ABSTRACT
But why Do we Not see the masterpieces of our heritage more often on the television, where they would reach a still vaster public, without it being necessary to disturb their rest in their museums, their castles, their architectural sites? Through a peculiar paradox, the Minister of Culture is a media star, but his Ministry does not have authority over television, and has no channel of its own at its disposal. This is very strange. When one prides oneself on ‘making masterpieces available to the great majority of people’, it goes without saying that the vehicle of television is an inescapable requirement. Initially, these ‘strange windows on the world’ had been removed from the control of André Malraux, who had given cause for concern in his role as Minister for Information in 1958. Jean-Philippe Lecat did secure in 1978 the union of Culture and Communication, but the supervisory role exerted by the Minister of Culture over audiovisual matters remained nominal. It went without saying in 1981, or at least it seemed to, that socialism, in its total commitment to Culture, would not fail to televise it. This did not happen at all, and one is even tempted to add: on the contrary. Why this obstinate widowhood? Why has such a televisually orientated Minister taken so little trouble to put an end to it? Today television is present in 94 per cent of French homes. It holds the lion’s share of what are conventionally called citizens’ cultural practices. One of two things must be true: either the ideal of Culture is sincerely and ardently held, more ardently today than it was in the right-wing time of Malraux, in which case every French home, thanks to the lares of the airwaves, is becoming simultaneously a museum, an opera, a theatre, a concert hall, an illustrated library, in short a multiply enhanced House of Culture, in line with the most generous dreams of ‘Young France’. 1 Or else this magic, fascinating lantern does nothing more than ‘bleat’, as Saint-Exupéry put it, and if this is the case, as is confirmed every day, one cannot see how the 149Ministry of Culture will ever be able to fulfil its primary mission: to make masterpieces available to the great majority of people. It is very clear that an habituation to the ‘bleater’ (which ‘ruins man’, as Saint-Exupéry said) renders one completely unable to take an interest in any kind of masterpiece whatsoever. Now even a modest cultural channel, like channel ‘7’, of which much was expected, and which produces many programmes, with a substantial budget, is practically censored or sequestered. 2 A tiny selection of its programmes are shown on FR3, one evening a week, and the channel itself , with its daily news and current affairs programmes, can only be received at great expense or by a ‘cabled’ audience comparable in size to that of the first programmes broadcast by the College of the Post Office and Telephone Service from the Eiffel Tower transmitter in 1935! 3 It is a long way from that House of Culture spreading out into every home that one could legitimately expect from really existing socialism.
