ABSTRACT
In an encyclopaedia entry on intellectuals and cultural policy in France, Rémy Rieffel argues that “state intervention in cultural matters has always provoked a certain mistrust on the part of French intellectuals, who are inclined to be individualist and anti-authoritarian. The figure of the intellectual as ‘critic of power’ has remained dominant throughout the Fifth Republic [i.e. since 1958], although one can observe the beginnings of a change in this posture with the accession of the Left to power in 1981” (Rieffel 2001, p. 342). It is certainly true that intellectuals in France over the Fifth Republic have tended to remain averse to the nuts and bolts of policy-making (cf. also Reader 1987, p. 22). I propose in this article, however, to nuance somewhat the picture painted by Rieffel: over the years of Gaullist and right-wing government between 1958 and 1981, one can observe interesting forms of participation in the policy process on the part of broadly left-leaning intellectuals; in the years after 1981, one is struck not simply by further instances of such participation, but also by a persistent reticence or hostility towards cultural policy on the part of both left and right-wing intellectuals. I shall look to probe further this aversion to the world of policy-making as such, asking why it might seem surprising to an outside observer; why nonetheless, on consideration of French intellectual history over the twentieth century, it can be seen as understandable; and how, indeed, it can in some senses be seen as all too understandable. I shall consider not just policy processes associated with the Ministry of Culture and Communication, as it is now called, but also certain policy developments issuing from the Ministry of Education, insofar as these have as much and often more bearing on the overall action that a regime directs
towards culture (understood not just as aesthetic education, but also as historical memory, the vulgarization of science, and the diffusion of information within the contemporary media landscape).
