ABSTRACT
These areas too have been an object of interest for four presidents at least. Here again, de Gaulle set a framework, appointing France’s first Culture Minister, the novelist André Malraux, who was given a respectable budget with which to promote Maisons de la Culture that would dissipate the obscurity of the philistine provinces. Pompidou paved the way for the national museum of modern art that bears his name; Giscard did the same for the nineteenth-century museum in the former Orsay railway station. Mitterrand both backed his flamboyant minister, Jack Lang, and pressed ahead with his own ambitious and expensive grands chantiers which have changed the face of Paris. Only Chirac gave the sector relatively little attention, appointing a second-rank minister and allowing budget cuts. Broadcasting has also witnessed direct presidential intervention, such as de Gaulle’s decision to allow advertising on France’s two public television channels in 1967. Both de Gaulle and Pompidou saw radio and (in particular) television as the ‘voice of France’, and demanded favourable coverage for themselves and their governments: Pompidou notably stalled ChabanDelmas’s attempts to liberalise the sector. Giscard broke up the State broadcasting monopoly in 1974, giving the three stations and the production company a (modest) measure of autonomy. Mitterrand delivered on electoral promises to allow private radio stations and to create an arm’s-length broadcasting authority, took the final decision on who should appoint the members of the new body, the Haute Autorité de l’Audiovisuel, opened two television channels to private operators, and was instrumental in choosing those operators (one of whom was Silvio Berlusconi, the future right-wing Prime Minister of Italy).
