which had previously been the case), but as an economic asset of prime importance.
Jack Lang, who served as minister of culture during François Mitterrand’s presidency, became the principal interpreter of this transformation, displacing the conception of culture – thematized by André Malraux but also by communist intellectuals – that had predominated during the preceding period, when the state had assumed significant legal and financial responsibility for cultural activities. The progressives who had been active in the Resistance during the war considered culture in terms of a pair of oppositions that, in their eyes, justified its “democratization” – its transmission to workers. The first was the opposition between culture and the economy, mirroring the opposition between the soul and the body. Workers, who are the foundation of the economy, and especially those workers whose labor makes heavy demands on the body, must have access to culture because they (too) have souls. Culture is in some sense their due: the economy is necessary, of course, but subordinate. Culture, to play its role, must be removed from the economic sphere. The second opposition is between high or elite culture, supported by “noble” institutions (museums, universities, and so on), and low or mass culture (industrial culture, cultural commodities, or culture at the service of the commodity cosmos); the latter was viewed with loathing by elitists and reactionaries, but it was also regarded with repulsion by certain thinkers on the left inspired in particular by the Frankfurt School.29 Seen in this spirit, cultural democratization was aimed at extracting the masses from the grip of low culture and raising them up toward high culture.
These are the oppositions that Jack Lang took it upon himself to deconstruct in a public way, beginning with a speech in Mexico City in 1982 that drew a lot of attention. On the one hand (the first opposition), he asserted that the ties between culture and the economy were not scandalous sources of corruption but normal and even indispensable. The economy does not pervert culture; culture requires the economy. Without an economy, there is no culture. Conversely, he predicted that it would be through cultural inventiveness that the economies of the world would be revitalized, and that “conquering unemployment is a cultural change that comes about through a change in cultural policy.”30 Culture is and must be at the service of the economy (above all thanks to tourism). On the other hand (the second opposition), Lang opened up the definitions of the term “culture” (following the lead of anthropology and sociology in this respect) in such a way as to break down the border between high and low culture. The concept of culture would henceforth include the so-called industrial arts, such as fashion and design, and also the popular arts, for example songs, comic books, and street art. Similarly, a nation’s heritage would include, on equal footing, long-standing historical monuments recognized as such and industrial complexes showcased by the eco-museums under development at the time31 (Lang had fought the destruction of the Baltard pavilions, which he had wanted to transform into a cultural center). Now anything could become culture, and every individual could become a creator if he or she were recognized as such. Lang proposed to replace the “democratization of culture” by “cultural democracy,” which would privilege the processes – very numerous, as it turned out – known as “artification.”32 Thus the power to bestow recognition on works of art that had long belonged to agencies such as museums, academic institutions, and critics had to be transferred to public financing agencies, whether these depended on the central government or on local authorities.
This new line was not just a matter of words. Lang’s argument was accompanied by concrete measures such as the creation of regional foundations for contemporary art (FRACs), which escaped the control of museum conservators,33 or the National Association for the Development of the Arts of Fashion (in 1989). These measures provoked outrage among the defenders of culture “in the noble sense”; beginning in the 1980s, the authorities implementing the new measures were accused of “relativism,” an anathema that was to resurface in force later on, when “values” became a central issue in political disputes.34 The FRACs were different from museums in the sense that their mission was to constitute collections and to organize itinerant exhibits. These innovations disrupted the hierarchy of intermediaries in the plastic arts – a hierarchy dominated up to that point by museum officials – while giving important
